Words

(This is from my personal blog in 2006. At the time, I’d just started publishing it in both Spanish and English.)

I suppose I should explain how this came about. Through the magic of technology, I occasionally peruse a report that lists the countries where visitors access my blog, and at last count, at least 40 countries were represented from every part of the populated world. (In a very few cases, remote readers have taken the extra trouble to contact me about what I write here, and this always touches me deeply.) 

It reminds me that we are all in this together, no matter our ethnicity, age, gender, sexual orientation, appearance, religion, or location. Although many languages are represented among my visitors, Spanish is easily the second-most common after English. One visitor pointed me to an easily accessible Spanish version of everything I post, so I've been copying and pasting it these past few nights, hoping it makes stopping by this blogspace slightly easier for those one in 25 whose first language is Spanish.

Also, it is one of many languages I love, and one of a handful I have a working knowledge of, largely because of my past reporting trips to Mexico, Spain, and Central America. It also came in handy in Italy, parts of Switzerland, and with a few Brazilians I've known in this country, including a translator and two babysitters, (even though it does not match up perfectly with Italian or Portuguese, of course).

Anyone who has spent any time at all with me knows how much I love languages, how each yields a different array of words and images that divide up reality into uneven chunks, much like white chocolate and nuts populating an especially yummy cookie. Which brings me to the photo I've included tonight of the cover of one of my favorite books, The English Language by Ernest Weekly. It is an updated version of a volume written in 1928 by one Ernest Been.

I can't go into detail now about what I love about this slender volume, because I must get on to something that feels much more urgent. But I'll say this: It is the best overview of the evolution of the English that has come down to us over the centuries that I've yet found, much as Karl Marx's summation of the agricultural stage of human development was one of his most brilliant (if somewhat overlooked) contributions in the mid-19th century.

Anyway, I found Weekly's book, its aged pages yellowed yet sturdy in a wonderful old used bookstore near the corner of Haight and Ashbury over 20 years ago, when my first wife and I were raising our three kids a few steps away. I didn't realize it at the time, but the great muckraker, Jessica "Decca" Mitford, had lived near this very spot as a single mother in the 1940s.

Later, when she and I became friends, I was able to connect up those dots. Especially, when at age 11, my daughter Laila and her best friend Cristina became the youngest writers in the history of The Nation to ever publish an article in that 1.5 century-old magazine, which was their interview of Jessica Mitford.

Talk about a woman who knew how to use language!

***

Tonight was not a hot summer's night, but a cool, foggy San Francisco night, more what we are used to here. My dinner companion charmed me with stories of her adventures between cultures and languages, and it struck me, as I watched her dark, sparkling eyes, and the way she used her left arm, hand and fingers to ever so gracefully illustrate her points, that maybe I would have felt at home in Babylon.

Okay, probably not, but I do love languages, and the particular way each of us uses our own. My companion tonight rued her difficulty with the "r" and "l" sounds, but of course, since she is Japanese, these feel unpronounceable to her, much as the guttural "kh," "gh," and "q" sounds create challenges for those westerners who try to learn Persian or Arabic.

But if you want to try to learn a difficult language, try Mandarin. So lovely and so unattainable. It is the Arabic of East Asia (I can hear my Beijing friend moaning in disagreement; she would say Arabic is the Mandarin of the Middle East), but no matter, both sing the human condition in tones no listener could miss. The prayer calls from mosques in Afghanistan at sundown have always been sung in Arabic -- it is a lovely sound on lonely nights over the steppe.

On the other hand, if you don't expose your child to Mandarin by the age of one, (s)he will probably never properly master the four tonal zones that Chinese people employ to convey their famously subtle messages. (Please visit Esmond's Cool Blog to learn how to help your child learn Chinese at an early age.)

Which brings me to Japanese, a somewhat more accessible language for Americans, who account for, after all, 87.51% of my 2,000+ readers (you know how much I love math!) I had the memorable experience of traveling throughout Japan giving speeches that had to be translated a couple decades ago. 

Nothing anyone can tell you will provide adequate preparation for an American visiting Japan for the first time. Every time since, and I'm sure in the future, that I go there, I will re-experience the cross-cultural dilemma of witnessing two peoples with languages that simply do not mesh. 

On the other hand, they’re all only words.