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Authors: William Alexander
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particular is real special.
Courage
indeed. If I’m going to be imprisoned here for a week, shackled to intravenous drips and monitors, I’d best stop whining and make use of the time. After all, the Marquis de Sade didn’t spend twenty years moping about the indignity of confinement (and the lack of young girls and younger boys) while imprisoned in Vincennes; he wrote like mad. *** It occurs to me that for at least the next several days I have no job to go to, no appointments, and no obligations whatsoever. I don’t have to cook, and—the lazy man’s dream—I don’t even have to get out of bed to pee. (Which is a good thing, since with multiple IVs dripping into me I have to go about every twenty minutes—all that liquid has to go somewhere.) Why, I can spend all day and half the night studying French!
In theory. This bird fluttering inside my chest is a little distracting. Discussions of the difficulties baby boomers face in learning a language tend to center around our brains, ignoring the other eight-ninths of us that’s holding up that head. My heart troubles are not making things any easier, for sure, and I realize, as I lie in my hospital bed, that I’ve come to a crossroads,
un carrefour
. One path leads to, well, Carrefour, the French department store and supermarket chain; the other, to lots of free time and a free pass—the unassailable excuse that “I gave up French to focus on my health.”
Which road will I take? I’m still undecided when Anne asks, “Can I bring you anything from home? A book? Radio?”
I think for a moment. “My laptop and headset, the French-English dictionary on my desk, and maybe the collection of Sartre plays in French.”
Et puis, merde—
screw it! I’m going to Carrefour.
COINCIDENTALLY, ROSETTA STONE, AS if it has been spying on me through the bushes, has moved on to emergency room vocabulary—“hospital,” “ambulance,” “broken,” “burned,” “wounded,” everything short of
mort
. This is considerate of them, but it means that there are a whole lot of more useful words we’ll never get to. Like “draft beer.” If I want to order a draft beer in Paris, I’m out of luck if relying on Rosetta Stone; linguistically, I’m better off showing up at a French hospital with a broken collarbone.
The most difficult part of French so far is remembering the new words. This is frustrating, especially considering that the typical child entering kindergarten has a vocabulary of fourteen thousand words. To put that into perspective, a child is learning a new word every two hours of every waking moment. Without trying. How does this almost magical acquisition of language happen? I’m killing myself trying to learn French; who taught me English?
UNTIL THE RENAISSANCE, LANGUAGE was thought to be bestowed on humankind by God, or the gods. The ancient Greeks credited Prometheus with bringing to earth not only fire but language as well, although as far back as the third century BC, Epicurus (whose writing credits include publishing the Western world’s first cookbook) argued that language is not the creation of a god, but rather a biological function akin to vision. Nevertheless, the view of language as something mystical, inexplicable, or God-given prevailed and may explain the comparatively late start of the science of linguistics. A book by the Swiss philosopher and linguist Ferdinand de Saussure,
Course in General Linguistics,
published shortly after his death in 1913, is considered to mark the inception of modern linguistics, putting the science of language a century or two behind the founding of biology, chemistry, and psychology—even half a century behind Darwin.
Into the mid-1800s, linguistics research and activity were focused mainly on vocabulary and on cataloging and translating newfound languages (helped in no small part by Bible societies, which provided the funding for researchers to go into remote areas, discover and learn an undocumented
Courage
indeed. If I’m going to be imprisoned here for a week, shackled to intravenous drips and monitors, I’d best stop whining and make use of the time. After all, the Marquis de Sade didn’t spend twenty years moping about the indignity of confinement (and the lack of young girls and younger boys) while imprisoned in Vincennes; he wrote like mad. *** It occurs to me that for at least the next several days I have no job to go to, no appointments, and no obligations whatsoever. I don’t have to cook, and—the lazy man’s dream—I don’t even have to get out of bed to pee. (Which is a good thing, since with multiple IVs dripping into me I have to go about every twenty minutes—all that liquid has to go somewhere.) Why, I can spend all day and half the night studying French!
In theory. This bird fluttering inside my chest is a little distracting. Discussions of the difficulties baby boomers face in learning a language tend to center around our brains, ignoring the other eight-ninths of us that’s holding up that head. My heart troubles are not making things any easier, for sure, and I realize, as I lie in my hospital bed, that I’ve come to a crossroads,
un carrefour
. One path leads to, well, Carrefour, the French department store and supermarket chain; the other, to lots of free time and a free pass—the unassailable excuse that “I gave up French to focus on my health.”
Which road will I take? I’m still undecided when Anne asks, “Can I bring you anything from home? A book? Radio?”
I think for a moment. “My laptop and headset, the French-English dictionary on my desk, and maybe the collection of Sartre plays in French.”
Et puis, merde—
screw it! I’m going to Carrefour.
COINCIDENTALLY, ROSETTA STONE, AS if it has been spying on me through the bushes, has moved on to emergency room vocabulary—“hospital,” “ambulance,” “broken,” “burned,” “wounded,” everything short of
mort
. This is considerate of them, but it means that there are a whole lot of more useful words we’ll never get to. Like “draft beer.” If I want to order a draft beer in Paris, I’m out of luck if relying on Rosetta Stone; linguistically, I’m better off showing up at a French hospital with a broken collarbone.
The most difficult part of French so far is remembering the new words. This is frustrating, especially considering that the typical child entering kindergarten has a vocabulary of fourteen thousand words. To put that into perspective, a child is learning a new word every two hours of every waking moment. Without trying. How does this almost magical acquisition of language happen? I’m killing myself trying to learn French; who taught me English?
UNTIL THE RENAISSANCE, LANGUAGE was thought to be bestowed on humankind by God, or the gods. The ancient Greeks credited Prometheus with bringing to earth not only fire but language as well, although as far back as the third century BC, Epicurus (whose writing credits include publishing the Western world’s first cookbook) argued that language is not the creation of a god, but rather a biological function akin to vision. Nevertheless, the view of language as something mystical, inexplicable, or God-given prevailed and may explain the comparatively late start of the science of linguistics. A book by the Swiss philosopher and linguist Ferdinand de Saussure,
Course in General Linguistics,
published shortly after his death in 1913, is considered to mark the inception of modern linguistics, putting the science of language a century or two behind the founding of biology, chemistry, and psychology—even half a century behind Darwin.
Into the mid-1800s, linguistics research and activity were focused mainly on vocabulary and on cataloging and translating newfound languages (helped in no small part by Bible societies, which provided the funding for researchers to go into remote areas, discover and learn an undocumented
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