Linguistic Gymnastics

Speaking in another language is the gymnastics act in the circus. I grab expressions as they're tossed to me, back flipping around prepositions, somersaulting through hoops of vocabulary, and spinning around the curves of grammar. Some days the tightrope is not so taut, the muscles strain, and landings involve more than just my feet. Other days I free fall, belly flopping into that safety net of English, or worse, silence. The whole time the crowd is watching.

The leap is one of faith, starting with lists of vocabulary bound safely in a textbook. It was at Exeter that I first learned the secret of language acquisition. We begin with the rules and exceptions of grammar neatly explained in print. We do the drills, we fill in the exercises. We write the homework on the classroom's blackboard. Then we leave, finding a place where people speak, dream, and love in the language, and we never look back.

Two years of Harkness-style French and I was in France, as an upper at School Year Abroad. In the beginning, I chose the program for the language; if I could have ordered "French language skills, near-fluency when speaking, proficiency in reading and writing" from a catalogue and stayed in New Hampshire I might have. But SYA taught me more than just a language; I discovered that the process of acquiring is as amazing in itself. I found that language immersion is also a stimulating cultural, social, and intellectual experience.

So now, six years, two languages, and another continent later, I am still a language learner, skipping from present to past to future, hopping over the conditional, twirling around prepositions. Vocabulary words dangle off my earlobes; they intertwine with the strands of my hair, extra ones found underfoot but above ground, crunching as I walk. The curls of the new letters wrap around my limbs, pressing gently into my skin.

Most of that description is not figurative, but literal; I have dotted my home with slips of paper with new expressions. They started months ago at my desk, but have spread into every room, so that now in every direction lies another sliver of this language. Above my stove is a label saying "the water is boiling." At the front door there is "if you knock on the door you have to listen to the reply." (Duk ala' al baab wa ismaa' al gewab'.) These pieces of the puzzle greet me as I make coffee in the morning, brush my teeth; I sweep the floor and find a few more that have dropped off, almost lost in this ongoing struggle to acquire a new framework of expression.

My language of choice, currently, is Arabic, a seductive language, structurally enthralling. Each word has a root consisting of just three letters. The language manipulates those three sounds to create webs of related words. An extra letter changes "look" to "watch," "cut" to "kill," "inform" to "announce" to "advertise." I imply emphasis by repeating a letter, make an active verb passive by adding a sound.

That is the root of the language, three letters spiraling out into families, trees, forests of words. The magnificence of the bigger picture, the poetry, the plays with sounds and words and meanings, dazzles me all the more for knowing that the root still lies in just three letters.

I swim deeper into the language, reveling in its dramatic presentation. A thousand thanks, for giving me directions. May God give you health for stopping the taxi here. Saddam Hussein's memorable "mother of all wars" was ordinary enough in the Arabic version. In English we have a few generic ways of calling people informally: man, brother, sister, dude, guys. In Arabic the equivalent is "my eyes," "my soul," "my love," all used easily with casual acquaintances. Arabic has no fear of the melodramatic.

While my language of focus is Arabic, I am simultaneously learning English. The study of foreign languages expands my confidence and awareness of my own; I know the grammatical terms, the reason for conjugations, no longer depending on instinct alone. Yet I appreciate it more, for in English, unlike Arabic, I do know what sounds right, and how far I can stretch a word's meaning. I know how to spin the structure of a sentence, juggling orders of words and still keep all the balls in the air.

In the end, we use words, phrases, prepositions to take abstract thoughts floating in our brains and to structure them in ways that other people can understand. How much does this structure affect the original meaning? Perhaps harsh sounds turn soft feelings harder. Maybe "I love you" can mean different things in different languages; it means different things depending on tones and facial expressions. We've heard, often, that poetry is lost in the translation. Sometimes, poetry is also found.

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