In Translation

Here's what is potentially the most bizarre thing about me.

I can speak and understand exactly one language: English. My first and only tongue. It is not for lack of trying, you understand. I spent four years taking Spanish and three taking French and all I can remember from either language is how to say, 'I can't speak Spanish/French, does anybody here speak English?', 'Where is the bathroom?', and 'I'm not American, I'm Canadian.' (Because I gotta cover my butt when I leave the country, I don't want to get spit on by Europeans.) Spanish is spoken far too rapidly for me to really understand it and French is so ambiguous in its pronunciations and constant streams of vowels that it mostly seems to depend on accents and context rather than, you know, actual words.

I can only write one language. English.

But.

I can read five.

I can read English, naturally, but I can also read French and Spanish. And I can do so at a reasonably functional level. I might not be able to stop and ask for directions in the heart of Madrid or Amboise, but I could read some directions from Google Maps in the local tongue. I can read children's books and simple papers and written messages in both languages even though I have less than no grasp of their spoken words. To a lesser extent, I can also read a bit of German and some Italian, mostly because my parents speak German and Italian is like French and Spanish's half-cousin.

But I'm not wired to be able to really grasp another language. It's probably because I never began to learn until I was way too old--the way American schools mostly work (unless they have a language program, which is exclusively confined to private schools with programs in other countries) is that foreign languages aren't touched on at all until at the earliest middle school, and sometimes high school. At any rate, the earliest most schools are going to offer a foreign language class is when the students are eleven or twelve, a time at which neurologists and sociologists believe that the brain has lost its ability to easily pick up a new language. It is believed that the reason babies pick up languages so easily when they're babies is because, when their brains are still developing (which continues many years after birth--your brain doesn't actually stop developing completely until you are in your twenties and sometimes close to thirty), the brain is actually wired and programmed to learn language. Nobody is quite sure how or why, and theories abound and are wildly variant, but it does rather appear that human beings are born pre-wired for language and inherently understand and grasp the concepts of whatever language (or languages) they are brought up around.

You don't retain this ability forever, though. Since the experiment involved in getting academically and scientifically viable results is absolutely forbidden (it is actually sometimes referred to as a 'Forbidden Experiment') and completely unethical, no such study has been done formally and research is gleaned exclusively from a handful of isolated, extreme cases. What I'm talking about here is the 'isolated child' or 'feral child' phenomenon. Remember Mowgli from 'The Jungle Book' who was reared by wolves? What about Tarzan, raised by apes? Believe it or not, this sometimes actually happens. It is never a good thing and is always the result of some horrible abuse, abandonment, or worse. But there are reported, legitimate cases of children left to fend for themselves who find some kind of familial love in pack animals--typically dogs or primates or other social animals that live in groups. Usually it's dogs, because even feral dogs are likely to have some trust for humans since they tend to live alongside us since we provide so much garbage and the occasional handout for them to exploit.

What happens is that these children take on the behavioural characteristics of their adoptive nonhuman family. In one semi-well-known case, a young Ukranian girl called Oxana Malaya spent five years from the age of three living with feral dogs in her poverty-stricken town. When she was finally recovered at the age of eight, she ran on all fours, manipulated objects with her mouth, and barked. Now in her twenties, she has re-learned the ability to speak but displays social retardation (similar to the social shortcomings of people with autism) and when stressed will occasionally revert back to canine behaviour.

Oxana was a lucky one though. She was three when she was abandoned and had learned how to speak before then, though through lack of use she fell out of practice just as you fall out of practice with any acquired skill you don't regularly use.

More extreme cases are ones such as the famous psychological study known only as 'Genie'. Genie was born in California in 1957 and was completely isolated. She never heard a spoken word, never recieved physical affection or interaction of any kind, was regularly beaten, and confined to a potty chair or cage until she was thirteen years old. She was completely deprived of any social interaction at all and at the time of her rescue had become profoundly mentally handicapped--though nobody is quite sure whether she was born with some mental disability that her isolation further aggravated, or whether she was neurotypical at birth and her retardation was entirely the result of her abuse. While she eventually learned to interact successfully with people in social settings and speak a few words, she never learned to speak properly. Her mental age was determined to be that of a toddler.

The point neuroscientists make is that it appears the brain is only wired for a short period of time to learn language. It's believed that after about the age of eight, the brain is no longer programmed this way--and if language isn't learned by then, it may never be.

Which is why some schools now are introducing language immersion programs for younger students, because the younger you are when you try and learn a language the more successful you are likely to be and the more comfortable you will be with it.

Of course people are still able to learn languages after this time and do so all the time, but only after they have already mastered one language. It just appears to be one of those things that some people are wired to do and others aren't. Not everyone can draw. Not everyone can write well. Not everyone is good with numbers. It only makes sense that not everyone can learn a language. (It's for this reason I firmly oppose mandatory langauge courses in higher school levels. If you aren't capable of learning language, as I'm not, it is tremendously difficult and extremely unfair to be graded on your proficiency in a subject you are just plain not wired to understand. I also don't think math or English or anything else except what a student is interested in and good at should be required after about the age of fourteen.)

But clearly something, somewhere in my head has some way of pulling meaning from words I'm not entirely familiar with.

Actually, I'm not able to glean understanding from something unfamiliar simply by exposure. Especially not a foreign language. I've been exposing myself to Japanese for a dozen years but have never managed to grab a single word from it. The reason I can read four languages I don't even understand is because they happen to be four languages that have a lot in common with English. English is basically French's anal rape child and features many similarities with the Germanic tongues; Italian, as I said, is just a combination of French and Spanish, and Spanish I studied in school and did retain a small amount of understanding.

I'm told what I can do is comparative linguistics, but I don't flatter myself to think it's that complicated a process. All I can do is find cognates--words that look or sound like something else in another language. And anybody can learn how to do that if they can bother learning it. If I can do it, anybody can do it.

I bring all this up as an extremely long-winded roundabout way of talking about what may be my absolute favourite internet meme of all time.

'Differenze Linguistiche', which shows how different words are similar in many languages and then come up with a totally different word for the same thing in another. What makes it funny to me is that the 'dissenting' word is usually German.

My parents both speak German. My uncle is German and speaks German to his sons; his whole family speak almost exclusively German, which made the wedding a bit awkward because only a few of the people could actually talk with the other half of the guests. So I'm around it a lot and I can attest that it is indeed as angry and unnecessarily consonant-heavy as it looks.

And as angry as that little rage-face appears to be.

I dn't care what you say in German. You could be telling me to have a wonderful day and it'll still sound like you're trying to rob me. I might just hand over my purse anyway. I won't understand what it is you're saying and I'm a big pussy.