After a few days of unseasonably hot weather (although I’m not sure what “unseasonable” means anymore), we had a wonderful day of cooldown, bright clear skies and a slight breeze. Words that my mother used to describe this kind of dramatic change came into my head: “Le bon dieu a balayé le ciel.” The good lord has swept the sky. She was not religious, nor was she French, despite the language she used to describe this meteorological phenomenon. Rather, she was Austrian, and had grown up with many languages. She was a talented linguist, continuing to learn languages into old age. German was her mother tongue, but she knew some Czech from her early childhood in that country, French from a governess and from classrooms, English from her time spent studying in London, a smattering of Italian, and, finally, Spanish toward the end of her life. When she married my Hungarian father in 1931, she moved to Budapest and focused on mastering Hungarian, a non-Indo-European language of legendary difficulty. When our family came to the U.S. in 1939, she was determined not to lose her hard-won fluency, and so usually spoke Hungarian with our father (though not with my sister and me, so we would not grow up with accents).
I have inherited some of her interest in languages, though neither her skill nor tenacity. I have always enjoyed learning new ways of speaking, and because I have a pretty good ear, I can often imitate the sounds others make. I became quite adept at French in my earlier years, and was later able to make my way in Italian during a sabbatical year in Rome. I can manage with “kitchen” German, since that was the other foreign language spoken in my house. An Ecuadorian daughter-in-law has pushed me in the direction of some Spanish. Singing in choruses has presented the opportunity of making use of some of these sounds. Mainly I enjoy the process of learning, so I have spent quite a lot of time in language classrooms, formal and informal.
After the election of our current president, with his hateful rhetoric toward immigrants of all sorts, I decided I wanted to do something positive for new Americans, among whom my family had once numbered. And so, instead of pursuing new ways of speaking for myself, I am helping someone else learn English through the English as a Second Language program at the Jones Library. Ours is a fiendishly difficult language because of its irregular spelling and pronounciation, and because of the richness of its idioms and vocabulary. Of course I am learning myself as I go. Working with an eager, bright and brave Nepalese woman, I am discovering how hard the process is. She has been in the country for several years, is a hardworking and productive person with a functional, if limited and ungrammatical grasp of English. She has work cleaning dorms at UMass; she uses public transportation here and to visit a son in New York City; she shops and cooks for her family; she reads and writes both in English and in her own languages – Nepali and Hindi.
But she wants to be able to speak and understand better. In addition to our twice-weekly sessions, she has joined one of the ESL program’s conversation circles. She is a determined person, and I am full of admiration. She and I go over points of grammar, verb tenses, idiomatic expressions. She is keeping a list of new vocabulary words, and I sometimes ask her to write sentences using them. We read books together, both fiction and nonfiction. We look at maps, and I often try to define words for her. She asked the other day: “What is ‘seems.’ ” The challenge was to define that word without using bigger, more complex ones. I fell back on giving her examples. I’m still trying to think of a better way to do it.
She and her husband have applied for their green cards. They will, I’m sure, make wonderful citizens when the time and their language skills are right. Perhaps it will be in time to vote this president out – a man with a dangerously limited vocabulary.
Marietta Pritchard can be reached at mppritchard@comcast.net