Měla babka čtyri jabka

Every day before lunch, we say this poem in English, which I learned from my Waldorf mentor, and an equivalent in Czech. I love the way the Czech poem sounds, even if I can barely pronounce it an only have a rough idea what I am saying. I recently re-discovered a book of Czech nursery rhymes at school and I have a few that I love hearing the kids say. They just sound so magical. I tried to read them and found that I could actually understand them. Then, obviously, I needed to translate them for real. I am always in search of new hobbies--and what better than translating verses from a language I've never studied?

This is my first attempt, and my favorite Czech rhyme:

Měla babka čtyri jabka

a dědeček jen dvě.

Dej mi, babko, jedno jabko,

budeme mít stejně.

Literally:

Grandma had four apples

and grandpa only two.

Give me, grandma, one apple,

and we will have the same.

But this doesn't have the same sort of ring to it. Here's what I came up with, though it clearly needs improvement:

Four apples had Grandma

Grandpa had just two.

Give an apple to poor Grandpa

Dear Grandma, won't you?

So yes, it loses lesson that 4-1 and 2+1 are the same, but it keeps the general feeling of the poem.

My second poem in Czech is:

Foukej, foukej, větřičku,

Shod' mi jednu hruštičku,

Shod' mi jednu nebo dvě,

budou sladké obě dvě.

Literally:

Blow, blow, wind,

knock down one pear for me

knock down one or two for me

they will both be sweet.

This one, I'm more proud of:

Blow, wind, blow through the air

Knock me down a juicy pear

Let one or two fall from the tree

Oh how sweet they both will be!

I'd like to say that there's a practical reason for me to be translating these rhymes. I'd like to say that it's part of a plan to teach my children English using the rhymes they are familiar with. But it's not. It's simply another way to pass my time. And I'm okay with that.

Now With DIAGRAMS!

So, I have to admit that lately I have a ridiculous obsession with diagraming things. It started with the hierarchy of expat needs, but now I think of at least ten diagrams a day. I diagram the thesis of a conversation in my head, whenever possible.

I've also been making a lot of color work knitting charts, so I found the strange need to use something equivalent to MS Paint to edit them. I find myself being a self-righteous Mac user, the kind of person Lisa and I vowed never to become all throughout college. But here I am. And as someone who grew up with Windows 95, I knew that everything I needed to do could be done simply in MS Paint. So I downloaded a shareware equivalent for Mac and now... behold the diagraming.

We start off with the old favorite: The Venn Diagram. John Venn, I thank you for your contribution to humanity. My favorite mental Venn diagram lately has been related to how much it sucks trying to learn another language as a native English speaker. There are two things that make English, a language for which orthography is so arbitrary we might as well make it pictographic, a fairly easy language to learn to speak: we don't really have cases or genders for nouns. This means that whether a noun is a subject or an object, it's usually the same word. The bird runs. I eat the bird. Same same. And while we may assign gender to specific (and generally sentient, ships be damned) nouns, these don't affect how we match them with adjectives. I eat the tasty male bird. I eat the tasty female bird. The bird is tasty. Same same same.

So far, I have not studied a language with this ease of use. They all require that when pairing a noun with an adjective, I properly match the case, gender, or both. If I had to pick which, case or gender, was easier to learn, I'd definitely pick gender as there is a maximum of three, double that for singular and plural, and you've got six possible ways to end a word. So, Spanish, your bubble is definitely the easier of the two in this mix. Finnish, while it has an exciting lack of genders even in the first person singular pronoun that makes all of us queermos jump for joy, requires that I decide before placing an ending on restaurant whether I am going up to (but not entering) or going inside of said restaurant. Cases, you are the bane of my existence. I submit. But now, the double whammy: matching case and gender. Latin and Czech, for this reason, are actually more difficult to some extent than the infamously impossible Finnish. I have to decide not only if I am going to be in or at the restaurant, I have to remember if it's a boy, girl, or other.

Trying to learn languages from this perspective makes them all feel impossible. I curse them for having cases and genders, when really, I should be cursing English for its simplicity. Why oh why did I have to grow up speaking such an easy language so now these concepts which exist in most languages are so foreign to me? I might lament. But I wonder what it's like from the other side. I know from experience with English language learners that they do want to gender nouns in English, "The restaurant, she is so nice!" But what I don't know is if you grow up with cases, do you want to say "I will meet you in the restaurant-u"?

Learning Languages

I am learning to live in this country where I don't speak the verbal language. I am learning to trade words for actions and emotions. I am learning to speak the language of friendly faces. I am learning to speak the language of Monday morning sighs as we wait at the cross walk for the light to change, the sigh as if to say, "While I would like a little bit more weekend, I am determined to make this week good." I am learning to speak the language of morning skyward glances and the afternoon quick step. And in school, I am learning to speak the language of wonder when we open up a rosehip to see the seeds inside. I am learning to speak the language of giggles and tambourines. I am learning to speak the language of potty dances and temper-tantrums. I am learning to speak the language of imagination at the sand table. I am learning to speak the language of spaghetti faces and dirty hands.

And I wonder, if we all stopped worrying about our words, how many languages could we speak?