Dabbling in Languages
I’ve always been a linguistics geek, dating back at least to Grade 8 when I did a presentation on the language family tree (none of my classmates found it as fascinating as I did). I still get lost in Wikipedia learning new things. (Did you know that Romanian has a lot of Slavic in it, despite being a Romance language like French, Spanish, and Italian?) And don’t even get me started on writing systems. One of the things I found most fascinating about India, when I visited ten (!) years ago, was that every state had not only its own language (many unrelated to the others) but its own alphabet. Northern India uses Hindi as its common tongue, and southern India uses Tamil, but if they’re going to speak north to south, they resort to English. Which is why there’s more English on the signs than you might expect, even in non-tourist areas… Unfortunately for me, I’m not a polyglot (fluently multilingual), though not for lack of trying. I’ve learned tiny bits and pieces of Klingon (really!), Spanish, ASL, and Hindi. Like most Canadians, I studied French in school and came away with enough knowledge to read food packaging (and occasionally other things) but not to converse fluently — especially in Quebec. I also studied Norwegian in university, enough for me to get by quite well on my first solo trip overseas, visiting extended family in Norway. That meant I could more or less understand written Danish and spoken Swedish,…