On learning language equivalencies

Equivalencies. My mind is a bit like like Swiss cheese, full of holes when it comes to languages. I took the equivalent of two years modern Irish at UC Berkeley one summer, nearly 20 years ago, but I bottomed out in July, as my learning button broke. My head no longer worked, and the thing is, I’m usually pretty good at picking up languages. Possibly the toughest course I ever took was modern Irish. Bar none.

Our Irish teachers, Joe Nugent and Breen Conchubhair were pushing us so hard that many of us lost the thread. I gave up somewhere around the cupula. The class was supposed to be the equivalent of one year of Irish crammed into an intensive summer course. They opted to give us the equivalent of second year Irish, too—and my head broke. I couldn’t absorb any more. I’ve never had that experience before.

I later took a year of Archaic/Old Irish in order to translate the medieval Irish epics (it was all bookwork), alas, I still can't read Irish—other than to recognize words and occasional phrases here and there. People from Ireland assure me that I still know more Irish than they do....

Sometimes foreign words arise unbidden, I’ve no idea where they come from. Or even what language. It’s all a mystery how we acquire language. I mean, it’s all nice and textbook and ordered in a classroom—but that’s not how we acquire language. You have to create memories. It’s messy. You know, like go down to the pub and raise a jar or two. Get stinking blind drunk. That’s when my Russian comes back. Chut-chut.

However, I can swear profusely (and rather inventively) in several living languages, and a few dead languages. When I combined the words sabaca/dog and pizdah/cunt in a spontaneous invective, let's just say I brought the Russian house down. I lived one summer in Switzerland, I didn’t pick up much Switzerdeutsch, but let me tell you, I could swear like a troll of the highest arcana with a mere handful of words.

I also studied a semester of medieval Welsh, but my heart just wasn’t in it. I was completely ADD as it was during the 9/11 crisis. We were all out to lunch—as it were. I remember that we held class outside on the DOE library steps at UC Berkeley because the building was shut down... So surreal.

Medieval Welsh is much easier to learn than Irish, no doubt. But there's not that much crossover with learning Irish. Brythonic vs. Goidelic. And of course all the extra "vowel" types and double consonants are maddening. But I can do a pretty good hll sound, as in Llewelyn.

Even Russian is easier to learn than Irish. I remember looking longingly into the other classrooms, that summer at UC Berkeley, where other students were learning easy languages like Spanish, Latin, and Russian, and it seemed like the students were all wearing PJs and comfortable slippers by comparison. I could understand what they were saying with little effort, just by standing in the doorways like a demented peeping Tom.

Learning Irish is hard, very hard. At least they don't conjugate prepositions in Russian. I mean—prepositions fergawdsakes. I get conjugating verbs and nouns.What kind of language needs that kind of precision that directional words need to identify who is speaking? And what direction is involved? Just never attempt to explain going up or down stairs in Irish. Just don’t.

I lived in the USSR for a while during 1989 to 1991, so I had to pick up Russian fast. Talk about total immersion. If I wanted anything I had to learn how to ask for it. Food. Beer. Necessities. Black market. Also, when I was traveling illegally to Leningrad, I had to watch my Ps and Qs. Everyone thought I was from Kazakhstan or somewhere exotic. I was labeled “ethnic. And I’m ethnically Irish, that’s as close as it gets.

Though I heard Ukrainian spoken often enough, I was living in Cherkassy, near Kiev for a while, I never picked it up. Like with Dutch, Ukrainian just didn’t stick. Ukrainian is sort of like Welsh with all those extra vowel-y things running amok and creating havoc with your eyes.

I lived in Amsterdam on and off during the early 1990s , and because everybody in the Netherlands either bi-, or tri-lingual, not counting several dialects. However, they all spoke to me in English. Whether language, or dialect, the Dutch seamlessly code-switch between linguas francas. It’s kind of fascinating, really watching the Dutch effortlessly slide through the indo-European continuum.

I regret to report that I was lazy, that I merely learned the usual sound bytes, but not the language. Hooey Dag, bedankt, dank u wel, and alstublieft. And place names. I can even say Scheveningen perfectly. I’d never be mistaken for a German spy.

Weirdly, I can mostly make out the meaning in Dutch, if it’s in print. Ditto that with Latin. Church Latin, that is. I never studied Latin. Just 15 years of church Latin. Ecum spiri tutu o. I barely studied Spanish either but at least I’m fluent in Spanish—unless I panic. Then it’s curtains.

You should've seen me in Portugal right after 9/11. I was waving my arms like helicopter blades trying to achieve liftoff as I spoke a a bastard Portuguese-Spanglish to the taxi drivers. Everyone thought I was Italian. The only Italian I picked up was when I was a child living among immigrant families. Random words. Food.

But in Portugal, it really was a matter of survival. We didn’t want anyone to know we were American for fear of reprocussion. So my cousin and aunt were schtum/mum while I was gibbering on like a polyglotted gibbon while waving my arms as if to take flight—to the taxi drivers who didn't know what to make of us. I was negotiating the equivalencies between languages to create a pidgin dialect of survival.

Portions of this original Facebook post was from Boxing Day 2017, but I extensively rewrote it on this Boxing Day—so the question begs, where to post it? It really has no beginning, no end. But I wasn’t willing to sacrifice the post to the garbage gods of language. Just cuffing it in the ears, not willing to let it go. Catch and release.