The Spitting Out of Mother Tongues

We currently have an exchange student from Uruguay staying with us, for about three weeks. His name is Mateo. It's been a pretty interesting experience. I'll admit that at first I was plainly freaked out, because he spoke very good English and his accent was so that I understood almost none of his Spanish. We don't speak much Spanish at all outside of our Spanish class at school, though, and when I speak to him (and most of the other Uruguayan kids) in Spanish, he has the the tendency to respond in English instead. This seemed slightly peculiar to me until we were discussing the learning of foreign languages with my brother (who has a holy obsession with lingua latina) and my father (who took German in highschool and learned English as a second language as a child). We began to ask each other why we were so keen on the languages we were learning: it turns out that none of us like the one we started out with. We don't like the default.

I suppose it would be too much to say that I dislike English. As I explained to a friend earlier today, it's a wonderful language IF you have been trained in it thoroughly since you were a small child and use it for artistic or academic purposes. There are so many delightful shades of meaning and connotative stains to play with that it's a very interesting language, and the melody tends to be less repetitive because words all start and end with pretty contrasting sounds. But it's not a particularly cute, idiosyncratic language to use simply. If you use really expressive, colorful words in English, or even express yourself in a really expressive, colorful way, you tend to risk sounding either artistic or archaic. That's because the common language doesn't use color much. The absence of diminutives, for example, I find an extreme loss to the nature of the language and, subsequently, the flow of the culture.

Not only that, but secondly, it is near impossible to sit comfortably in proper grammar. The impossibility of expressing impersonal statements void of gender, eg. when the winner's name is announced, they should come forward to pick up their trophy. It is properly obnoxious to say "he or she." It's annoying to write it, for gosh sake- no one does it unless they're being technical, so it only exists in the writing of scholars and feminists. Another really awkward grammatical situation comes up frequently in trying to express plural possessives with named subjects. Eg, Me, my brother and sister's cat is black. It sounds ridiculous to say "My, my brother's, and my sister's cat" because it's redundant and feels incomplete. Yet another example is the nonexistence of a second person plural and its similar issues with possessives. "Your guyses poster is blue" isn't correct in terms of spelling or grammar, but it's how we talk. Grammatically, it would have to be "your poster is blue," which now has an ambiguous possessive pronoun.

Thirdly, the verbs are freaking impossible. There is near no pattern in their conjugation and any conjugation there is is regularly irregular. Look at the variation between 1st person verbs conjugated in the simple past: Is → Was, Walk → Walked, Carry → Carried, Wear → Wore, Drive → Drove, Eat → Ate, Sleep → Slept, Wake → Woke... They're just unwieldy and have tons of different forms that are difficult to memorized because, once again, there are many that are rarely used correctly (due to their unwieldiness).

So, I have my reasons for being peeved with English. Jaco is, too. But I realized after not much discussion that my dad and Mateo weren't exactly in the same boat.

Mateo isn't fond of Spanish at all. He says it is too difficult, has too many dumb rules, and too many irregulars. I think this is BS of course, especially in comparison to English. I have no idea how he could say that. But he has rejected Spanish as inferior to English. My father was apparently the same way as a teenager: instead of loving Afrikaans, he plunged himself into English and German, learning both well (the former much better, obviously). He thought it was brilliant that his children would grow up speaking the superior language. Now here we are, obsessing over Afrikaans, Latin, Spanish, Greek, German, whatever, and finding them altogether more interesting than English.

I think this is because when we learn new languages, we take for granted both the more full-bodied potential of our first tongue and also the worldview application it has. In every language there exists a special way of expressing sentiments and ideas with shades that exist only in their accompanying culture - this is a very important piece of the language to hang on to. I think the key in growing new tongues is like adopting new political attitudes: it's important to stay grounded and be wary of simply rejecting the old for the sake of its oldness, because in reality it ain't any older than the new one. Once you've adopted the wonderful and new, you are now amongst a whole body of people who are bored with their norm and want input from yours. Fascination shouldn't come solely from what is new, but from the worth something has from the beginning. It is indeed an exercise to see it all with fluent eyes.