Lingua Franca
Language. We hear and learn words from a very early age. We express ourselves by imitation and the slow realization that if we can name something, we have some control over it. We absorb vocabulary as a useful tool and we don’t think much about the words themselves, but we soon learn how to use them. Anyone who has been in a situation where they were surrounded by a language other than their mother tongue, will know the frustration and powerlessness of being without speech.
Words are a passion for me, and this has led me to learn languages other than English. I studied Latin, French, and Spanish at school and like every other student, tried to learn the foreign words as if they were new mathematical formulas to master; and like much of the math we study in school, I couldn’t see a way that these difficult words had anything to do with my real life. After graduation I started to travel, and soon wished that I had paid more attention to my studies. It was humbling to discover that a 2-year-old in his own country, could speak his language better than me, so I made a serious effort to learn and use more words.
After forcing myself to speak a new language for a while, I found that the easiest words came out of the mouth without thinking, especially words with which we are all familiar. Nobody in North America has to rack his brains to come up with words like “adios, amigo, mañana, rapido, or bueno”. Most of us don’t have to make a complicated excavation of memory to know that “adios” is another way of saying “goodbye”. It is from this point that I begin my theory of languages.
They say children can learn a second language more easily than an adult, that a child is in a more receptive state and can easily absorb new information. Adults tend to sort and categorize new information into manageable compartments. When people try to remember something, they pull it out of a drawer somewhere at the back of the brain. This storehouse of information can only be maintained by not mixing up the contents of the labelled packages. Luckily, the brain is more fluid than a filing cabinet, and we have the capacity to merge folders.
At some point in my language studies, having added Greek, Italian and a bit of German to the languages I have lived in, I realized that categorizing a word in another language into the overall box of Non-English Language was a mistake. I began to learn words as if they were a part of my mother tongue. If I learned the word “casa”, I wouldn't think of it as a Spanish word that means house. I would think of it as just another word that stands for the image of a house. I tried to eliminate the translation factor with the knowledge that when I see or hear the word “house”, I don’t first think of it as a word, but as any house, the house where I live, the house where I grew up, my dream house, or a composite image of houses. Therefore, when I hear the word “casa,” I skip the step of thinking of it as a Spanish word that means house, but bring up a visual image of a house. If I hear or read the word “spiti,” which means house in Greek, I think of it as just another word in my vocabulary that symbolizes a house. It doesn’t matter what language it is. In this way, I found language learning easier. Now, if I hear a combination of words in another language, I can visualize what is meant without having to translate that phrase into English. I believe that the greatest error in language instruction is to insist on reinforcing the categorization that happens in the adult brain. We shouldn’t study French, but study other ways of saying things, using words that just happen to be French.
This is a simplistic approach, and generally deals with just vocabulary, but the further we delve into any language, we realize that differences in grammar are part of the rhythm and essence of the culture to which the language belongs. Sometimes this requires learning different rules of structure, but these, like any rules of language, are only systems that have been developed to make words into sentences.
One of the first and most inexplicable pitfalls for an English speaker is understanding gender designations in another language. Why is the moon feminine in Italian and the sun is masculine? Again, rules have been proposed, but rules are always broken, so in the end, one is forced to imprint the idea of a feminine Italian moon onto the understanding of an Italian way of being. We could learn “la luna” by rote, but the knowledge sticks better if we think of the moon in its Italian incarnation as a beautiful, mysterious female form, just the way an Italian might see it. The French rule of thumb is to categorize nouns that are active and can be used by humans as masculine, while feminine nouns are objects that have things done to them. A table is therefore feminine, while a knife is masculine. The way that children learn words in their language is not to think about gender, but that the correct word for a table is not "table", but "la table," as if it were one word. The key is to avoid translation and language separation and to think of all languages as one language. We humans, should develop a richer, multilingual vocabulary to express ourselves.
My Greek teacher often emphasized that you can’t separate language from culture, and the more I know about languages and their cultures, I see that this is true. In the connected world of today, all cultures and languages are beginning to blend. As we come closer together, we understand each other better and realize that there is only one language, and it is not English or French, or Italian, or Russian, but a plethora of words which stand for ideas, feelings, objects, hopes and dreams. It would be best for us all if we understood each other without looking at languages that are not our native tongue, as "other," but are part of the beautiful and broad spectrum of human language.
