Friday, February 20, 2004

Languages I wish I knew,

in no particular order of importance:

Afrikaans
Polish
Japanese
Arabic
Yoruba
Gaelic
Spanish
Cherokee
Navajo
Sanskrit
Esperanto
Dutch
Italian

Of course this list could go on until I'd listed all of the known languages in the world, but I thought I'd jot down a wish list of the first baker's dozen. A couple of them are oldies but goodies in my book - for instance, Dutch, a language I've been meaning to learn since I was in high school. Somehow I got it into my head that when I went to college I would be able to learn a new language every year, and for some reason that now eludes me I had chosen Dutch as the first target on my linguistic hit-list. Was it because that my favorite professor at M.I.T. (whom I'd met at a function geared for pre-frosh) was Walter Lewin, a native Dutch speaker? Or was it the fact that I'd been fascinated by the Netherlands when I was there for four to five short days as part of a high musical musical touring group? There was something about all those Dutch informational signs (written in all-lowercase letters) in the Amsterdam airport that made me so curious about a language with so many "oo" and "j" sounds in it, I just had to know more about it.

Well Dutch didn't quite pan out as I'd planned. My first year at M.I.T. was a real humdinger, although I did manage to take a wintercession crash course in Esperanto, none of which I remember. The year after that I actually learned Nahuatl, the language of the Aztec people which is still spoken today as a first language by over a million people in Mexico; and the year after I attempted to learn ancient Greek for the first time at the Harvard Extension School in a course in Homeric Greek, the text for which - Clyde Pharr's Homeric Greek - I now use at The Greek Institute. After that there was a bit of a lull as I enjoyed the carefree life of an acapella rock star and NC-17 skit writer, but then I was right back in the thick of things with the Latin/Greek Institute's Intensive Program in Ancient Greek - my second pass at the language, this time successful. That was 1995.

5 years / 3 languages = a new language every 1.66 years. Okay, not bad.

It's at this point, however, that the master plan takes a serious southward tack. Although I did learn Middle Egyptian and the bare rudiments of Akkadian during my years at B.U., that's about it until I started to try and learn Modern Greek by osmosis starting in 1998 or so (a process which is sadly still ongoing); and then there are no new languages at all after that. Granted, during this last period I have refocused my efforts on Greek, in its Ancient, Medieval, and Modern incarnations, but that's it.

So now it's 14 years / 6 languages = a new language every 2.33 years. Not good. I need to take an intensive summer course or two to get myself back in the game! Until then I'll see what I can do about making time for those "Introduction to Sanskrit" books I have gathering dust on my dining room bookshelf. So far all they've been good for is pressing flowers, and there are precious little of those during a the long New England winter...

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