(I have decided, at Annie's suggestion, to start putting some of the more interesting anecdotes from my studies down on the blog and simultaneously to Everything2.)
Part One: Al begyndelse er svær
(The beginning is always tough)
Here in the US of A, people who speak a second language are something of a rare commodity—let alone those who speak a third or fourth one. The reasons for this are myriad, way beyond the scope of this article, but it offers a few disadvantages to us monolingual Yanks.
There is something uncanny about hearing someone switch gears from your native language to another, unfamiliar one. It is almost eerie—the voice is the same, although the accent changes, but suddenly the words are incomprehensible. There’s an odd feeling as if your brain just lost its ability to process words altogether. Perhaps there is just a mild drop of helplessness too...or at least self-consciousness.
I vividly remember the occasion when I introduced a wonderful German client to a coworker whom I knew spoke some German. It was a very odd experience, hearing two women I knew pretty well as they happily chatted...barely a word of their conversation comprehensible to me.
While visiting London with Annie, I had several occasions to remember that my own tongue is not her first or only. She would show me texts—-absolutely undecipherable to me—peppered with strange-looking words like ‘og’ and ‘på’ I told her it looked like moon-man language.
I will confess that I had next-to-no background in Danish. As much as I love languages, I had never studied the Nordic ones at all. I just knew a bit about their taxonomy and the high degree of mutual intelligibility among them. I knew the word ‘bastard’ in a couple of them (I used to collect that word in foreign languages—don’t ask, I can’t explain these things). I had seen “the Kingdom” (Riget in Danish) and heard a lot of the language because of that, but all I knew was it sounded a touch like German.
One afternoon, I sat at the end of my bed in our room at the Lynton Hotel in London, and Annie napped peacefully on the other bed. I went to wake her gently with a hand massage. I sensed consciousness returning to her. She sighed and said something like this:
“Vudehklogeh?”
The three pound meat computer between my ears went “Database search—not found. Alert: Data received contains no information.”
I think I awkwardly said something like, “Honey, are you awake?”
Upon which, she opened her stunning blue eyes, looked me in the eyes and said, “Vudehklogeh?”
For an instant, I had the irrational fear that the English lobe of her brain had shut down and this could put a real dent in our holiday. But mercifully, she blinked her eyes slowly, stretched prettily and said, “Was I speaking Danish?”
Soon after the end of our vacation, I resolved to learn some Danish. Who knows? I love learning language, this could be fun!
Next time: Hvaba'?
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2 comments:
Heh! Yeah, I can see how that would be odd. It always amazes and amuses me that we have these noises and symbols that get rearranged to carry information and just the simplest changes removes that information...
I had an accountant once who was from India and he'd sometimes call his wife and chat in another language (I don't know which one, they have about 300 of them I believe.) One day I heard him change languages in the middle of the conversation to yet another language I didn't understand, talk for a while in that language, and then come back to the first, not understandable language. I asked him when he got off the phone what the hey that had all been about. He looked A. surprised I could even tell and B. a little embarrassed. He said, "Some things are not appropriate to discuss in (name of language here, whatever it was) so we discuss them in (the name of the other language) instead." Alas, I never discovered the meaning of this.
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