Years ago, before Barnes and Noble became extinct, I discovered a phenomenally pretentious book in the travel section---a part of the store I'm embarrassed to admit to frequenting, but usually offers more stimulating material than the rest of the available rubbish. Anyway, the cover of the book was decorated with a skinny, airy-looking woman happily paddling a gondola and adorned with the title "La Bella Lingua: My Love Affair With Italian, The World's Most Enchanting Language". Ah Christ, I moaned to myself.
At the time, America was recovering from the hangover that followed the wildly popular novel "Under The Tuscan Sun", upon which millions of middle-aged American women foamed at the mouth at the thought of ditching their husbands, moving to a Tuscan villa, and tanking themselves on wine everyday for the rest of their shallow lives before reality shook them and they realized it was never going to happen. Living at my second cousin's in Dewey Beach one summer, the lesbian neighbour would drool over backyard glasses of white wine and expound her fantasies to me about moving to Tuscany while I swam lackadaisically in her pool, the cool water melting away the heat of the day's labour.
I turned the book over to read the synopsis. It was a sickening ode to the beauty of the Italian language the author had apparently drawn from a long Italian holiday in which she attempted to learn the language and, simultaneously, eviscerate the inherent characteristics of the Italian culture and people from their tongue. It was a pathetically amateur stab at anything resembling a piece of linguistic scholarship---but of course, the exact kind of tripe the hungover Tuscan Sun housewives needed (unironically, tripe is hangover food in Turkey). Wouldn't it be nice to have a long holiday in some country and then write a half-assed book about how nice the language is and how it resembles its people, I thought. Only in America.
Of course, scores of scholars and non-scholars alike over the years have come up with a plethora of theories about how language is shaped by society, or vice-verse. Benjamin Whorf was really the first to put it out there, but since Chomsky came along the poor chap's theory has really taken a beating. However, some linguists have come to reexamine Whorf's theory. If you're interested, Guy Deutscher has written a phenomenal book about the matter....but I'm getting geekily off topic, I see. This post is not about the correlations between a language and its people.
Anyway, this cursory literary discovery occurred long before undergoing a Master's in linguistics, so naturally at the time, I was severely linguistically bigoted. I had studied Spanish my whole academic career---a language that was easy, indisputably utilitarian in the Western hemisphere, not to mention increasingly useful in the United States---and had just begun studying German, a language which I took a liking to because of my heritage as well as the sheer deliciousness of its grammar: I liked the unambiguity of its syntax rules, as well as the entertainment of forming long words that would take an entire sentence to express in English (Fahrtreppenbenutzungshinweise --- "Instructions for using the escalator").
But Italian? Please. A dying language, if not dead in the water already, just like its predecessor, Latin. Italian was like French in my book---women loved it for its "romantic" sound, but it had no real use. Well, at least with French you could go to Africa and get around, but Italian? Unless you were one of the miserable American women who dreamed of having Fabio sweep them off to Italy where they would eat good their whole lives and live la dolce vita, Italian was just as good as Latvian, Faroese, or Cherokee. I scorned it because I associated it with delusional romanticism and hence, pretension. Plus, wasn't it loud and irritating? I shook my head and thrust the book back on the shelf---why would anyone want to learn something so useless? "La dolce vita!" I parroted in a mocking voice. "What rubbish."
In the years following that pedestrian browse in Barnes and Noble, I travelled quite a bit. Most of my travelling was around Central and Eastern Europe, but everywhere I went I tried to learn a bit of the local language to ingratiate myself with the locals, at the very least. However, the more I learned, the more intrigued I became. How interesting it was that in Polish a komorka was a mobile phone but in Russian it was a small room where everyone went to smoke cigarettes; that the capital of Croatia means "Scoop!"; and that in Georgian numbers above twenty are vigesimal, meaning that the number 75 in Georgian, სამოცდათხუთმეტი (samotsdatkhutmeti), translates to "three [times] twenty and ten five more". I travelled through lands in which the languages were completely useless outside their realm, but fascinatingly colourful and textured inside among their people. The more I travelled, the more this appreciation for linguistic diversity blossomed. While learning tidbits of various languages fosters a novel admiration for a people's tongue, throwing one's self headfirst into the nitty-gritty of learning a language from the ground up will instill an appreciative awe of the complexities and beauty of any language you've committed yourself to.
Although I had been making novel observations about languages my whole travelling career, it wasn't until I moved to Turkey that this realization manifested itself. All alone in a strange country with a strange language and no ticket home for the first time in my life, I spent 40 liras I didn't have and bought a book: "Turkish in Three Months". An amateur title, but that book was probably one of the best investments I've ever made. My first months in Turkey, I worked during the day, went home and studied from it after work, and then unwound at the end of the day watching American sitcoms on an NBC affiliate with Turkish subtitles. In Istanbul, I learned the subtleties of modern Turkish on the streets by day, and the meat and potatoes in my little pink-walled apartment by night. Seven months later, I had a restaurant host in Ayvalik believing I was a blond-haired, blue-eyed Turk.
Of course, utilitarian purposes drove me to invest much effort in learning the language. But, digging deeper, there was a lot to love about Turkish---phonetically, it was absolutely no lovers' tongue, but semantically and syntactically, it was a delight. There were no genders (no "he" or "she" like in English, nor male or female nouns like in Spanish), only three real tenses (three and a half, actually: past, present, present progressive, and future), and it had the same fantastic agglutinative quality that German had, sticking word roots together to make something that English needed a sentence for (gönderemeyebileceğim---"I may not be able to send [it]"). What it lacked aesthetically, it made up for pragmatically. And that, I realized, was the essence of what made languages beautiful---it was not how a particular language sounded, or how compact its grammar was, or what kind of unique idioms it possessed, but a continuum of multiple factors in which one aspect compensated for the lack of another: Turkish grammar compensated for its phonetic unsexiness, English's ubiqitousness made up for its exception-ridden grammar, and Piraha's grammatical simplicity makes up for what it lacks. Every language is unique, and absolutely beautiful in its own way.
And with this realization, I came 180 with regards to my own linguistic bigotry. While years ago I scorned romantic fawning over Italian, I am now married to a beautiful Italian woman and have ironically developed a love for la bella lingua. Of course, a large part of this is because I associate it with Anna and her family, but moreso because of its cadence, quirky idioms, well-rounded grammar, and.....well, it just sounds nice. It may not be utilitarian, but it is a language of a wonderful people, a language I hope my own children will speak one day and hence, a language very far from being dead. So now I realize, in retrospect, it was not the author's romanticization of the Italian language that made me scorn that book so much, but her trivialization of it based on her deluded cultural preconceptions (no, Italians are most certainly not all loud and lazy). Italian really is a beautiful language, but---like any other language---you will only understand that once you leave behind your cultural preconceptions and hence, linguistic bigotry.
