Speaking in Tongues

Like many Americans, I’m embarrassingly illiterate in any languages other than English. The one exception is/was Latin, for which I had a truly strange affinity all through high school (even though the Latin program there only went through junior year). My freshman year in college, I took a Latin advanced-placement test which landed me in a third-year Latin class, among people who’d decided to major in the classics at a time when I myself still thought that an ability to use the phrase “ablative absolute” correctly in a sentence marked one as a hopeless nerd. (Of course, thinking so required a little bit of mental sleight-of-hand, to forget that I myself could use the phrase that way.)

One of my sisters and I once “tried” to pick up a smattering of German. I think this was inspired by the fact that Dad had fought in the European theatre in WW2, although he had not (I think) picked up much of the language himself. All I remember now of that brief experiment was Das haus ist gross, which cracked us up because we could immediately think of many gross hauses.

Years later, I supervised a group of programmers among whom were three Chinese immigrants. They all spoke English well, but it still felt awkward and exclusive to me — it seemed unfair that they’d volunteered to endure all the communication difficulties, while the rest of us just babbled on in our hodge-podge of idioms, slurred consonants, and more or less formal or casual diction. So I asked one of them to offer lessons in spoken “Chinese” (Mandarin, I guess?) every now and then, during lunch breaks, to whomever among us wanted to attend. (Always big on teamwork, I think I had some vague idea that we could come up with some catchphrases and in-jokes which other programming groups couldn’t hope to penetrate.)

And all I remember of that, now, was the notion that two identically pronounced sounds could mean two wildly different things, depending on whether one’s voice was rising or falling.

I’m not sure where in the last few days I picked up a link to this page — wherein The Economist investigates and/or woolgathers on the subject of the most difficult (and still extant) language in the world. But it’s an interesting piece, which told me in its fairly short length much that I didn’t even imagine to be true. I mean, differences in spelling — the mapping of sounds to writing — they can make things difficult, sure. Ditto unfamiliar grammar, although the article cites some confounding and unforeseen possibilities even so:

Latin’s six cases cower in comparison with Estonian’s 14, which include inessive, elative, adessive, abessive, and the system is riddled with irregularities and exceptions. Estonian’s cousins in the Finno-Ugric language group do much the same. Slavic languages force speakers, when talking about the past, to say whether an action was completed or not… And to say “go” requires different Slavic verbs for going by foot, car, plane, boat or other conveyance.

…George Lakoff, a linguist, memorably described a noun class [i.e., something like a gender] of Dyirbal (spoken in north-eastern Australia) as including “women, fire and dangerous things”. To the extent that genders are idiosyncratic, they are hard to learn. Bora, spoken in Peru, has more than 350 of them.

But the truly mind-blowing section of the article is the last, “Yes we (but not you) can.” (The section title itself deserves an appreciative laugh.) In it, The Economist reveals its nominee for most difficult language: something called Tuyuca, a language spoken on the eastern reaches of the Amazon. Among other interesting features:

Tuyuca requires verb-endings on statements to show how the speaker knows something. Diga ape-wi means that “the boy played soccer (I know because I saw him)”, while diga ape-hiyi means “the boy played soccer (I assume)”. English can provide such information, but for Tuyuca that is an obligatory ending on the verb.

I’ve always liked imagining a story which featured the last speaker of a particular language who also spoke no other languages. The story idea especially haunts me to consider it set in prehistoric times, when no Teach Yourself Language X courses were even on the horizon… and, worse, no one who spoke Language X would have been the least motivated to teach it to a stranger anyhow.

It had to have been just about one of the loneliest of human experiences, no?