Longing for Language

I have never felt at home in English. No, I'm not going to go on about previous lives or anything like that!

I just don't like English. I'm very, very glad I learned it as my first language, for I never would have learned it as a second language. People laugh when I say that I don't do well with English. They blame my lysdexia. But what can I say?

Actually, quite a bit.

I've studied over eleven languages now. German, Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, Anglo-Saxon, Icelandic, Irish, Welsh, Breton, Manx and Italian. I guess that's twelve. I became fluent in German and Spanish; got to reading level (with dictionary to help) in Latin and Anglo-Saxon, enough to know bad translation when I read it. I had French in school, but don't even try to speak it although I do understand quite a bit. I have a linguistic knowledge of Greek and Italian and Icelandic, some reading ability, about a year's equivalent in schooling. I have a strange linguistic/vocabulary knowledge of the Celtic tongues, but not much in the way of grammar or common usage--enough to know about noun forms and to recognize words out of passages and to pronounce much of what I read. The only languages I'm continuing to learn are the Celtic languages.

I don't consider myself good with languages. Mostly because I have a poor memory and do not use the languages I know. When I lived in LA, I spoke Spanish every day and that is the only way to become fluent for me. But I could read newpapers in German and had about 6 years equivalent of schooling. I read Icelandic, AS, Latin and Greek because I'm a historian and love the sagas and poetry.

Okay, enough background. I know enough to know that it is easier to express things in some languages than in others. Most of this is what I call a connotation tree, or a long pattern of association that makes the language "heavy" in a certain head space. The Latinate languages tend to be "heavy" in a space where sex, death, and god overlap; the Germanic languages are "heavy" in a space were war and god overlap, for instance.

Anglo-Saxon is one of the most earthy, sensible, prosaic and unimaginative languages on the planet. It is excellent for speaking the simple facts and the truth of the world without embellishment or metaphor. In AS a person has a soul because he is alive. AS is wonderful for talking about war and death and sex and fighting monsters and killing and fighting more monsters and sex and eating and being wounded. It's a hands-on language. To say that English is descended from AS is like saying the British culture is Greek. Well, there are lines tracing back, but English is a lingua franca, almost a pidgin, a tongue that evolved out of many tongues. This is why it has a vocabulary that is four times the size of most languages and why it has an incredibly stupid grammar and why the spelling is horrid.

But English is a language that was meant for commerce. It is not a language of the spirit or a language of science. Oh, you can talk about those things, but almost all the words are borrowed and you always sound, well, spiritual or scientific, like a religious fanatic or a geek.

I've decided that my native tongue, or my "right" language is Gaelic that is spoken in the Islands or in Donegal. This is my heritage so it is not any leap to understand that the way that I learned to talk and think was Gaelic in English. What do I mean by this? Gaelic is a language in which it is almost impossible to be straightforward and simple. It is a language of metaphor. It is not a "good morning" but a "top of the morning." British English, but much more so, American English is so metaphor heavy that it baffles most foreigners. Simple English is easy. "Letting the cat out of the bag", "tongue-tied", "tempest in a teapot," is not. It takes years to learn all of the metaphors in English. Gaelic is worse. Gaelic is a poet's language, or a language were one is always doing something that sounds like something else entirely. There are fifty ways to say "good night," and none of them are literally, "good night." You cannot say yes or no; you cannot own something, you cannot just talk about something directly. Inference and allusion are everything to the Celt.

That is why I like it. A friend of mine once complained that language should have one word for one thing to make it impossible to be unclear. I just laughed. My own nature is to load down meanings upon meanings so that our entire conversations consist of interwoven elements, connotations that stun and astound, a language that wakes up the spirit and sets the mind racing in a hundred different directions.

The next problem that I have with English is that it's ugly. Writers talk about music in language; English is like clanking pots to me. It's offensively ugly. Music abounds in language. Spanish always sounds passionate because the language allows one to speak faster and faster with a rising tone of urgency and emotion. French has a rising and falling to it like breathing. Even German, in all its supposed harshness, has a breath to it that is like rain, a hesitant, earnest quality to it that makes it a language for debate and speeches and thoughtful, intense conversation. And Gaelic is the murmuring tongue, the tongue that is like the style, half-hidden, have sounded, disappearing in and out of the flicker of light and music of the other world.

Like German, English gutterals and glottal stops should make it a thoughtful tongue, but it becomes merely clumsy. Like French, it has a rhythm to it, but it is not a rising and falling, but a hesitant, racing, headlong then stuttering, as if one does not know what to do or how to feel. Like AS, the greatest English poetry is alliterative, but the poetry most popular is that that rhymes. So it sounds dorky, forced and contrived, unlike the Latinate poetry where almost every word ends in a similar ending and so there is not fishing for a rhyme.

And so I long for a mother tongue. I hobble along in this one, hoping for beauty in meaning, hoping for music in interesting juxtaposition, sounding religious, sounding like a geek, unable to speak in loaded meanings without sounding like a mad poet.

That I should be so cut off. Mad indeed.