Lingua Franca

Language. We all hear and learn words from a very early age. We learn to express ourselves by imitation and the realization that if we can name something we have some control over it. We absorb this vocabulary as a useful tool and we don’t think much about the words themselves very much, but we soon learn their power. 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 & Spanish is school and tried like every other student 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 hard to pronounce words had anything to do with my real life. After graduation I started to travel, and soon wished that I had paid more attention in school. It was humbling to discover that a 2 year old could speak his language better than me, so I made a serious effort to learn and use more words.

After forcing yourself to speak a new language for a while, the easiest words just come 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, manana, rapido, or bueno”. Most of us don’t have to and make a complicated excavation of memory to know that “adios” is just another way of saying “goodbye”. It is from this point that I begin my theory of languages.

They say that children can learn a second language more easily than an adult, that a child is in a more receptive state and can absorb more new information. Adults tend to sort and categorize new experience into manageable compartments – an information filing strategy learned while growing up. It seems that when people try to remember something they pull it out of a drawer somewhere at the back of the brain, and that the useful organization of information can only be maintained by not mixing up the contents of these labeled information packages. Luckily the brain is more fluid than filing cabinet and we have the capacity to merge folders.

At some point in my language studies, having added a 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 didn’t think of it as a Spanish word that means house, I thought of it as just another word that symbolizes “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 an image - my house, the house where I live, the house where I grew up, my dream house, a composite image of a houses. Therefore when I hear the word “casa” I skip the step of thinking of it as a Spanish word that means house, but it bring up a visual image of a house. If I hear or read the word “spiti” which means house in Greek, I think of a house. Spiti is just another word in my vocabulary that symbolizes 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.

Therefore, I believe that the greatest error in language instruction is to re-enforce the natural categorization that happens in the adult brain. We shouldn’t study French, but study other ways of saying things using other words that just happen to be French.

This of course is a simple 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 rules of structure but these, like any rules of language are only systems that have been developed to explain usage.

One of the first and most inexplicable pitfalls for an English speaker is to understand 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. The key is to avoid translation and language separation and to think of all languages as one language. We human beings have developed an rich 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.