Languages had always been a source of fascination to me, and having now settled into my new home and established the website, I could really begin to spend more time working on them. The first language I studied after Lithuanian was Spanish. My interest in it was piqued by a conversation that I had with Neil’s mother, in which she talked of holidays the family had taken in parts of Spain and mentioned that she had been learning the language over many years. I asked if she had any books that I could borrow and she found an old “Teach Yourself” title for me to take away and read. The following week we visited Neil’s parents again and I returned the book to his mother. When I began conversing with her comfortably in Spanish she couldn’t believe it.
I used a similar method to learn Romanian, which I began after my friend Ian asked me for advice on learning the language to help him communicate with his new wife. I supplemented my reading with an online Romanian language edition of the Saint-Exupéry classic Micul Print (The Little Prince).
My latest language-learning project is Welsh, a beautiful and distinctive language that I first heard and saw during a holiday with Neil to the small North Wales town of Blaenau Ffestiniog, in the mountains of Snowdonia. Many of the people in this area speak Welsh as their first language (overall, one in five people in Wales speak Welsh) and it was the only language that I heard spoken in many of the places that we visited.
Welsh has a number of features that are unique among all the languages I have studied. Words beginning with certain consonants sometimes change their first letters, depending on how they are used in a sentence. For example, the word ceg (mouth) changes to dy geg (your mouth), fy ngheg (my mouth) and ei cheg (her mouth). The word order in Welsh is also unusual, with the verb coming first in a sentence: Aeth Neil i Aberystwyth (Neil went to Aberystwyth, literally, “went Neil to Aberystwyth”). I’ve found the hardest part of learning Welsh is the pronunciation of certain sounds, such as ll, which is rather like putting your tongue in position to say the letter l and then trying to say the letter s.
An invaluable resource for my Welsh study has been the Welsh language television channel S4C, which I’m able to watch through my satellite receiver. Programs are varied and interesting, from the soap opera Pobol y Cwm (People of the Valley) to the newyddion (news). It has proven an excellent way for me to improve my comprehension and pronunciation skills.
• • •
The relationship I have with a language is quite an aesthetic one, with certain words and combinations of words being particularly beautiful and stimulating to me. Sometimes I will read a sentence in a book over and over again, because of the way the words make me feel inside. Nouns are my favorite type of words, because they are the easiest for me to visualize.
When I’m learning a language there are a number of things that I consider essential materials to begin with. The first is a good-size dictionary. I also need a variety of texts in the language, such as children’s books, stories and newspaper articles, because I prefer to learn words within whole sentences to help give me a feeling for how the language works. I have an excellent visual memory, and when I read a word or phrase or sentence written down, I close my eyes, see it in my head and can remember it perfectly. My memory is much poorer if I can only hear a word or phrase and not see it. Conversing with native speakers helps to improve accent, pronunciation and comprehension. I do not mind making mistakes but try very hard not to repeat them once they have been pointed out to me.
Each language can act as a stepping-stone to another. The more languages a person knows, the easier it becomes to learn a new one. This is because languages are somewhat like people: they belong to “families” of related languages, which share certain similarities. Languages also influence and borrow from each other. Even before I began to study Romanian, I could understand perfectly the sentence: Unde este un creion galben? (Where is a yellow pencil?) because of the similarities to Spanish: dónde está (where is?), French: un crayon (a pencil) and German: gelb (yellow).
There are also relationships between words inside each language which are unique to it. I am able to see these connections easily. For example, Icelandic has borð (table) and borða (to eat), French has jour (day) and journal (newspaper), and German has Hand (hand) and Handel (a trade or craft).
Learning compound words can help to enrich vocabulary and provide useful examples of a language’s grammar. The German word for vocabulary, as an example, is Wortschatz, combining the words Wort (word) and Schatz (treasure). In Finnish, compounds can be formed that are equivalent to many separate words in other languages. For example, in the sentence: Hän oli talossanikin (He was in my house too) the last word, talossanikin, is composed of four separate parts: talo (house) + -ssa (in) + -ni (my) and -kin (too).
I find some aspects of language much more difficult than others. Abstract words are much harder for me to understand and I have a picture in my head for each that helps me to make sense of the meaning. For example, the word complexity makes me think of a braid or plait of hair—the many different strands woven together into a complete whole. When I read or hear that something is complex I imagine it as having lots of different parts that need tying together to arrive at an answer. Similarly, the word triumph creates a picture in my mind of a large golden trophy, such as the ones won in big sporting events. If I hear about a politician’s “election triumph” I imagine the politician holding a trophy over his head, like the winning team manager at an FA cup final. For the word fragile I think of glass; I picture a “fragile peace” as a glass dove. The image I see helps me to understand that the peace might be shattered at any moment.
Certain sentence structures can be particularly hard for me to analyze, such as: “He is not inexperienced in such things,” where the two negatives (not and in-) cancel each other out. It is much better if people just say: “He is experienced in such things.” Another example is when a sentence begins: “Don’t you . . . ?” as in, “Don’t you think we should go now?” or “Don’t you want ice cream?” Then I become very confused and my head starts to hurt because the questioner is not being clear if he means: “Do you want an ice cream?” or “Is it correct that you don’t want an ice cream?” and it’s possible to answer both questions with a yes, and I don’t like it when the same word can mean two completely different things.
As a child, I found idiomatic language particularly confusing. Describing someone as “under the weather” was very strange to me because, I thought, isn’t everyone under the weather? Another common saying that puzzled me was when my parents might excuse one of my brothers’ grumpy behavior by saying: “He must have got out of the wrong side of bed this morning.” “Why didn’t he get out of the right side of the bed?” I asked.
• • •
In recent years, scientists have become more and more interested in studying the kind of synesthetic experiences in language that I have, in order to find out more about the phenomenon and its origins. Professor Vilayanur Ramachandran, of California’s Center for Brain Studies in San Diego, has researched synesthesia for more than a decade and believes there may be a link between the neurological basis for synesthetic experiences and the linguistic creativity of poets and writers. According to one study, the condition is seven times as common in creative people as in the general population.
In particular, Professor Ramachandran points to the facility with which creative writers think up and use metaphors—a form of language where a comparison is made between two seemingly unrelated things—and compares this to the linking of seemingly unrelated entities such as colors and words, or shapes and numbers in synesthesia.
Some scientists believe that high-level concepts (including numbers and language) are anchored in specific regions of the brain and that synesthesia might be caused by excess communication between these different regions. Such “crossed wiring” could lead to both synesthesia and to a propensity toward the making of links between seemingly unrelated ideas.
William Shakespeare, for example, was a frequent user of metaphors, many of which are synesthetic, involving a link to the senses. For example, in Hamlet, Shakespeare has the character Francisco say that it is “bitter cold”—combining the sensation of coldness with the taste of bitterness. In another play, The Tempest, Shakespeare goes beyond metaphors involving only the senses and links concrete experiences with more abstract ideas. His expression: “This music crept by me upon the waters,” connects the abstract “music” with a creeping action. The reader is able to imagine music—something normally very difficult to create a mental picture of—as a moving animal.
But it isn’t just very creative people who make these connections. Everyone does; we all rely on synesthesia to a greater or lesser degree. In their book Metaphors We Live By, language scientist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson argue that metaphors are not arbitrary constructions but follow particular patterns, which in turn structure thought. They give as examples expressions that indicate the links: “happy” = “up” and “sad” = “down”: I’m feeling up, my spirits rose. I’m feeling down, he’s really low. Or “more” = “up,” and “less” = “down”: My income rose last year. The number of errors is very low. Lakoff and Johnson suggest that many of these patterns emerge from our everyday physical experiences; for example, the link “sad” = “down” may be related to the way that posture droops when a person is feeling sad. Similarly, the link “more” = “up” may come from the fact that when you add an object or substance to a container or pile, the level goes up.
Other language scientists have noted that some of the structural features of many words not normally associated with any function, such as initial phoneme groups, have a noticeable effect on the reader/listener. For example, for sl-there is: slack, slouch, sludge, slime, slosh, sloppy, slug, slut, slang, sly, slow, sloth, sleepy, slipshod, slovenly, slum, slobber, slur, slog . . . where all these words have negative connotations and some are particularly pejorative.
The idea that certain types of sounds “fit” particular objects better than others goes back to the time of the Ancient Greeks. An obvious illustration of this is onomatopoeia, a type of word that sounds like the thing it is describing (fizz, whack, bang, et cetera). In a test carried out by researchers in the 1960s, artificial words were constructed using particular letters and combinations of letters thought to link to positive or negative feelings. After hearing the invented words, the subjects were asked to match English words for pleasant or unpleasant emotions with one or other of two invented words. The appropriate matches were made significantly more often than would be expected by chance.
• • •
This type of latent language synesthesia in virtually everyone can also be seen in an experiment originally carried out in the 1920s, which investigated a possible link between visual patterns and the sound structures of words. The researcher, Wolfgang Köhler, a German-American psychologist, used two arbitrary visual shapes, one smooth and rounded and the other sharp and angular, and invented two words for them: takete and maluma. Subjects were asked to say which of the shapes was the takete and which the maluma. The overwhelming majority assigned maluma to the rounded shape and takete to the angular one. Recently, Professor Ramachandran’s team has replicated the results of this test using the invented words bouba and kiki. Ninety-five percent of those asked thought the rounded shape was a bouba and the pointed shape a kiki. Ramachandran suggests the reason is that the sharp changes in the visual direction of the lines in the kiki figure mimics the sharp phonemic inflections of the word’s sound, as well as the sharp inflection of the tongue on the palate.
Professor Ramachandran believes this synesthetic connection between our hearing and seeing senses was an important first step towards the creation of words in early humans. According to this theory, our ancestors would have begun to talk by using sounds that evoked the object they wanted to describe. He also points out that lip and tongue movements may be synesthetically linked to objects and events they refer to. For example, words referring to something small often involve making a synesthetic small i sound with the lips and a narrowing of the vocal tracts: little, teeny, petite, whereas the opposite is true of words denoting something large or enormous. If the theory is right, then language emerged from the vast array of synesthetic connections in the human brain.
An interesting question that language researchers are beginning to explore is whether or not my ability with languages extends to other forms of language, such as sign language. In 2005 I participated in an experiment carried out by Gary Morgan of the Department of Language and Communication Science at City University in London. Dr. Morgan is a researcher in British Sign Language (BSL), the first or preferred language of around 70,000 deaf or hearing-impaired people in the U.K. Many thousands of hearing people also use BSL, which is a visual/spatial language that uses the hands, body, face and head to convey meaning. The test was designed to see whether I could learn signed words as quickly and easily as written or spoken ones. A signer sat opposite me at a table and produced a total of sixty-eight different signs. After each I was shown a page with four illustrations and asked to indicate the one that I thought best described the sign I had just been shown. The signed words varied in meaning from the relatively simple “hat” to more difficult signs for concepts such as restaurant and agriculture. I was able to correctly identify two-thirds of the signs from the possible choices presented to me and it was concluded that I showed “very good sign aptitude.” The researchers now plan to teach me British Sign Language using one-to-one tuition with a signer to compare my acquisition of the language with that of the others I know.
Esperanto is another very different kind of language. I first read the word Esperanto many years ago in a library book, but it was only following the purchase of my first computer that I discovered any more about it. What drew me most of all to the language was the fact that its vocabulary is a blend of that of various languages, mostly European, while its grammar is consistent and logical. I very quickly esperantiĝis (became a speaker of Esperanto) from reading various online texts in the language and from writing to other Esperanto speakers from all over the world.
The Esperanto language (the word means “one who hopes”) was the creation of Dr. Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof, an eye doctor from Bialystok in what is now Poland. He first published his language in 1887 and the first world congress of Esperanto speakers was held in France in 1905. Zamenhof’s goal was to create an easy-to-learn universal second language to help foster international understanding. Today, there are estimated to be somewhere between 100,000 and over 1 million Esperanto speakers worldwide.
Esperanto’s grammar has several interesting features. The first is that the different parts of speech are marked by their own suffixes: all nouns end in -o, all adjectives in -a, adverbs in -e, infinitives in -i. For example: the word rapido would translate as “speed,” rapida as “quick,” rapide as “quickly,” and rapidi as “to hurry.”
Verbs do not change for the subject, as do most natural languages: mi estas (I am), vi estas (you are), li estas (he is), sî estas (she is), ni estas (we are), ili estas (they are). Past-tense verbs always end in -is (mi estis = I was), future tense in -os (vi estos = you will be).
Many of Esperanto’s words are formed using affixes. The ending -ejo, for example, signifies “place,” as in the words lernejo (school), infanejo (nursery) and trinkejo (bar). Another commonly used suffix is -ilo, meaning “tool or instrument,” and is found in words such as: hakilo (axe), flugilo (wing) and serĉilo (search engine).
Perhaps the most famous feature of Esperanto’s word-building grammar is its use of the prefix mal- to indicate the opposite of something. This feature is used extensively throughout the language: bona (good) / malbona (evil), riĉa (rich) / malriĉa (poor), granda (big) / malgranda (small), dekstra (right) / maldekstra (left), fermi (to close) / malfermi (to open), amiko (friend) / malamiko (enemy).
The creation and use of idiomatic speech is generally discouraged in Esperanto, however, some examples of “Esperanto slang” do exist. A new learner of the language might be called a freŝbakito from the German frischgebacken (fresh-baked), where the standard Esperanto word would be a komencanto (beginner). An example of an Esperanto euphemism is la necesejo (the necessary place) for a bathroom/WC.
Tony Attwood, a clinical psychologist and author of Asperger’s Syndrome: A Guide for Parents and Professionals, notes that some individuals with Asperger’s have the ability to create their own form of language (known as neologisms). He gives as examples a girl’s description of her ankle as “the wrist of my foot” and ice cubes as “water bones.” Dr. Attwood describes this ability as “one of the endearing and genuinely creative aspects of Asperger’s syndrome.” After the birth of my twin sisters I created the word biplets to describe them, knowing that a bicycle had two wheels and a tricycle three, and that the name for three babies born at one time was triplets. Another of my childhood neologisms was the word pramble, meaning to go out for a long walk (a ramble) with a baby in a pram, something my parents did frequently.
For several years as a child I tinkered with the idea of creating my own language, as a way of relieving the loneliness I often felt and to draw on the delight I experienced in words. Sometimes, when I felt a particularly strong emotion or experienced something that I felt was especially beautiful, a new word would spontaneously form in my mind to express it and I had no idea where those words came from. In contrast, I often found the language of my peers jarring and confusing. I was regularly teased for speaking in long, careful and overly formal sentences. When I tried to use one of my own created words in conversation, to try to express something of what I was feeling or experiencing inside, it was rarely understood. My parents discouraged me from “talking in a funny way.”
I continued to dream that one day I would speak a language that was my own, that I would not be teased or reprimanded for using and that would express something of what it felt to be me. After leaving school I found I had the time to begin seriously pursuing such an idea. I wrote words down on pieces of paper as they occurred to me and experimented with different methods of pronunciation and sentence building. I called my language Mänti (pronounced “man-tee”) from the Finnish word mänty meaning pine tree. Pines are native to most of the Northern Hemisphere and are particularly numerous across parts of Scandinavia and the Baltic region. Many of the words used in Mänti are of Scandinavian and Baltic origin. There is another reason for the choice of name: pine trees often grow together in large numbers and symbolize friendship and community.
Mänti is a work in progress with a developed grammar and a vocabulary of more than a thousand words. It has attracted the interest of several language researchers who believe it may help shed more light on my linguistic abilities.
One of the things I like most about playing with language is the creation of new words and ideas. I try in Mänti to make the words reflect the relationships between different things: hamma (tooth) and hemme (ant—a biting insect) and rât (wire) and râtio (radio), for example. Some words have multiple, related meanings; the word puhu, for example, can mean “wind,” “breath” or “spirit.”
Compound words are common in Mänti: puhekello (telephone, literally “speak-bell”), ilmalāv (airplane, literally “airship”), tontöö (music, literally “tone art”) and râtalā (parliament, literally “discussion place”) are various examples.
Abstracts are handled in a number of ways in Mänti. One is to create a compound to describe it: “tardiness” or “lateness” is translated as kellokült (literally “clock-debt”). Another method is to use word pairs as can be found in Finno-Ugrian languages such as Estonian. For a word such as dairy (produce), the Mänti equivalent is pîmat kermat (milks creams) and for footwear there is koet saapat (shoes boots).
Although Mänti is very different from English, there are quite a lot of words that are recognizable to English speakers: nekka (neck), kuppi (cup), purssi (wallet), nööt (night) and pêpi (baby) are examples.
Mänti exists as a tangible, communicable expression of my inner world. Each word, shining with color and texture, to me is like a piece of art. When I think or speak in Mänti, I feel as though I am painting in words.