Learning Italian
Feb. 4th, 2013 09:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fiat_knoxThe past few weeks have behooven me to begin the arduous task of learning a language I haven't learned before. In this case, Italian.
When I began learning languages, the only tongues I knew were English and Welsh. Here and there, I learned of other languages - but only a word here and there. The French word for thirteen, treize; the Russian for goodbye, До свидания. Dad being Irish, I even heard póg mo thóin (kiss my arse) once in a while, usually while he was driving and some dyn twp anghymwys cut him up in the road.
Unfortunately, it took years for me to get to a school where they would actually begin teaching languages - and the first languages I began learning, painfully and slowly, were French and Latin.
And I never learned that much either - language classes were a lot of excruciatingly slow dictation, the teachers droning on and on and expecting us to just copy the words down. Those of you who had to go through a British language class will know the torment well - language labs, sitting there in a booth while some monotone voice droned at us, having to memorise endless tables of nouns and verbs without context, crap like that.
And then the exams - the oral, aural and written exams, where you would be dropped in at the deep end with no rehearsals or practice.
At no time did anyone actually hint that this knowledge would be profitable, or even useful, to you; that one might, perhaps, develop deep friendships or enhance one's chances of landing work in adult life or - through learning of the geography and history of the nations whose languages one was learning - perhaps broaden one's mind beyond the usual level of narrow-minded parochial ignorance of the average Brit.
Fast forward, now, to the present day. And here am I, tolling away, using Google Translate if I haven't got a dictionary to hand, slowly and steadily picking up what bits and pieces of languages I can, and wondering what I could have done had I been given resources to learn the languages of my choice from a single-digit age; to learn French, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Greek, Latin, Welsh, Russian, Japanese and whatever else I could lay my hands on, from the earliest possible age - the age at which I'd just learned what speaking was about.
You can tell, by the quality of my posts, that I am most familiar with English, and my vocabulary in English is vast - but if I could spend the rest of my days learning all the above languages, doing nothing else, I would. I really would.
And so to Italian.
Every time I look at Italian, I am reminded that this is actually Latin; the language of the Roman Empire, allowed to mature for 1600 years. The only place where you see Latin, nowadays, is in the technical fields of science, medicine and law, and of course this blog uses the evolved standard Roman alphabet; but Italian is the language which is now spoken on the streets and in the fields of the same Italy on which Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, Cicero and Catullus once trod in their sandalled feet; the same country where Roman centurions, legionaries, equestrians, senators and consuls once lived and breathed, fucked and murdered and died.
Italian is their language, fermented for more than a millennium and a half and turned into this. The other Romance languages, and the loan words of English which came across here from France with the Norman invaders, are the nephews and nieces, and you can see the family resemblance; but Italian is the clear and undisputed son and heir.
And I really, really wish I'd been given the chance to learn this first.
When I began learning languages, the only tongues I knew were English and Welsh. Here and there, I learned of other languages - but only a word here and there. The French word for thirteen, treize; the Russian for goodbye, До свидания. Dad being Irish, I even heard póg mo thóin (kiss my arse) once in a while, usually while he was driving and some dyn twp anghymwys cut him up in the road.
Unfortunately, it took years for me to get to a school where they would actually begin teaching languages - and the first languages I began learning, painfully and slowly, were French and Latin.
And I never learned that much either - language classes were a lot of excruciatingly slow dictation, the teachers droning on and on and expecting us to just copy the words down. Those of you who had to go through a British language class will know the torment well - language labs, sitting there in a booth while some monotone voice droned at us, having to memorise endless tables of nouns and verbs without context, crap like that.
And then the exams - the oral, aural and written exams, where you would be dropped in at the deep end with no rehearsals or practice.
At no time did anyone actually hint that this knowledge would be profitable, or even useful, to you; that one might, perhaps, develop deep friendships or enhance one's chances of landing work in adult life or - through learning of the geography and history of the nations whose languages one was learning - perhaps broaden one's mind beyond the usual level of narrow-minded parochial ignorance of the average Brit.
Fast forward, now, to the present day. And here am I, tolling away, using Google Translate if I haven't got a dictionary to hand, slowly and steadily picking up what bits and pieces of languages I can, and wondering what I could have done had I been given resources to learn the languages of my choice from a single-digit age; to learn French, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Greek, Latin, Welsh, Russian, Japanese and whatever else I could lay my hands on, from the earliest possible age - the age at which I'd just learned what speaking was about.
You can tell, by the quality of my posts, that I am most familiar with English, and my vocabulary in English is vast - but if I could spend the rest of my days learning all the above languages, doing nothing else, I would. I really would.
And so to Italian.
Every time I look at Italian, I am reminded that this is actually Latin; the language of the Roman Empire, allowed to mature for 1600 years. The only place where you see Latin, nowadays, is in the technical fields of science, medicine and law, and of course this blog uses the evolved standard Roman alphabet; but Italian is the language which is now spoken on the streets and in the fields of the same Italy on which Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, Cicero and Catullus once trod in their sandalled feet; the same country where Roman centurions, legionaries, equestrians, senators and consuls once lived and breathed, fucked and murdered and died.
Italian is their language, fermented for more than a millennium and a half and turned into this. The other Romance languages, and the loan words of English which came across here from France with the Norman invaders, are the nephews and nieces, and you can see the family resemblance; but Italian is the clear and undisputed son and heir.
And I really, really wish I'd been given the chance to learn this first.
