THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: IN PRAISE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES

Thought for the Day: In Praise of Foreign Languages
In today’s shrunken world, familiarity with foreign languages can be a useful skill.
I speak five of them, with varying degree of proficiency, from writing a book to ordering a coffee, all but one acquired through vagaries of life beyond my control.
– Polish, first, is my mother tongue; I was born with it. Although I left Poland at the age of seven, I speak it flawlessly, without a hint of foreign accent. A single giveaway is occasional use of an antiquated expression.

– Next came English at the age of eight, when I found myself in London, living with my mother, who placed me in school sans the slightest knowledge of the language. At the time Mother was a lieutenant colonel in the army, which would explain it. English was drummed into me by nuns with daily spelling and summarizing of texts into ‘précis’. It’s quite time-consuming trying to achieve proper reduction of text, as recognized by the French mathematician Blaise Pascal, when he wrote to a friend: ‘I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.’ Shakespeare had his own take on this: ‘Brevity, he said, is the soul of wit’.

– After English it was Spanish – at the ripe age of ten – in the beautiful city of Buenos Aires known as the Paris of the South. Not pure Spanish with its “thetas” and “eshhs”, rather the Spanish of erstwhile American colonies, liberally sprinkled with “italianisms”, due to a heavy post-war immigration from Italy.
At that point I could juggle three languages with ease. Kids’ brains are like little sponges, absorbing without concern for rules of grammar or other linguistic niceties.
– As I became a teenager French followed, for no other reason than that according to old European traditions, a proper young lady ought to speak the courtly language of diplomacy, even though by then it had been displaced in that role by English, and even though the family were cash-strapped political expats.
– Fifth, German, uphill battle, not an unmitigated success. What can you expect of a language, where nouns come at the beginning of the sentence, verbs at the very end, and five lines of text in between. When I went to work for a German corporation, I overcame these hurdles, on the kindly advice of my boss: “You vill learn it, and you vill like it”.
Is such an agglomeration of tongues useful?
Depends on the languages. For me it was godsent. Three times during my professional life excellent jobs came my way only thanks to the knowledge of a particular language. Since I retired, they still open a window to other cultures, allowing vistas of foreign places where one moves freely and orders dinner without excessive use of sign language.
Now it’s time for Italian:
– Buongiorno, Signor Dante, here I come.

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