Egészségetekre

Pronunciation, to me, has been a source of fascination, intimidation, and triumph. As a child I often pronounced words in many different ways, unwittingly so, and to this day I think about how many ways I pronounced "thanks" and made a fool of myself in front of my third grade classmates. It's much easier for me to reflect on that now that my world of language has been so greatly amplified via time spent overseas and multilingual friends. Now that I live in Washington, D.C., I hear a variety of languages but often I can identify them. I'm perplexed by this; I probably give myself too much credit and am grateful for having watched so many European films. Yet, I wonder if I only notice the languages because I have heard them before. The sounds of Swedish are not so uncommon to me now that I have begun to admire the films of Ingmar Bergman. In fact, I am pretty sure that I had swedes standing next to me on a Metro platform the other day; it's not because I understood at all what they were saying, but rather because the sounds and the rhythm of the language sounded weirdly familiar. And I heard the couple say jo (djo:) - the Swedish word for "yes".

However, this recognition of other languages and my ability to produce the same sounds has reaffirmed my above mentioned perspective on pronunciation. It seems that the biggest reason that a lot of people I meet don't speak foreign languages is not because they aren't interested, but because pronouncing words is a source of anxiety. The loss of naïveté is a rough moment and in the past year I've had a couple of instances in which I have realized that, plainly, I don't pronounce things as well as I think I do. This is not a bad thing. I know that French is a very hard language to speak and of the little French I speak, I thought that I was able to pronounce things decently well. After speaking French with two Frenchmen and having them correct my pronunciation errors, I realized that it's difficult to judge one's own pronunciation. Granted, I am critical of myself because I hold my pronunciation to high standards. Still, it was strange to realize that there is an interesting relationship between how I think I am pronouncing something and how it actually sounds to someone else. Case in point: Ikea.

When exiting Ikea it is hard to miss the sign that explains how to say "good-bye" in Swedish: hej då. There's a phonetic spelling on the wall that explains that the 'e' in hej is pronounced with a long a sound; yet, for the longest time I thought I was saying it correctly by saying something along the lines of haa dau. I didn't realize that I had been pronouncing it wrong until recently, when a friend explained how to pronounce it. It occurred to me that I had fooled myself. The phonetic spelling on the wall reads ha: do: (or, better put, haa dau) and intends for English speakers to recognize that the way to pronounce the Swedish word hej closely mirrors the pronunciation of the English word hay (perhaps also hey). Thus, it incorporates a long (English) a sound.

To avoid completely losing my audience, I'll digress for a moment.

The Spanish language has taught me a lot about vowel pronunciation. In Spanish, a phonetic language, the pronunciation of every word can be inferred by simply pronouncing every letter of the word. That said, the sounds of letters don't change unless they are accented, in which case the sounds are made longer. I learned how to pronounce the vowels a, e, and i by teaching myself that the pronunciation of the Spanish a mirrors the way English speakers say the a in law. The Spanish e sounds very much like the a in bay, and the i sounds like the e in me. Or, rather, the pronunciation English vowel a has been split into two vowels in Spanish, a and e, and the pronunciation of the English e is the how one pronounces the Spanish i.

In Spanish:
a = a in 'law'
e = a in 'bay'
i = e in 'me'

To return to the explanation of why I had been pronouncing hej då wrong, I realized that I had been pronouncing this foreign word by unconsciously pronouncing the vowels as if I were speaking Spanish. When I saw the phonetic spelling ha: do: I said the a based upon how I would say the a in Spanish and thought that I was correct. I had been told previously that I pronounce most words in other languages with as if I were speaking Spanish, but it was really funny to me to finally realize how true that was. It has taught me a lot about how we judge our pronunciation; it deviates from our ability to recognize what we have convinced ourselves is right and that which actually is.

Lo que fuera

Learning a foreign language likely counts as one of the cooler experiences that I have had. I remember having to write weekly essays in our "diarios" for my high school spanish class and in them trying to use all of the different locutions we had learned in class. Thinking back on the last two years of my high school spanish experience, learning Spanish was like building a mountain out of legos; the base was large and extensive, representing the importance of a good foundation, and gradually with each new verb tense or set of vocabulary the mountain crept upward into the clouds. For the sake of posterity, I can't say that I will ever reach the the peak of my spanish language mountain, but each part of the language that I learn (or relearn) always seems essential.

I've always believed that by learning a foreign language I have begun to understand the English language better. I think I should probably better acquaint myself with the proper terminology, but perhaps I have embraced my indolence because there's a certain pleasure in referring to the rules of spanish relative pronouns when speaking English. Using them a lot in English (where they are not as crucial as in Spanish) is almost directly related to my understanding of their usage in Spanish. Yet it's interesting that even though English grammar is classically Latin-based, the language has grown in such a way that English speakers can effectively communicate well even without using perfect grammar when they speak.

I recall hearing about the subjunctive well before learning about it in Spanish class. I heard from people in more advanced classes that it was pretty difficult and hard to understand, but I didn't really know what they were talking about until I learned it in class myself. I never knew that besides tenses, there were verb moods; perhaps the best thing for me to hear when I first learned about the subjunctive was that we don't really use it in English (well, I guess we do, but it's super simplified). In Spanish, verb conjugation is crucial because using subject pronouns isn't mandatory. It is to say, in English we have to use subject pronouns with verbs or who the speaker is would be unclear. The sentence I went to the store wouldn't make sense without the subject pronoun I (although colloquially, anything goes). Removing the subject pronoun I, the sentence reads went to the store. In English we have to use subject pronouns because often there aren't many verb inflections (I went; you went, he/she/it went, we went, you all went, they went). However, Spanish verbs have many inflections, such that the subject pronoun can be dropped because verb endings are different for each subject pronoun.

To show the variety of Spanish verb inflection, a basic example is the present indicative conjugation of the Spanish verb ver (to see):

yo veo [I see]
tú ves [you see]
él/ella ve [he/she sees]
nosotros vemos [we see]
vosotros veís [you all see]
ellos/ellas ven [they see]

But to avoid digressing further into pronouns, I'll say why I started writing this today: I think the subjunctive is cool. What I also think is cool is that in English we don't conjugate verbs any differently when expressing emotion, preference, desire, etc. However, in Spanish expressing emotion, preference, or desire calls for the use of the subjunctive. On my way to the library I was listening to the Silver Jews song "Death of an Heir of Sorrows" in which David Berman says "mostly I wish, I wish I was with you". I find it funny that he could also have said "I wish I were with you" and nothing would have changed at all as far as the meaning or the grammar. Yet, grammatically speaking, were is the only evidence of the past subjunctive left in English.

Studying the loss of the subjunctive in English would really require a lot of research if I were to want to discuss it much more. But, in the meantime, perhaps take a moment to think about how many times you hear was instead of were, and vice-versa, in conversation. Also, do you find that in certain instances you would use was instead of were, just as David Berman did? According to Dr Goodword's Language Blog, the past subjunctive is in its death throes, yet a lot of idiomatic expressions use were (e.g. as it were, if I were you) which leads me to wonder: are idioms the most effective means of preserving language?