Embracing Confusion
Saturday, May 3rd @ 3:31 PM
By Elizabeth Moeller
Mrs Moeller is a part time teacher in a one room schoolhuse, mother, farmer, writer, and linguist. She shares with us her pasion for the joy of language. This is her first appearance in our pages, but she will hear from us if she doesn't keep writing.
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I love to have been there at the birth of so many words and sounds, satisfying my toddling discontent with one language known by everyone. No funny nuances, no
mispronunciations, just undeviating word order or inflectional endings that stop nothing. Hello….. hylo….. hola….. hallo.
I would have loved the moment of confusion in Babel, like a nymph coming out of the same boring brown cocoon as everyone else, but suddenly with a whole new world of colors to name. There's little better than old Latin carols like Personent Hodie, or the lush taste of listening to French in a chic restaurant, the scent of parmesan and Italian marble and glass proclaiming nel mezzo del camine di nostra vita, the beauty of Chinese calligraphy on rice paper, Arabic carved in stones so lightly they should float on water, Swahili greetings that embrace like good friends, Celtic crosshatch carving patterns of lost sounds. I would cry if such various beauty disappeared into infinitely reflecting identical grammars. I ni sogoma….. ohio gosaimas….. salaam….. kia . . . oro.
The God of freckles punished with a marvelous gift, felix culpa. I've loved learning new languages, dead languages, notations and ciphers. I savor the sound of synonymous concepts sympathetically vibrating like three piano strings tuned to one note, like the overtones of a perfectly sung a cappella chord. Guten tag….. gei sou….. namaste….. ciao.
Language itself for me is the ultimate puzzle for entertainment. I can turn down the volume or turn it up; however, I can shut down my computer but when I shut up I have to be quiet. Prison and jail are synonyms but prisoner and jailer are antonyms. Why? We have twelve or a dozen, but the French only have douze. But the French have memorizer or approfondir. I love it when I can use different words for remembering my father's face and remembering my cell phone number. It's so different, but in English, not so shaded. Bonjour….shalom….. hau kola….. aloha.
Numbers are the key for me. Learn to count from one to ten and all else seems possible. I've told my patient friends who ask me how I manage to travel so comfortably a very
silly story. My daughter has an itchy knee. She fell in some sand. She was trying to go down a rocky slope. She put cheese on it. She hates cheese. Could you help her? I then
pattern about five times. Itchy-knee-sanshe-go-rock-shechee-hachee-could-jyou
(because we really do pronounce it with a "j" sound). I then explain that they've learned to count to ten in Japanese. We all have the same teeth and lips and tongue and mouth.
We just mean different things when we make the same sounds. Annyoung hasimnikka…..sawadi crap….. jambo….. Zdravo.
Some languages have so many ways to say hello, so many greetings, it can take a while just to learn them. I use Bambara when teaching little ones time. I ni sogoma, I ni
wari, I be di, I ni su are used for good morning, good afternoon, good evening and good night. We look at the digital clock to see what part of the day it should be and answer in Bambara. Hands wave and boys answer m'ba while girls respond n'se, first, learning that many languages have different genders. All are more entertained, and the lesson is learned. Nih hao…. .adaab….. sawubona….. kiana.
Some things are special. I've found to my displeasure that Musetta's Waltz from La Boheme should only be sung in Italian. All else is vowel abuse. The Chinese character for "longevity" looks better than any calligraphy for bat. And the same hated little creatures, vesper, seems to sleep prayerfully in Latin. Peace… paix….. shalom….
Kyuui.
Sound matters in language, as well as looks. Scholars will forever debate whether onomatopoeia is real or imaginary, but some things just sound funny. My kids love to laugh when they say gokibootie even though we have no cockroaches in our apartment. But cucaracha gets people up and dancing without much trouble. While butterflies really should be renamed flutterbys, they're even better as mariposa amarillo. Speaking of colors, if the sounds of the names aren't important we'd number them in the hardware store. But color samples draw words from so many languages to evoke so much more than multiple shades of red. Hej….. Hei….. Oy….. Arru.
If you write the letter that represents the "r" sound in Russian as a coiled rope it's easier to remember even if it does look like a "p". Complain to the Greeks not the Russians. And I love writing my name in Greek letters just to confuse people looking for my room. Actually I have an unfair advantage. My name means something-that herb that goes on chicken, grows all over and many languages have a name for it. I can just say my name is________ , wherever I go and it sounds familiar to others' ears.
We have strange responses to hearing names. It is the essence of the bully to mock someone's name. It is an unconscious rudeness to mispronounce or easily forget a person's name. Names are meaningful to us, important to our sense of who we are. With a little patience and practice even Dostoyevsky's characters can be familiar. Just because people in Thailand have the longest names in the world doesn't mean it's impossible to learn them, just difficult. Kayira be…. merhaba….. osiyo….. zdravstuvite.
Languages are confusing, challenging, beautiful and powerful. Language reaches deeply into us as we share and pray and reach out, trying to make sense of the confusion.
But I would embrace it and try rather than hide away and not celebrate the variety of language's pied beauty. Respect…. Initiram….Sevasmos…. Sonkei.
