Read Online Flirting With French by William Alexander - Free Book Online Page A

cannot be distinguished. In other words, after just ninety-six hours out of the womb (and most likely from birth, but there’s a limit to how early you can rip a newborn from its mother’s breast for a linguistics experiment), * babies have already picked up the cadence, the rhythm, and the characteristic sounds of the language.
    And languages do differ greatly in this respect. You can easily tell when someone is using French or Italian even if you don’t speak a word of it yourself. Italian draaaws out and almost sings its syllables, as if every sentence is from an operetta, and is filled with
i
and
o
sounds, while French uses hardly any variation in intonation at all and is distinguished by its nasal vowels. Scandinavian languages feature hard
g
sounds that emanate from the nether regions of the throat. In fact, Belgian scientists have determined that newborn babies cry in their mother’s tongue, meaning, for example, that French babies cry with a characteristically French rising inflection.
    This ability of babies to distinguish and learn the sounds of their native language comes at a price, though, and one that gets to the root of a problem that vexes many adult foreign language learners: our inability to reproduce some of the phonemes (a phoneme is the smallest distinct unit of sound) of that language. We all know the difficulty, for example, that native speakers of Asian languages have with the English letters
r
and
l
—the “flied lice” problem of bad Chinese-waiter jokes.
    What is less widely known is that the core problem isn’t that they can’t pronounce these two letters; they can’t pronounce the letters because they can’t even aurally
distinguish
between them. To the ear of someone who has grown up surrounded by the Chinese or Japanese languages, which don’t employ the
r
and
l
phonemes,
rice
and
lice
actually sound the same.
    Infant brains, unlike adult brains, can distinguish all the thousands of different sounds that make up human speech, but that skill is short lived. Researchers have found that seven-month-old Japanese babies can easily discriminate the sound of an English
r
from an English
l
. Yet by the age of ten months, these same babies can no longer tell the difference. This makes me feel a little better about the fact that I cannot master the French
u
sound as in
tu
or the guttural
r
in
rouge
because we don’t have anything quite like either in the English language.
    You wouldn’t know that from watching this Rosetta Stone infomercial, where everyone seems to speak foreign languages perfectly with no effort. I turn it off and eventually fall asleep, which is the signal for the phlebotomist to show up to draw blood again, for only the seventh time today. I don’t mind too much, but my poor veins shrivel up and hide whenever Miss Transylvania walks in the door. Well, the veins had better get used to it. I’ve been told I’m going to be here awhile, at least several days, perhaps as much as a very long week, or until my heart returns to a normal rhythm.
    “Courage,” the cardiologist says to me, patting me on the shoulder as he leaves the room during morning rounds. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard an American other than Dan Rather use that valediction. ** I smile to myself, recalling the French taxi driver who’d good-naturedly wished us “
Courage!
” when we told him we were from the States.
Courage,
one of those words the French use a lot (pronounced “
cour-AHJ
,” the accent on the second syllable), and in different ways, is from the French
cœur,
or “heart.” Thus
courage
means literally to “have heart,” a connection which, sadly, is totally lost in English. However, many of the heart-related idioms we have in our language—“heartbroken,” “bighearted,” “learn by heart,” “lionhearted”—have surprisingly close French equivalents, more so than with most idioms, which tend to be localized. The heart, it seems, is a special case. Mine in