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The sound of snow on the Mediterranean
English wasn't the language I chose to learn, rather, even when I was ten, many more years ago than I'd like to admit here, it was clear to my parents that English and its speakers are gaining ground in the world and that you needed to learn the language to get anywhere. French was the language I loved and aspired to master as a teenager and then, continued to study in college. I simply absorbed Italian, the way I did my native Croatian, while imperfectly, by listening to my mother speak it to neighbors, and to acquaintances we ran into at the Korzo, and by spending way too many Saturday evenings watching Canzonissima. (You kind of like this? Here's your chance to learn more about La Carrà "Sensazionale," while practicing your Italian at the same time.) ...And German was a mistake.* (*Not really. This is just a cheap way to end a paragraph by using an all too common linguistic stereotype; it's too bad I will never be able to really "interact" with Goethe, Rilke, Grass, and ordinary beer-drinkers at the Oktoberfest, in the original.) Unless you were lucky to have acquired two or more languages in early childhood, as explained here, the thing about our first, native language is that it feels as much part of us as our arms or legs; it feels like the only reasonable and enjoyable way to speak. For example, don't you agree that the Croatian word pahulja has all the white quietness of the feathery snowflake in its sound that an English snowflake** simply doesn't? You don't. That's right; my point exactly. (**I can't help it, but snowflake always reminds me of the Croatian fleka, a colloquial word for stain.) Poets and novelists build their worlds around this dreamy, evocative quality that words of our native language tend to have for us, paying as much attention to their sounds as their meanings, ignoring and challenging thereby what every Linguistics 101 student must learn: That the vast majority of words in all languages are simply arbitrary "labels" attached to the world that surrounds us, with no natural or necessary relationship between their sound and the objects or ideas they represent. Otherwise, how could so many different languages exist in the first place?! But, of course, linguistic theory and linguistic practice are two different things. My first exhilarating experience of snow, so rare in the coastal town I grew up in (remember the snowfall in that town on the Adriatic coast in Amarcord?), was mediated by the sound of the word pahulja and no amount of foreign language lab time can pull this lovely sound-meaning association out of me. In Lost in Translation, Eva Hoffman has written beautiful pages about how difficult it is, and why, to have to replace the juicy, malleable, evocative words of our native language with their straight-out-of-a-dictionary second-language versions, dry and lifeless because unrelated to any of our life's experiences. Still, the fact that I can speak, read and write in a few different languages fills me with joy and excitement each time I think of all the possibilities this continues to open up for me. It provides me with a sense of freedom, alternative points of view, an escape from the necessity of Wittgenstein's "The limits of our world are the limits of our language." This is also the feeling of some pleasure obtained for free (well, not so free in either case) I get when I cross an East River bridge, capturing the view of the Manhattan skyline, thinking to myself again and again, "I live here." We can capture more facets of an event and feelings it provokes in us by talking about it in two different languages. In spite of all the superficial diversity of sound and structure, all languages are built in almost disappointingly similar, while really ingenious and complex ways. At the same time, they are separate cumulative creations of different sets of past and living speakers and carry the imprint of their cultures, environments, actions, interests, beliefs, and feelings in their vocabularies and expressive habits. If I paint with yellow, green, blue, and white in English, and necessarily use a different palette in Croatian, the same trip I took over the Atlantic this summer will end up provoking in you a slightly different mood and depict a different angle of what I did and how I felt, despite my intentions. It may also almost seem to me sometimes that I took two different trips. This ambiguity and lack of permanence of our experience, and our difficulty in capturing it, is, I think, more readily apparent to those who can speak more than one language. This is educational, but not always an easy thing. Living your life in different languages in an eye-opening experience (which we often prefer to avoid). Discovering the world through a second language is similar to your first experience of discovering the world beyond your street with familiar houses filled with relatives, friends and good neighbors--it's different, and it will take a while until you'll feel at home in it. But the rewards of stepping outside the circle are large because unavoidably you'll learn things you never would by staying inside it, and that includes the realization that all circles also overlap which, eventually, will make you feel at home, and not bored, anywhere. (ZVIEZDANA)
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