speaking in tongues

One problem with having multiple blogs is knowing what to put where. I translated a Dutch poem today – which could probably have gone here. On the other hand, this weekend we have an outing to an amusement park (from work) plus it’s Carnaval, the Dutch equivalent of Mardi Gras, and writing about those should go over on Avontuur. I will write them up there afterward, anyway. The problem is just that I’m not a very segmented person; for instance, I don’t have one personality for work and another for play, as many people do. I’ve never felt the need to have separate blogs for reading or knitting or whatever; I end up rambling too much anyway, so I just bung it all in here and let potential readers decide which parts to ignore. So it’s a little weird to have to decide what goes here and what there, even though having a separate site made more sense since that one’s for both me and Rudder.

Anyway, translating the poem was fun. I needed a dictionary, of course, but I use one of those occasionally even when writing in English. I did get a little help, though, from a Dutch friend who gently pointed out a couple of places where I’d missed the point of the original. If you can imagine trying to explain Clement Moore’s Night Before Christmas to someone who’s just barely learning English, you’ll have the idea: “What’s ‘Twas”? Why is he taking a nap if it’s bedtime – isn’t a nap just during the day? Isn’t a sash like a belt? Why does he throw one out the window? Why is there a breast on the snow?”

One weird thing about learning a language is that you only know a snapshot of it, that timeslice of the language as it exists in the present time. With only a few exceptions, I have no feeling for how Dutch has changed over time, for archaic or poetic usages. It feels a little like a handicap, as if I won’t really know the language until I know it in the time dimension as well as in the dimensions of modern usage. Yet plenty of native English speakers function reasonably well (depending on how you define “reasonably”) under the same constraints.

And of course the reality is that I really won’t ever know the language fully, not in 20 lessons and not in only a year here. A year from now, I’ll be trying to learn Mandarin, and I won’t ever master Dutch unless we come back here for some reason. If we didn’t come back and I wanted to learn a language for fun, I wouldn’t pick Dutch: too few people to practice with unless you live in the Netherlands, Belgium, or South Africa, and no particular need for it elsewhere. I’d pick French, on the theory that with French and English, you might not speak the local language when you travel around the world, but at least you speak the second language of quite a lot of people. Or continue with Mandarin, for the same reason. I don’t think I’d enjoy either of those in quite the same way, because I won’t see the historical echoes of/in English at every turn the way I do with Dutch, but I suppose French will be close enough to still be fun.

I don’t know how I’ll react to Mandarin, since there won’t be cognates and connections to jump on and play with – that is, there will be internally, but not between Mandarin and English. I think that’s why I enjoyed learning Spanish more than Hebrew when I studied those. It will be interesting to see what it’s like, anyway. People seem to live for years in Asia and to love living there without ever learning the language at all, but that just puzzles me.