About languages

I am a linguist by training and profession, so languages, learning them and using them, have played an important part in my life.
For someone who as a boy grew up in Yorkshire in the 1960’s that may not seem an immediately obvious outcome. Yet paradoxically in today’s age of greater globalization, communication and international travel with potentially greater exposure to foreign languages, language learning is actually taken less seriously in England now than it was then.

I didn’t really encounter a foreign language until I started learning French at grammar school when I was eleven, and even then it was taught by an Englishman as a somewhat academic exercise, not that different from the Latin I started at the same time. Then at thirteen, in the rather odd way that schools are organized and curriculum options are offered, I had to choose between German, Ancient Greek or biology as an additional subject. I chose German, which is why I am where I am today.
My choice was inspired by the fact that we had some new neighbours in Ilkley who were Dutch. Willy and Evert spoke Dutch to each other and their dog, but English to us. They knew other languages too. They had a son who was studying at the Sorbonne in Paris. We all watched the news footage from there in May 1968 with some trepidation. Their house was full of strange and different smells (Dutch cooking, coffee and other things no doubt that I couldn’t place) and objects from the many different countries where they had lived. It all seemed very exciting to me, so I decided modern languages was for me.
After all, I was already precociously good at French; about the same time I got my teacher, Tony Kingham, to explain to me the tenses we had not yet come across in class so I could read Astérix books.

The first lessons of the new subject, German, were an intimidating experience. We actually had a native speaker. Dr H.E.H.A. Krips had been a brilliant young judge in Vienna at the time of Anschluss and decided to get out while he could. For his sins, he ended up for the rest of his life trying to foster an interest in German in young schoolboys in Bradford. He was the oldest teacher in the school in my day and his nickname (for all masters had nicknames) was “Daddy” which spoke volumes, as he was well loved. Daddy Krips actually had a radically modern approach to language teaching and spoke to us only in German for the first three classes - to our total bewilderment. He then relented and taught us what it all meant in English.
Later, in the sixth form, for our cultural improvement he once brought along a record of some Schubert settings of Goethe (which I later learned he used to sing himself as a young man). By then we were a small group of eight long-haired 70’s teenagers interested in progressive rock music. Unfortunately, at the melodramatic piano flourishes that open “der Erlkönig” my good friend David Berry subsided into a fit of wild laughter. “Ach! You know nossing!” Dr Krips burst out deeply disappointed.
It was a privileged way to learn German and we got very good at it.

In the meantime French continued apace and we had also been given an opportunity (which we were not allowed to refuse) of learning Russian from scratch to O-level in one year with Mr Lloyd. Sadly in those Soviet days there was little opportunity of contact with Russians and the printed matter that issued from the USSR was diabolical, though I did treasure a copy of “Ogonyok” which had a rather fetching woman tractor driver on its cover. So my Russian lapsed. I periodically try to revive it, it’s a kind of seven year itch; but we tend to part company when I get stuck on verbs of motion. I’ve not given up on the idea totally and a schoolboy knowledge of Russian has often helped me out in spotting key words in countries.where other Slav languages are spoken.

I won my scholarship to Oxford to read French and German in the autumn of 1976, which in those days left me with what would now be called a short gap year from January to September during which I went to live in France. I had been given a teaching job until the summer in a lycée in a town called l’Isle-Jourdain in a department called the Gers somewhere in the South - it took a lot of finding in the atlas. Although only 30 km from Toulouse, it was in fact spiritually miles from anywhere I had known.
My cousin Sheila had married a Frenchman a few years before and I had once spent a fortnight with them based in Clermont-Ferrand. I had also interrailed for a month partly in France with a friend from Bradford one previous summer. However, nothing had prepared me for the total immersion I was about to get into deepest France and the reality of French as she is spoken there.
Spending a lot of time initially with my pupils, some of whom from repeating years were actually older than me, I eagerly relearned a parallel language of “argot” and idiomatic expressions. I’m sure I learned far more French from them than they ever learned English from me. Moreover, all of this was in a strong twangy Southern accent. I remember my first friendly encounter with the school chef who was to give me left-overs from school lunches (actually quite good food) in a metal container or “gamelle” - a new word to start with - that I had been given lest I starve in the evening. He asked “Tu es venu avec le traing? Tu veux du paing? Tu veux du ving?”
South-Western French was all I spoke for weeks on end and people talked a lot. At the end of our first translation class at Christ Church that autumn, Dr Robinson tried to make some French coversation and the whole class was taken aback by the torrent of what sounded like a French peasant that issued from my mouth.
I have lived for more than half my life in French speaking countries and speaking French comes as second nature to me, though without the Southern accent these days. However, out of a certain snobbery I have never gone the whole hog on the Belgian accent. Since I had the grammar thrashed into me from a young age I also have no trouble writing French, probably with fewer spelling mistakes than the average Frenchman. The difference between spoken and written French is huge and to learn to write it after having learned to speak it is a major effort the progress of which I followed with curiosity in my own children. Given how I was taught it though, I learned to speak it after having learned to write it.

I’ve never felt as inside German. I lived in Germany for ten months in 1979-1980 in a small town called Kamen on the extreme edge of the Ruhr. I travelled about the rest of West Germany a lot at the weekends as there wasn’t much doing there (“tote Hose”), though often to see other student friends from England. I was never as utterly immersed in German as I had been in Fench in l’Isle-Jourdain. My spoken German has never been as good as my spoken French and I always find reading German a bit of an effort. It is, however, a language I enjoy immensely because of the way it builds up words out of clear components of meaning. I love signs like “Verkehrswidrig abgestellte Fahrzeuge werden kostenpflichtig abgeschleppt” (illegally parked vehicles will be towed at the owner’s expense - though the sheer poetry is lost in translation). Interpreting from German is great fun, an intellectual challenge syntactically and usually something the audience is interested in given Germany’s importance.

It was while in Kamen that I started Italian evening classes for something to do and by way of preparing to visit that Easter Simon Porter who was working in Naples. The level in the group was not very high. After six weeks the teacher suggested I move up to year two. For two years after that I did no Italian, but when I came to train as an interpreter in Brussels, there were people working with Italian in my group, so I started to pick up a lot hearing it interpreted during exercises. I made Italian friends who talked a lot among themselves in Italian and who were always very encouraging if I tried to join in with my rudimentary Italian. Eventually I came to marry an Italian. So I now speak Italian more spontaneously than I speak German, but my knowledge of it is not so deep or literary. As I mainly learned Italian by listening to it and speaking it, I cannot write it without having to look up every other word to check its spelling.

Given the large number of languages we work with at the SCIC (the European Commission’s interpreting service - see “About interpreting”) there has always been considerable pressure, both spoken from management and unspoken from my peers, to learn new languages for professional purposes. When I rejoined the staff in 1992 I was very keen to learn Spanish properly. I had a passing acquaintance with it from numerous holidays in Spain and also more recently Cuba and Mexico and it had always attracted me as an important world and literary language. Since I already had French and Italian it was not going to be too hard. However, non-linguists may be surprised to hear that there is one hell of a lot of vocabulary to learn if you’re going to use Spanish (or any other language) professionally, even if you’re on relatively familiar ground gramatically. I was also very motivated by the prospect of having three months off work living in Spain, a country I like very much; I find there is a human and social side to life there that is very appealing. Needless to say Spanish remains to this day the least strong of my professional languages and I am somewhat diffident about speaking it because of lack of practice.

Speaking a language is really like playing a musical instrument: you only get and remain good at it by constant practice. However, if you’re going to get anywhere you just have to get stuck in, no matter how inelegantly at first.

Since my addition of Spanish in 1995, I have not sought to learn another language for professional purposes.
Without a strong personal motivation (eg partner’s language) I can’t seem to find the time and energy for what is such a huge task. Also I guess I just feel like doing different activities after a day of working with languages.
Moreover, I have little professional motivation to learn another language as I know it would make little real difference to my career (and pay) given my present seniority; it could potentially affect adversely the range of meetings I do in the light of the language combinations required for them, if I were to become “too useful” elsewhere; and the obscurer the language, the less it is actually spoken and the less you get to practise it, while the higher the responsibility that goes with it as colleagues depend on you for relay (double translation).
Having said that, when I’m actually in a country where the language is new to me I’m brimming with curiosity and want to learn as much of it as I can to be able to read what’s around me and try out phrases on the locals, if only the standard pleasantries of everyday life. I have a shelf full of Teach Yourself books and various accompanying recordings on my iPod. But it’s strictly for pleasure, not business. In this way I have a smattering of Dutch and Catalan and know a few words of Greek, Portuguese, Croatian and Turkish among others. When I say a few words, that is what I mean, a few words. As a language professional I know only too well what the different levels of proficiency are.

For those of us who are actually fluent in other languages it is interesting to observe objectively how we use our different languages.
I’m writing this blog in English because English is my native or mother tongue. Engish will always be and can only ever be the language I know best and therefore my language of choice for expressing my thoughts.
The top level of my consciousness can be occupied by another language, most easily French, as the phrases and words may in that way be ready to be released spontaneously to interact with my environment and those I speak to. In that sense I may “think” in other languages.
Although I rarely remember my dreams, I know I dream in a variety of languages too and have been heard in my sleep to speak in them.
However, I believe I am only capable of deep and original thought in English. I know this because when engaged in a more profound conversation in another language I become aware of the fact that I start having to translate my new ideas from English rather than being able to draw on a ready to use stock of phrases in the other language.

I also do mental arithmetic in English. That is not because it is deep thought, but because as a boy I learned the word patterns for it in English. I don’t actually have a mathematical mind but a literary one: in my head I hear “four plus six is ten”; I don’t see 4 + 6 = 10.

English is the language I prefer to read in and the only one in which such careful use of language as in poetry can have its full resonance. I understand the words in other languages, but they don’t carry the same emotional charge. Words do not exist in isolation but have acquired from shared use over many centuries endless connotations and cultural references that the foreigner is incompletely aware of.
This insufficient awareness of the baggage of a language is why it is very easy to sound rude in another language. It is very easy to pick up swearwords in another language and be quite foul-mouthed, but it is really a very bad idea, because you can never really know the force of what you are saying. I admit I often sin myself in this respect.

In fact we speak other languages at our peril and to our disadvantage, as we lose precision in conveying our thoughts. This is why, at a negotiating political level, interpretation remains important, even if the exchange could take place in simple English as a lingua franca.
However, the fact that we are ready to venture into someone else’s linguistic terrain is usually perceived as a gesture of good will by the listener because of this readiness to expose ourselves and to get closer to them (which is why in some meetings delegates prefer not to use the interpretation even if it is available).
There is also a converse argument that using a language other than your own forces you to reformulate your ideas in a more direct way which can improve their clarity, which has been a choice made by some writers (Beckett, Conrad). However, I don’t think it’s my case.

The readiness to learn other languages, to transcend barriers, to penetrate other cultures and to understand other human beings, their context and motivations, can only enrich one’s experience of life.
Often once you have learned the language of the country you felt so attracted to and actually manage to understand the overheard conversation at the next table, it will remove the romantic verneer of the place, as you realize that these people share the same ordinary everyday concerns as those at home. Yet that in itself, the realization that we are more alike than different, is a discovery of great value which sadly many people never make. because of their reluctance to learn languages.

Speaking another language so you can join in with a group of people from another background, best of all when you are in their country, is a liberating experience that allows you not just to discover other people and cultures but also to discover new aspects of your own personality.

I may be a linguist by profession, but I also find languages essential to my personal enjoyment of life.