THE LANGUAGE GAP
By Doug Ingold
Doug Ingold is one of our authors with many fine books to his credit (see books). He is also the editor of Wolfenden Publishing, and being an editor he knows the subject of language. In this story he tells about the “language gap.”
What a strange phenomenon language is, how profoundly complex and subtle. Fluid, always in transition, immersed in the dynamic culture from which it springs, a language is ever on the move. Even a conversation between two native speakers is, I suspect, less precise, and more clumsy than we suppose. We think something, then we try to express it, and what comes out is only an approximation of what we were thinking, and what the listener understands is only an approximation of what we said. And yet it is an amazing skill, a delicious gift, the sharing of which gives us some of our greatest pleasures. Indeed, a language is all but useless unless it is shared.
And a “foreign” language? Is it a bit of a myth, or an exaggeration, to say that a “foreign” language can really be learned? When we say that the waiter in an Italian restaurant speaks English, what we really mean is that he can explain the menu, talk about the wine, take your order, chat a bit about the weather or the countryside. Ask him for an analysis of his country’s political structure, or his and his family’s relationship with the Catholic Church, or his thoughts about the immigrants flowing into his country and you will soon run into the gap. His thoughts, assuming he understood you and that he chooses to share them, will come out as hard, narrow slivers of the complex rush of ideas coursing through his mind.
There are degrees of skill, of course. People are said to be bilingual, or multilingual. They flow from one language to another, mix them up, can give and take. But the ones I have met confess that when they venture outside their native tongue, they feel themselves skating on the surface of a lake, the depths of which mystify and confuse them. “A Dodger? What is a Dodger? And a Brooklyn one?” “Daffy what?” “Duck? Daffy Duck? What is that?
My father-in-law, who grew up in Germany but who has lived in the Unites States for seventy or more years, speaks English in such an eloquent and seductive way that listeners are held in thrall. And yet it is always an effort for him; he feels himself often talking from the edge. And now, after all these years, his German threatens to fail him. The skills that without a conscious thought he learned as a child have become blunted. The language itself has moved away from the decade and the village where he learned it. On the phone talking with relatives back in Germany he is a man rushing to catch a departing bus.
The language gap is a painful place to be. I want to understand this family of mine. I want to catch the nuance, the joke, the worry. I want to give voice to my own personality. I want to show them who and what I am. And yet none of this can I do.
As I was writing the above words of self-pity, I remembered the two attractive young women we met on a bridge over the Seine while we were in Paris. Each of them held a clipboard and a pen, and on the clipboard was what appeared to be a petition. The document was in French, of course, with a title followed by a paragraph of text and below it lines for signatures and addresses and perhaps space for a donation. The young women were aggressively seeking signatures on the busy pedestrian-only bridge. They would step directly into the path of an approaching person, shove the clipboard at them and shout something. I assumed I could not understand because they were speaking French, but then I realized that the harsh, forceful demanding sounds were grunts more than words. To get free of them we each signed on the clipboard, having no idea what it was we were signing. It was only as we were leaving that I realized that the two young women were deaf-mutes. They could not speak to anyone in any verbal language. The sounds they made, the aggressive physical mannerisms they displayed were desperate attempts to communicate, to break through the wall of isolation, to cross the language gap that surrounded and imprisoned them, that spread in every direction they looked and extended as far as they could see.
Editor’s note.
When Doug had the THE LANGUAGE GAP published on his webpage, and which we lifted, we found dozens of readers’ comments at the end. Of those, quite a few are interesting, and we are reprinting three of them here.
NancyJean says:
Great artcle, Doug. ‘like rushing to catch a bus’. That describes how I feel about my native language, English. The lack of basic grammer, punctuation, and the distain for the art of cursive is a mystery to me. I feel like many people are speaking German. This is a good read!!!
Bobbie says:
Thanks for sharing this, Doug. At my advanced age, I am – for some reason – struggling to learn Spanish. In almost a year, I feel I have made very little progress. Your essay mirrors my frustration. You have hit the nail on the head.
Iris Schencke says:
Very well written Doug. As a member of the Swedish speaking minority in Finland, where I lived my first 7 years, I was surrounded by bilingual people. Both of my parents were trilingual. Did they have gaps? I don’t know, but I do know that one of the languages was the mother tongue and I assume it was stronger. For my mother it was Swedish. But she went to work everyday using Finnish. And she became famous for her sensitive translations of poetry from Finnish to Swedish.
As a teenager I moved with my parents to Mexico, where I attended a British private school. (I also picked up Spanish to some extent) I fell in love with English. Such a huge, flexible, rich, language. It grows at a tremendous rate and everybody in the world is studying it and contributing to it. There’s never been a Lingua Franca like the language used by the internet! When I returned to Sweden after two years I felt I wrote better in English than in Swedish. In my mid twenties I moved to Palo Alto. In my struggle to find my footing in this new place I did not commuicate much with family and friends in Sweden and made no effort to meet Swedish speakers in California. And to my dismay, my Swedish developed a “lag”. It took me a brief but to me very annoying moment to feel fluent. Especially troublesome was vocabulary related to my new work experiences. Now, thanks to the internet I am easlily able to keep it both fluent and current by lots of emails to family and by listening to Swedish radio. I think there are truly bilingual people but It requires living and or working somewhere where both languages a used all the time. An annoying aspect of my bilingualism is my forever lingering Swedish accent in English. A cousin of mine in Finland, who had Swedish as his mother and father tongue, married a woman who’s first language is Finnish. In order for their three children to be truly bilingual they insisted the kids speak only Swedish with the father and only Finnish with mother. They choose Swedish primary schools for them, knowing that Finnish, the language of the majority in Finland would otherwise dominate. I am facebook friends with these young people. They swim like fish in the ocean of languages on the internet. They have all added fluent English. And one of them also Russian. It takes effort and motivation! It is really very difficult to learn another language well enough to feel you can actually represent your complex self well and it take great effort to keep it going. Not until you feel you can are you truly there. But, if you happen to be lucky enough to be born into English be happy about it. Never has there been such an amazing language to play around in. This became a long comment. And there is much more I can say about it. Again thank you for your insightful and amusing story
