PART IV
A huge gap yawns between formal, printed, taught language, and what come out of native speakers’ mouths. People who have learned languages in a classroom discover this the minute they try to have any kind of conversation with one of those native speakers. At least, the way classrooms presented non-native languages to me left this hurdle. I never had the opportunity to find native speakers, much less any who would have had the great patience required to suffer a stumbling, groping conversation with me.
Yet children learn language easily. Naturally. Quite literally, language is natural to us: The tongue, lips, larynx, and other parts of the airways double as a vocal tract, material parts of us without which we might yet make noises, but without which we couldn’t speak. I know that I’m going on about something which is obvious, but think about it. Take a minute to notice that our speech, our languages with all their variety, such varied and ephemeral phenomena, depend on this aspect of our very material bodies.
Not to mention the brain. It has been discovered that other earthlings, other species, can use “tools” for a variety of purposes, and other species have plenty of ways to communicate among themselves. (I sometimes think their great difficulty is getting anything across to us.) These messages can be startlingly subtle, or complex. Even certain freaking trees will produce protective substances when a neighboring tree is attacked by an insect or mold. Even certain freaking bacteria are observed to act in concert; somehow in biofilms for instance an entire (local) population will suddenly change behavior, like a flock of blind beesties. Some kind of critical number is reached, and somehow the periphery of the group knows about the far periphery and all in between. They can do that.
But the brain is a missile of a totally different caliber.
Other species lack syntax, orders of their sounds that can be changed without changing meaning. A human by contrast have the ability to order of the words change. Humans can butcher and bleed words and impose weight on particular ones in totally novel ways. Idioms. Metaphor. Slang-slinging. Humans can see patterns and distill the intended message almost from chaos. (This is a trait which in other contexts can lead us to fantastic error—magic, witchcraft, and generally having the illusion of complete and rounded knowledge of matters we know little to nothing about—for instance all political and social systems, in all places, at all ages.) The mind sees patterns. It wants to see patterns. It wills to see.
Really, I want to say there’s nothing like the human mind. But there is, or are, things like it. Chimp minds. Orangutan minds, gorilla minds, dog minds, lion minds. Whales and dolphins clicking across the breadth of waters. Horse elephant swallow minds coming swift though tree branches to alight within. That fine muscular co-ordination is the result of eons of neural development. Intelligence, of a sort.
I say this again, I repeat the point of similarly, after noting a difference, as a way of noting unity across the differences so crucial to us. At close range the differences between us and others appear large and significant. We can fly as birds and many bugs do, but they can’t make much less play accordions. On the other hand every species knows how to reproduce itself with sufficient precision to continue its line as it presently is, yet with sufficient potential difference to adapt to long change. And that ain’t easy.
Both at longer range and finer detail more similarities appear. A vast amount of life runs its operations on the same chemical operations. Until the turn of the millennium it was thought that our evolutionary lineage had diverged from certain “primitive” forms so long ago—400 million years—that none of our chemical processes could be the same. Then it was discovered that very fundamental ones haven’t. For more than 400 million years life has been exchanging oxygen in similar bloodstreams. It has been generating its most fundamental energy in the same exchange between adenosine di- and tri-phosphate molecules. The life that burns in us burns in them. The alien is not so alien. There’s a unity.
And children, little packages of future time storming with fear and amazing greatness, children pick up speech naturally, and the facility lasts until puberty. Then, hormones extinguish that God-given aptitude, and, now that learning another language is difficult, young scholars are judged fit to be tasked with learning them. It’s no longer appropriate of course to baby-talk to young teenagers, and also they’re in the company of other teenagers hence losing the dependence on the big people providing food warmth and love, hence the strong desire to imitate them, and are instead ginning up a social mind formed by mutually uninformed peers. So instead of baby-talk, instead of exploiting that incredibly adaptive mimicry, books are opened before students. We learn parts of speech: This is a noun. This is a verb. This is a verb tense. We conjugate verbs. We get some kind of intellectualized approach to language that feels like a book being driven into our foreheads with a ten-penny nail.
I have had a number of conversations with people more attuned to education—teachers and people learning to be teachers—and they have flooded my steam-making boiler with cold water whenever I warmed up the topic of missing great opportunities by not teaching foreign language at a much more tender age. Young children, supposedly, really aren’t ready.
So we get little nibbles of hearing something a few brief periods a week. Study phrases. Recite conjugations (ever hear people conjugating across the table in a restaurant?) I stayed with all those drills. I wrote the answers on tests. I sat in language labs and listened to stilted conversations, running the tapes back and back again, trying to get it right. People—some people—have gotten through this process and actually learned to talk to others. So it’s not without merit.
But not me. Whenever I tuned into a radio program or jumped into a theater to watch a foreign-language movie (living foreign speakers remained far removed from my experience), nothing got through to me. Natural speech is fast. I mean fast.
And it’s distorted. The words that are printed on a page, so painstakingly memorized and practiced, aren’t at all what come out of people’s mouths. Consonants slip and slur. Words are smushed together; “an apple” becomes “anapple.” Pronunciation changes: The English my children brought home from first grade was something I had difficulty understanding. I thought I was losing my mind at a much-too-early age, having heard, and having begun to experience, that insanity is hereditary: you get it from your children. They’d say something like “Meeminslooey” when they meant “Meet me in St. Louis.”
So. It has slowly dawned on me that in trying to speak as someone else I am grappling with the matter of being someone else. It’s an attempt to put my head offstage for a while and try putting on the head of someone else.
(still more to come….)