The English-Learning and Languages Review Æ Homepage
Playing
with Words
or
The Real
Fun of Language
David Bond
(undergoing revision of
layout)
Contents
|
1 Learning a language does
not have to be a Victorian parlour game |
Two games to be recommended
- No word ever means the same as another |
kiss and baiser |
|
|
explore the differences |
a word to sum up your country |
wheesky to make you smile |
the world of meaning table
has for an Italian |
|
television: used in different ways in different
languages |
"What's on
television?" and "What's on the television?" |
languages are expressions of
culture and history |
do not ignore so-called
old-fashioned words |
|
Chrisoula's steed |
a new language is a new window
on the world |
English for special purposes |
learning jargon in another
language is understanding difference |
|
learning a language is an act
of love |
declining memory alone cannot
explain different experiences in learning different languages |
being born again into a
language |
not loving a place and so not
learning its language well |
|
the necessity to embrace both
language and culture |
the need for both intellectual
and emotional commitment |
the limitations of
dictionaries |
ways of minimising the
limitations; but dictionaries are inexact and often misleading |
|
monolingual dictionaries
preferable |
the misguided practice of
making vocabulary lists |
the illusion of using
dictionaries to establish more exact meanings |
the importance of using
dictionaries in the right way |
|
don't open the dictionary
before you have tried to mime the 'unknown' word |
learning what the Greek
"skeparni" is by using it, not by looking it up in the dictionary! |
escaping from the world of
equivalents into the certain world linking words to realities |
constantly rehearse words,
phrases, sentences, passages, learn them by heart |
|
practise thus the rhythm and
natural flow of a language |
savour a word in its context
before you open that dictionary |
you finally open the
dictionary not to achieve exactness but to judge the dictionary |
frequent failure of
dictionaries to provide adequate translations for words in their common
contexts |
|
acharnement |
la raison sociale |
a dictionary can be right and wrong at the same time |
frimousse |
|
the pleasure of hunting for
the origin and history of words |
bezpecne |
words that may mean more to
one in a foreign languagge than they do in one's own |
awareness of difference,
emotional commitment, passions of the chase = the fun of language-learning |
|
ser & estar |
Greek laokratia and
democracy |
words as fathers to new thoughts |
|
I am not the most gamesome person in the world. I am more the lean
and hungry type that tosses and turns in my bed of a night. If anything led me
to retire myself as a language-teacher, it was the seemingly irresistible
spread of the belief, amongst those who taught languages, that learning to be
fun had to involve an almost incessant playing of games. I'm all for learning
being fun - who is not - but I have never really believed that this
necessitated turning the classroom into a twenty-first century version of the
Victorian parlour and I have never been very convinced of the efficacy of this
approach. Nevertheless, to show that I am no grouch, I should like to recommend
a game or two to all students of language.
The
first game would most usefully be played amongst students of different
nationalities. The students would compile together a list of words in English
or in whatever language they were learning and then each make separate lists of
what they felt were the equivalent words in their own languages. The game is
then to explore word by word all the differences in meaning, tone, usage,
etymology and history that the various words display. Well, all right, it's not
exactly the most fun, fun, fun game that was ever invented (I did warn you that
I wasn't gamesome) but its results can be fascinating. The point of the game is
to make clear one of the most crucial truths about language. No word ever means
the same as another; there is no such thing as a synonym. No two words in one language
mean the same and no word in one language is ever an exact translation of
another. These are truisms but how often they are forgotten! Yet the
implications for every aspect of language-learning are vast and need constantly
to be kept in mind.
Let me play the game,
for a moment, as a form of patience. I don't suppose anybody is going to want
to play it with me anyway. Take the English word kiss and the French equivalent
baiser. I know I have chosen a notorious example (as of course will many students)
but it makes the point none the less. For at least two centuries now, the
French word baiser (literally to kiss) has had, as a verb, a
quite different signification involving a more intimate stage of physical
intimacy. Say "embrasser", more decent, as Flaubert put it, some time
last century, in his Dictionnaire des idées reçues. But how can embrasser
mean the same as kiss. Look at the etymology of the word, which contains
the element bras (meaning arm) and clearly related to the English word embrace,
developed of course from the French. So embrasser means both kiss
and embrace according to context. Baiser is still used as a
substantive, to mean kiss or in compounds like baise-main
(which is untranslatable in English except by a circumlocution. And so one goes
on. This has only brought us to the threshold of the most interesting
questions. Do the French and English kiss in the same circumstances and in the
same manner? Does a kiss have the same cultural signification? One could have
literally hours of fun savouring the distinctions in depth.
Baiser and kiss are, I admit, a
bit of a cheat. Take the word table. This is surely unambiguous. A table
is a table is a table in anybody's language and in any language. Mensa, mensa,
mensam and all that. Now I do remember once playing a game (perhaps I am
more gamesome than I care to admit) which involved each person (and we were all
different nationalities) thinking of one word that for them summed up their own
country or their own culture when they were far from home. It was intended to
represent the thing, if you like, that each person most looked forward to on
their return. I - I am a little ashamed to say - came up with privacy
which is true enough but a bit anally retentive. My Italian friend, Saverio,
had no doubts. His word, pronounced with dramatic emphasis and not the
slightest hesitation, was table.
Another anecdote. A
Venezuelan friend of mine was a great taker of photographs. Two or three gathered
together and, snap, it was watch the birdie! To encourage his subjects to
smile, however, Jesús (for such was the gentleman's name) used to ask them, in
English, to say whisky, which in his own pronunciation, wheesky, had the desired effect of
stretching the lips into a suitable rictus. I always used to be much amused -
not gamesome? I am a veritable wag - by the thought of the glum photographs
that would result if groups of English people stood around saying
"whisky".
I felt rather the
same about Saverio's table. The thought of an Englishman, or even an
Englishwoman, far from home, murmuring "table" to him or herself in a
tone of wistful longing in the small wee hours of the morning was totally
ludicrous. Yet I knew exactly what Saverio meant and the mot, for him, was as
juste as a mot can be. Table has implications for an Italian, and in Italian,
that it does not have for the English or in English. It speaks of aspects of
family life and of good fellowship, of mealtimes both as rituals and as celebrations,
of a whole world of food-preparation and kitchen conversation and of all sorts
of other things that only an Italian could justly describe. The word for
Saverio conjured up a whole universe beyond the simple four-legged piece of
furniture and beyond, for that matter, mere plaisirs de bouche.
Modern words it is
common to suppose are more readily interchanged between languages. They belong,
particularly those related to science and technology, business or politics, to
a sort of internationalese. Take the word television. We use the noun in
English in different ways. It describes the physical equipment ("Put it on
top of the television"); it describes the technology ("Television has
changed our lives"); it can refer to the programming ("English television
is the best in the world") and it can have a meaning, hard to describe,
that is all, or some, of the foregoing at the same time ("What's on
television?"). In other languages, the seemingly identical or
near-identical word may be used in some of these ways but not in others. Or it
may be used in all of these ways but not as frequently or consistently. For
instance the word émission in French (roughly equivalent to the English
word programme) is used more widely than its English equivalent and will often
overlap with the sense, or one of the senses, of the English television.
The word poste is used in French to refer to the physical equipment more
often than is the English word set. The English word set, unlike the French
word poste, is rarely used on its own of the television but nearly
always in the compound television-set, which, in its turn, has
rather an old-fashioned sound to it. What is more we never use the word set,
as the French do the word poste, to refer to a telephone (which we
always call the telephone) or a computer set-up (for which we have the
word workstation but only in a business context). On the subject of
telephones, there is also the French word appareil......
The game, as you see,
can be almost endless fun. I haven't even touched here on questions of
grammatical usage - the prepositions or articles that are (or are not) used
with the word. Here again the English word television is a priceless
specimen. "What's on television?" and "What's on the
television?" can mean entirely different things, but in some contexts they
appear to mean the same thing. But do they? Something is going on in our minds
when we sneak that extra little word in (or choose to leave it out) although it
would be difficult to say what.
Before the reader
concludes that I am entirely and irremediably frivolous, let me try and
extrapolate what seem to me to be serious implications of all this. Clearly
language, a language (and the words and expressions of which it is composed)
are expressions of culture and history. Teachers who invite their students to
ignore certain words or certain uses of a word on the grounds that they are
old-fashioned of never used nowadays are guilty of serious error. I remember
once doing precisely this with comical results. The word steed had come
up in some piece of English that a class was looking at and I simply dismissed
it in those or similar terms. One of my students in the class was, as it
happened, also my girlfriend at the time. Chrisoula (for that was her name) was
the proud owner of an extremely battered but solid old bicycle. In the week
that followed the class where the word steed had reared its noble head,
a dozen or so people on different occasions must have referred to that wretched
antique as her "trusty steed". I lost the girl, sad to say, shortly
afterwards but the salutary lesson has remained with me. Whenever I am inclined
to dismiss a word or phrase as archaic, I just murmur to myself
"Chrisoulas bicycle".
In one way the
difference between languages and the difference between words, precisely
because it reflects that difference between cultures and histories, is
extremely good news and, without wishing to sound too much like Billy Graham,
it is that good news that one often needs to emphasise to the language-learner.
A language, I used to tell students in my more pompous moments, is a window on
the world. And when you learn a new language, you are able to see the world
through different eyes. Every language learned is a new window on the world.
Pompous but true and, unless students of language are able to appreciate it,
they miss out on what, to me, is the real fun of learning a language.
When English for
special purposes (if that is the name by which it is still known) became a
popular vogue at some point in the 1970s I was sceptical. It may be a sort of
snobbery but I find something distasteful in the notion of learning a language
merely so as to be able to converse in an appropriate jargon with business
colleagues or competitors or whatever. At the same time, I understand entirely
why there is a demand and I quite appreciate that that demand must, in some way
or another, be supplied. If I were teaching business English, I would be
inclined to spend a lot of time emphasising the way that even learning jargon
in another tongue should be seen, not as a process of translating but precisely
as a process of understanding difference. Just as languages as a whole reflect
different cultures so the different languages of business reflect different
business cultures and practices. In business, as in any other area of life, a
language can provide a new window, a different perspective. The business-person
learning a language can, as it were, benchmark language-use in the language
learned (compare, contrast and evaluate best practice) just as he or she would
benchmark other aspects of another's or another nation's business.
At the risk of
sounding even more like Billy Graham, I would assert that learning a language
is an act of love. Some may sneer at such a formulation but I am as certain of
it as I am that I live and breathe. I wish sometimes language-teachers and
language-schools would be more honest with students and, when they know that
students will not benefit from their attentions, or will benefit so little as
makes no difference, that they would simply tell them so. For there are such
students and anyone who has spent any length of time teaching languages knows
it. It is not that they are incapable, physically or mentally, of learning the
language (whatever language is in question), for no one is that. Nor is it a
question of age. Although the phenomenon is, I think, inconceivable in
children, I have encountered it in relatively young adults. The students in
question are, in my view, the victims of a species of phobia. Without going
into it further here, I would only add that it is almost invariably accompanied
- whether consciously or unconsciously - by a dislike, bordering on aversion,
for the language concerned.
At different times in
my life I have spent roughly equivalent periods of time in two parts of the
world - both European countries as it happens - where I have, naturally enough,
assayed to learn the language. The difference in the result on the two
occasions could hardly have been greater. Different languages can be more
difficult relative to the particular learner, but the two were, on balance,
pretty equivalent from my point of view. I was certainly older on the second
occasion (twenty years of difference) and I do not deny that this is a factor.
The principal problem as regards language-learning as one gets older is one's
memory which unquestionably deteriorates That difference alone, however, is
insufficient to explain the extent of the difference between the two
experiences and I have, since that time - I am only in my forties - continued
to learn, or improve, languages without too inordinate an effort.
On both occasions I
had found myself in the countries in question for somewhat eccentric reasons
and, to some extent, under adverse circumstances. It was love - plain,
ordinary, common-or-garden love for a woman - that had taken me to country A, a
love that was sadly doomed, from the moment I arrived there, to disappointment.
I stayed on with dogged determination, desperately short of money at first and
doing all sorts of odd jobs to earn a living, and I learned the language. I
learned it, for the time I was there, pretty well. My relationship with the
country might reasonably be described as love-hate, perhaps partly - who knows
- on account of my disappointment in the girl, yet love (in both cases) was
certainly present in the business.
As a result - and
here again we return to the notion of a language as a window on the world and
of each new language as another window through which one sees the world - the
experience of being in the country marked me for life. Strange to say, since I
used my second name while there, I was almost literally born again into the
language. More mundanely, I was prepared for it to become part of me and
therefore it has affected (quite profoundly) the way I talk, the way I eat, the
way I think; in short, it has added a dimension to me as a person. I have been
back to the country in question a couple of times since - but not now for over
twenty years - and I still speak the language with reasonable facility. In some
ways I speak it with more ease than I do other languages of which I have a far
greater passive knowledge and in which I have a far greater vocabulary.
In the case of
country B, I was on the run - both to get away from
Nor would it be true
to say that the country had no interest for me. Intellectual curiosity was
still alive, though all passion was dead. And my stay there was not without its
menus plaisirs, come to that. Country B boasted excellent beer,
extremely pretty young women and a native variant of billiards that -
ungamesome though I am - I miss to this day. Yet, for all this, in the state of
mind I was in, I could not love the place and, as a result, learning the
language was a hopeless uphill struggle. Despite a sincere effort - less impassioned
certainly than had been the case in country A but no less genuine - I got next
to nowhere with it and, most curiously of all, having left the place, within
months if not weeks, I had forgotten what little I had ever known.
The point I am trying
to make here is a practical one. A just apprehension of the cultural
significance of a language, and an active willingness to embrace both language
and culture, is not a luxury for the language-learner but a necessity. What I
have had the temerity to call love (and feel free, by all means, to find a more
bloodless, scientific term if that is more to your taste) is truly at the heart
of the matter. Learning a language does not require an anabaptist ritual or a
till-death-do-us-part plighting of troth but, for adults, who, unlike children,
measure their affections (and not always over-generously), there is a question
of conscious choice involved. The adult language-learner has to want to learn a
language and this simple fact is more often respected in theory than its is in
practice. It involves both intellectual and emotional commitment. Nobody can
pour a language into somebody else's brain via some sort of funnel attached to
the top of their head and every time a student is given the impression that
language-learning is simply a matter of hard work and technique, practice and
parlour-games, he or she is being grievously misled.
Finally let me turn
from a broad perspective on language-learning to a matter that is of a most
downright, practical nature - that of dictionaries and their use. You will
recall that the starting-point of this entire discussion was a very simple
observation that no single word ever means the same as another. In an absolute
sense, of course, this condemns dictionaries from the outset since, in a sense,
the whole raison d'être of lexicography would seem to be based on an entirely
opposite contention. Lexicographers, I warrant, are by and large an honest
bunch of rogues and would be the first to admit the limitations of their
science.
There are, what is
more, several devices by which they very properly seek to minimise, or
circumvent, those limitations. First of all, they provide several alternative
definitions for each word defined, thus hoping to cover, one way or another, a
large degree of its meaning. Then, in a good dictionary, they provide examples
of a word's usage that further helps to define it. In an ideal world, the
dictionary is also conducted on what the OED calls historical principles and
will therefore give the etymology and history of the word as best it can.
Despite these efforts, a dictionary, whether monolingual, bilingual or
multilingual, must always, by definition indeed, be an inexact and often
misleading work of reference. Perhaps what is really needed is something more in
the nature of an encyclopaedia of language that devotes whole essays to the
words it catalogues, carefully explaining their history and origin and
discussing the nuances of meaning they express. In this sense, lexicography has
to some extent gone backwards since the days of Samuel Johnson, who was
unafraid to express himself at length upon the words he defines. One might, for
the same reason, prefer the chattier style of Larousse to the more scientific
manner of the OED.
For the learner of a
foreign language, a monolingual dictionary (such as The Oxford Advanced
Learner's Dictionary) is doubtless preferable. It avoids the necessity
(always dangerous) of having to think of one language in terms of another. As a
teacher, I inveighed more frequently than I care to remember against the
iniquitous practice, now rarely employed by the pedagogues but still often dear
to the student, of compiling vocabulary lists that linked a column of words in
the language to be learned with a corresponding column of words in the
student's native language. This practice is always disastrous and leads to what
I call the blank half of the page syndrome.
This occurs when
students search their minds for a word (or phrase) in the language they are
learning. They are certain the word or phrase is one they have encountered and
that it exactly fits the required context. They positively remember having
carefully entered the word (or phrase) in their notebook. They scan their
memory and they picture the notebook. They can see in their minds eye the very
page on which the word (or phrase) appears. Unfortunately as they picture it,
they realise with dismay that all they see is one column of words - the words
(or phrases), as they wrote them, in their own language. The half of the page
which should have contained the equivalent column of words in the language to
be learnt, which did indeed contain them and which, on paper, still does, is
completely blank.
The reason for this
is childishly simple. The brain is naturally indolent, where indolence is
effectively a synonym for efficiency. If one tells ones brain, as the students
in question compiling their lists of equivalents have done, that this or that
word (or phrase) in one language (already well-known) means the same as this or
that word (or phrase) in another (to be learnt), the brain quite properly takes
the shortest route and retains (expending the least resource) the familiar
words and phrases. The equivalents, redundant if identical in sense, are simply
blanked out.
Like most givers of
good advice, I am not necessarily good as following my own. In practice, I
frequently make use of a bilingual dictionary when learning a language, from a
combination of laziness, convenience and curiosity. The element of curiosity
is, psychologically speaking, of enormous weight. I cannot count the times that
students, put on the defensive by some sally of mine, have pleaded that they
just wanted to make it more exact. Arrant nonsense! A dictionary never yet made
anything more exact. As we have seen, it is not in the nature of a dictionary
to do so. What the students have succumbed to (and I succumb along with them
more than a little) is simple, vulgar curiosity.
Simple? Vulgar? Well,
not entirely. What, I wonder, does the dictionary say the word means, might well
express the thought. And it is not such a bad thought at that. We should be
careful always of denigrating or of thoughtlessly repressing such instinctive
reactions. Much can indeed be learned by the language-minded student from a
bilingual dictionary, from seeing, that is to say, the equivalents given for a
word in his or her own language. What matters most in dictionary-use - and here
is the real nub of the matter - is not so much what dictionary one uses but how
one uses it.
The English
expression "look up a word" is an excellent one, with its
implications of consultation (as one might consult a doctor or an
encyclopaedia) and is, as far as I know, unique. Most languages tend (at least
in their most normal usage) to refer merely to looking for words. At the
opposite extreme, in Greek, the expression most commonly used is to
"open" the dictionary, a curious metonymy that sees this seemingly
trivial part of the process as being the essential one. There is, however, in
the Greek expression, an important seed of truth that can usefully complement
that expressed by the more thorough-going English one.
Consider for a moment
the possibility that, when using a dictionary, the most crucial moment is
indeed that at which you first decide to open it. Here I can recommend a number
of useful games - how frolicsome I have now become - that the language-learner
(and language-teacher) might care to try. The cardinal rule is never to rush to
open a dictionary upon encountering a word you do not, or think you do not,
know. To do this is simply to insult your own intelligence. Instead (and it
works surprisingly often and is almost always like a small miracle when it
does) try to mime to yourself the meaning of the word or phrase encountered.
Sometimes (although in practice more rarely than you might suppose) this will
be impossible, often it will be tricky (no pain, no gain) but it will
invariably be instructive.
Another anecdote. At
one time in my life I had the dubious honour of working on building-sites on
the
Let me describe a
skeparni to you. It is in most respects a relatively lightweight hammer. At the
non-striker's end, however, it has a flat solid tail (where a claw-hammer has
its claw) which can be used for levering and extracting nails and so forth. The
tail, as well as being flat, is also sharp, which allows it to be used
additionally for splitting bricks and planks of wood. There, in all its glory,
you have the skeparni and why it is not in more general use around the world, I
will never know.
According to my
dictionary a skeparni was an adze. Now, I was vaguely familiar with the English
word. I associated it with the Elizabethan carpentry that shaped the beams in
English houses of that period and even had a sort of picture in my mind of what
an adze looked like. It was a picture, I may say, that did not entirely
correspond with the rather clearer image I had of a skeparni. The dictionary
had of course made nothing more exact. It had not helped, and of course
couldn't have helped, in the slightest possible way.
Such moments as these
should properly be ones of real pleasure and self-satisfaction for the
language-learner. You have an absolute certainty that you know a word in the
new language which belongs solely, as far as you are concerned, to that
language. You have escaped from the world of equivalence and are nose to nose,
as surely and as really as the skeparni in your hand, with the truth about
language and its relationship to the world (and worlds) it describes. This
ability to define language (without equivalence) in terms of what we see and
hear and touch and feel is greater than we are usually prepared to credit. It
still makes me smile to think of times when students, absolutely convinced of
their ignorance of a word but persuaded by me to attempt a mime, would, at
first maladroitly, then more confidently, outline some object or event or
action that, nine times out of ten, depicted the intended meaning with more
accuracy than any dictionary could have done.
Another game. Tease
yourself with words before you open a dictionary. (I will not say it is better
than sex, but it has some of the characteristics.) Run the words on your
tongue, turn them over in your mind, become acquainted, become intimate. Know
your words in an (almost) biblical sense and you will have little need of a
dictionary for a bible. I would go further still and recommend to students the
pedagogically undervalued practice of learning by heart, If anyone has ever
wondered how so many people came to understand, write and even speak Latin so
well (though a dead language) in the Medieval and Renascence period, they need
look no further than rote-learning for at least a partial explanation.
The consignment to
short-term memory (for the adult it is not likely to be anything else) of
phrases, sentences, whole passages, read or heard, is a remarkably effective
way of experiencing and practising an element of language that is often
completely neglected in conventional teaching. By this I mean the rhythm and
natural flow of a language, its melody and its mannerisms, which are quite as
significant a part of any language as its grammar or its pronunciation. This is
not an aspect of language that can successfully be taught, either in the
classroom or even in the soporific tedium of a language laboratory, but they
can be learned by a process of constant monologue by language-learners
themselves.
So there is a whole
gamut of (more or less) entertaining aspects of foreplay to be considered
before ever a student deigns to open their dictionary. It is a teasing game
that can last almost as long as the student desires or can endure the
tantalisation. Visualise the word, familiarise yourself with it, memorise it in
its context and chant it like some holy mantra. Turn it this way and that and,
only when you have explored every angle and experimented with every arcane
position, open that dictionary.
There are two
important effects of this teasing game. One is to securely lodge the word (or
phrase) in the memory, thus precluding the blank half of the page syndrome. The
other is to fundamentally alter one's relationship with the dictionary. One no
longer looks to it to make anything exact, but rather, quite straightforwardly,
to satisfy ones curiosity or to extend one's understanding of a word one
already knows. Instead of turning to the dictionary in expectation of some sort
of revelation, one turns to it expecting confirmation (on it's part) and
recognition (on one's own). Instead of putting one's own judgement in the dock
(with dictionary as judge), it is increasingly the dictionary itself one
evaluates critically, using ones own judgement and understanding as the guide.
This in turn
generates another enjoyable game - correcting the dictionary. It is remarkable
how often even the best dictionary will turn out to be wrong or misleading or wholly
inadequate. This is not as harsh a criticism as it sounds; it is simply a
tribute to the unpredictable versatility of language (and the human beings who
make use of it). Take the French word acharnement. This appears quite
commonly in a context where, if pushed to translate the word into English, I
would render it as sour grapes. By the same token, acharnement
would be the obvious French translation of that English phrase at least in some
of its occurrences. This I knew perfectly well and had felt no need even to put
the English equivalent into words until, that is, out of curiosity, I opened my
dictionary (French-English).
The dictionary in
question was certainly not at a loss for words where acharnement was
concerned. It gave: - rage, rabidness, fury, deprecation, fieriness,
animosity, savageness (sic), obstinacy, inveteracy, persistence,
tenacity, passion. Impressive, eh? All of which things, what is more, I
have no doubt acharnement can and does mean in different contexts. None
of which, however, it meant in this context; none of which expresses remotely
the notion of sour grapes; none of which would have produced an
adequate translation. Not of course that sour grapes would have
been exact but that, as we have seen, is in the nature of language and
translation. It is further complicated by the fact that both the French use of acharnement
and the English use of sour grapes are often rather slipshod with
respect to the basic or original sense of the word (in the former case) and the
phrase (in the latter), but this too is in the nature of language, its usage
and its development.
A similar story with
the phrase la raison sociale. I knew it and I understood it but, as with
skeparni, I could not for the life of me think of an English equivalent
and in the end curiosity took me to the dictionary. The dictionary gave style
of firm. Now it may be that there some English people to whom the phrase
style of firm is familiar, but I have led a sheltered life and it certainly is
not known to me. I could understand it all right but only because I knew the
French. La raison sociale is the manner or style in which a firm chooses
to describe itself - Snodgrass and Woodford, or Woodford and Snodgrass or
Snodgrass Woodford Associates and so on. Obviously, in a context, I would have
no difficulty in understanding style of firm to mean this (although house
style, which admittedly has a slightly different meaning, might have
been more easily comprehensible) but, of itself it meant nothing to me.
Sometimes a
dictionary can be right and wrong at the same time. Take the word (French once
more) frimousse. Again I had understood the word in its context and
opened my dictionary - as one should - with a very good idea of what it would
have to say. I was not on this occasion entirely prepared for its specificity. Frimousse,
according to my dictionary was a colloquial word for the face of a young girl.
The last part of the definition was admittedly placed in parentheses but was
not otherwise qualified in any way. The joke on this occasion was, the context
in which I had actually just read the word was (equally specifically) the
description of a face of an old woman.
Factually therefore
the dictionary was quite wrong, but, in another sense, it was quite right. The
novelist whose work I was reading is rather a specialist in teasing out the
youthfulness of her older characters and I had, as it happens, even said as
much in a review I had written. In this case the subject was a woman-tramp
feeding pigeons, transfigured (saint-like) in the moment that the birds
alighted on her head, arms and shoulders. The novelist in question is a
wordsmith of the highest order and frimousse was the perfect word to
describe the woman's features. The dynamic tension between the factual wrongness
and the symbolic rightness of the dictionary-definition, as well as giving me
great pleasure, undoubtedly contributed towards my understanding of the word.
So much then for the
Greek aspect of dictionary-use, the joys of opening the dictionary. When we
turn to the English aspect - consultation of the dictionary - we are involved
in matters that, while serious, are no less playful. Here the language-learner
might best be compared (with all due deference - none in point of fact - to
political correctness) to a butterfly-hunter or some similar collector of
specimens. Words (the specimens) become the fascinating subjects for a
life-time's study. The language-learner should never blanch at playing the
amateur philologist, the hunter after meaning in the world of words. This is
moreover an area of language where adults, so often considered the poor
relation to children in language-learning terms, can bring to bear
sophisticated skills and can derive a real advantage from their knowledge and
experience.
Here dictionaries can
be seen at their best and here too one could really wish for dictionaries that
were more consultable, more like encyclopaedias. Here too one would always
prefer a dictionary that gives historical usage and etymology (often lacking in
dictionaries specifically designed for language-learners). For French, I would
myself like a dictionary that distinguished whether words were of northern or
southern origin; in a country as large as
One need not,
however, be as obsessive as I am to derive very straightforward benefits from
consultative dictionary-use. In the case of the French the words morve
and pépie, for instance, I was well aware that they described diseases
that afflicted poultry. I was equally certain that knowledge of the English
equivalents would advance my knowledge not one jot (they are, as far as I can
recall, glanders and roup respectively). Nevertheless the
dictionary, by revealing to me other (slightly slangy) meanings or usages of
the words, was extremely helpful. I rather doubt my mind, not prone to ruminate
on sickly chickens, would have retained the words without this aid. As it is,
the words morve and pépie have considerably more meaning to me,
even if I still don't know what effects they have upon the poor wretched birds,
than the English words glanders and roup which, if it were not
for this essay, I would have forgotten again by now.
Awareness of
difference, emotional commitment, the passions of the chase - these are for me
the elements that constitute the fun of language-learning. These are the
elements that ensure that the process is one of significant addition to
ourselves, or genuine enrichment of our understanding and our experience.
Without them, no amount of classroom jollity or hours of intensive study can
make the experience anything but a chore and a disappointment and, in certain
cases, even a total waste of time.
The distinctions of
meaning that different languages can deploy (and into which we are inducted
when we learn those languages) can be of a remarkable beauty and importance. The
distinction, for instance, made in Spanish between the verbs ser and estar
is for me of such a logical elegance that I have difficulty in understanding
why it has not been adopted by all the other languages of the world. Broadly
speaking, the distinction made is between something that is in permanence (soy
hombre- I am a man) and that is only as a temporary state of affairs (estoy
aquí- I am here). I was so charmed, philosophically, by this distinction
when I first encountered it that I immediately sat down to invent a language
that had (as far as I remember) twenty ways of expressing the verb to be in all
the various possible gradations between the essential and the ephemeral.
This is not the place
to talk politics, but sometimes, I believe, the word may indeed be the father
to the thought, perhaps even to the fact. As we learn via language from each
others experience of the world, discovering things not known in our own philosophy,
we contribute in a small way to extending the possibilities of human knowledge
and understanding. Somewhere in this world of ours, spoken and yet to be
spoken, are the words and the ideas to create new worlds and fashion new
societies. We have only to go out and find them.
Copyright David Bond 1999
The Editor welcomes your comments or contributions to discussion of this
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