The mind is a strange and wonderful thing, mysteriously extracting memories and information on necessity, with effort, or at whim. Dreams, if nothing else, make this abundantly clear: situations or people we haven’t even remotely considered of late will suddenly appear, and there you are, like it or not, confronted with something lodged in your own brain.
I am grateful for this retrieval process when it comes to language. Not long ago, for example, I was in the Wal-Mart with my mother-in-law, and I heard someone speaking to a salesperson in Spanish. She was speaking slowly, loudly, trying to make herself understood. The salesperson looked at the speaker with a blank expression that read: I don’t know Spanish.
Well, I went over to the woman and thought I’d try to help. This is not something I am usually emboldened to do. Very often I see and hear Spanish-speaking people in our community, and I’m pretty sure that, if I tried hard enough, I could muster something vaguely resembling sense in their language and just, you know, be friendly. But I don’t do it, by and large, because, well… I don’t do it.
But I felt sorry for this woman. It’s difficult to be a minority (an experience I have had very little, I’ll admit); it’s difficult to be the one who doesn’t speak the language. So I went over and asked if I could help. The salesperson disappeared Almost Immediately.
By trial and error I learned that this woman needed a doormat. Just a doormat. A simple thing on which one can wipe one’s shoes (“zapatos” en espanol). So I found another salesperson—a new and better one—to take her to the doormat section of Wal-Mart. I was happy, and the woman I’d helped was happy. It was a happy, happy occasion.
My Spanish skills don’t help me much in Switzerland. In fact, they do not help me at all. No one in Switzerland speaks Spanish. But they do speak German and French and Italian and a language called Romanche (sp?), which is the closest surviving language to Latin in the world. No Spanish.
I studied German when we lived there years ago. I didn’t take a class or anything; I just worked at it with this 12 c.d. set, but I never got beyond the second c.d. Instead, I practiced what little I could with our neighbors. They admired my pronunciation and hardly ever made fun of me and taught me Swiss-German (horrors!), which, as you might imagine, is different enough from “high German” to make it Really Really Difficult.
Still, I learned some things. I learned to say “Gruetze!” to people I passed on the street, and to say “Gruetze Mittenand” to more than one person on the street, even if that extra person was a dog. And I learned not to say “Guten morgen” in the mornings, but to just say “morga!” and to give my voice a little upward lift at the end of “morga.” And if I have misspelled any of the Swiss-German in this paragraph then please forgive me: I learned to speak the language, not to spell it.
When I returned to Durham after those glorious three months in Switzerland at the end of 1995, I Hardly Ever Used Swiss-German At All. Or German. In fact, I think I Almost Never did.
But the mind is a wonderful thing. And this week that Swiss-German and German, after very little time in Switzerland, started floating to the surface of my brain and out my mouth very nicely, very conveniently, and, even, to my surprise, correctly.
I love language, even foreign ones.
Our hostess Susanne speaks German and Swiss-German. Her English is excellent (though we did have the dictionary out a few times), and her French also is good (she hates speaking French). The girls already have French and English at school; their father Thomas’s English is also very good. It’s marvelous, really, how the Swiss go about managing the language issue: in a country so small, they have four national languages, and they all seem to get along Very Nicely.
As we were leaving the country yesterday, getting ready to fly to Germany, the luggage sticker machine got stuck. The attendant at the desk was a very nice woman who, at first, spoke to us in German. Our German (or maybe it was Bill’s—yes, it was Bill’s) was good enough that she carried on with German until she saw our passports, and then it all came in English.
The sticker machine was still stuck. She had to open it and remove the tape, tear off a wrinkled piece, and try again. Then she had to do it again. And a third time. And yet another time again. She said something to the attendant next to her; she smiled sheepishly at us and apologized. We smiled and waved it off. “It’s no problem,” we said. We waited. She tore at the tape.
You speak the language you speak in Switzerland depending, obviously, on where you live. And then you must learn English. And then you must learn another one of the four languages that is a national language in that country. So presumably our attendant spoke a lot of languages.
Still, when it came to it, she swore in English.
Maybe that’s one of the first things you learn.
