the future of language

Language is an animal. It prowls, it lurks around the corners of the mouth, around streetcorners, it stalks softly through reams of sounds, before pouncing - swiftfooted - on pages of prey.

So if language is a species, then its grammatical structure and lexicon - its DNA, if you like - are passed down from generation to generation, mutating each time. This Darwinian metaphor for language is pervasive; already the press are talking about languages 'dying out' as if they were endangered species. Some languages have already become 'extinct'. If we can bring the bison or the orchid back from the brink, can we save our languages from extinction too?

I suppose keeping zoo animals in captivity is the equivalent of preserving 'dead'languages in a locked-away library. Semioticians have talked of a linguistic 'ecosystem' in which languages, like organisms, are interdependent. Tongues interact as animals and plants do; they feed off each other; they mimic others' strengths and pounce on their flaws; they give birth to new generations of communication like textspeak or slam poetry. When the lingosystem's balance is upset by invasions, religions or technology, languages (like organisms) can become endangered and indeed extinct.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the technological revolution of late. English is the global language, particularly because it was the Internet's mother tongue. Arabic and Chinese are becoming increasingl popular in the West because they open the gateway to business in the East.

Meanwhile, dying out languages like Welsh have been put on the endangered species list. Just as we encourage endangered species to adapt to new environments, so Welsh speakers have adapted their silvertongue with a new tool: Internet vocabulary and a plethora of webpages. It's not a Welsh of mythic beauty, it's a mutated Welsh of a modern age - to survive, it will have to adapt.

'Hold hard then, heart. This way at least you live.' Derek Walcott, the Fist

homeland and hiraeth

Language is a funny fabric. Words are shapeshifters, changing to fit the speaker's intentions. Yet a word can also be incredibly specific, pinning down a precise concept that's difficult to translate. 'Home' is one of these words. Do nomadic languages have a 'home'? And if so, does it describe the nomads' temporary housing, or does it denote something far more important, one of the few stable factors in nomadic existence: the home that one has among family?

Explaining my longing for home is difficult in Paris. My home doesn't exist in France, or indeed in French. 'Home' is translated as 'Chez soi', or 'ma maison', but neither of these explain the specific feeling of love, and warmth, and comfortableness that I feel. 'Homesickness' is inadequately translated as 'nostalgie' or 'le mal du pays'. Faced with this inadequacy of wording, is it any wonder I feel so tongue-tied in Paris?

The other day, I stopped a well-to-do woman on the street to ask for directions. 'Je ne parle pas aux étrangers,' she snarled. 'Did she mean she didn't talk to strangers, or to foreigners? Was she being racist, or just careful?

'Etranger' has two translations in English: a stranger, and a foreigner. In English, a foreigner can be someone you know well, but in France you would still call them an ' 'étranger'. Even after living in Paris for years and years and years, you will always be an 'étranger' - a foreigner, and thus a stranger to this strange city.

Enlisting Paris

Stuff I miss when I'm in Paris:

-British milk
- real Greek yoghurt
-scones, crumpets, carrot cake, chocolate cake
-pubs
-my bicycle
-big green spaces
-the Times, in full, in print. Ditto the Observer & Poetry London.
-the Royal Institute of Art, the Tate, the Phoenix, the South Bank
- the tube
- people wearing colourful clothes
-smoke-free zones
-cheap Haagen Dazs
- my HBS hoodie
-home

Stuff I'll miss about Paris:

-croissants & pain au chocolat
-the Saturday market at Nation
-very clean swimming pools
- the Velib
- Louvre, Musee Rodin, l'Orangerie
- Guys with big statement specs, stubble and skinny jeans.
- Parisian fashion in general
- the Soup bar on Rue de Charonne
- poker
- chocolat chaud viennois
- cheap wine

latex heads and lather, part II

Having moved to the 15th arrondissement, I was in need of a new local pool. During the last six months here in Froggieland I've tried out many of the famous ponds in Paris - including the pool in Les Halles surrounded by tropical plants, and the Josephine Baker pool with a glass roof, situated on a floating island on the Seine.

My experience of swimming with the frogs has been mixed. At Piscine Josephine Baker, a snotty, spotty receptionist accused me of being foreign - shock, horror - and wrongly trying to claim a discount available to under-25s who live in Paris. I pointed out that I live in Paris and am under 25, regardless of my accent. Nonetheless, she refused to accept my various identity cards, and insisted that I'd need to bring my apartment contract to get the discount. Something was very fishy about Josephine Baker - and I'm not just talking about the Seine.

My experiences at local pond Aspirant Dunant were better- although their lilipad lockers once proved disastrous when a friend couldn't get hers open and had to flip-flop to the main reception in her bikini and ask the male staff to help. They were delighted to naturally...

Now, I have found piscine paradise - finally, a pond with excellent showers, very very clean floors and a 50m pool! (This is twice the length of most pools in Paris). Its size means it's rarely crowded. In Piscine Blomet, Liliputian lockers are a thing of the past - rather than having to cram all my possessions into a frog-sized box, I can lock the entire cubicle I have been using and take the key! The showers are very good by Paris standards, lukewarm but very powerful, and the hairdryers are fantastic. Piscine Blomet is definitely my new pond - and I'm one very happy froggy indeed!

travels and tinned tomatoes

Sometimes speech is superior to novels in its ability to adapt, update and be instantly relevant. Novels are like tinned tomatoes but speech is the real thing – freshly plucked, red and ripe and juicy, smelling of today. Novels can be stored; reliable and predictable, they have a meatier flavor and melt and mature in your mouth. Novels are stocky, food-for-thought. But speech tastes of summer.

My parents are both moving on - to new people, new houses, new ideas. Which leads me to thinking. They’ve both evolved from their decades-long friendship – from their dialogue (of which I was the transcript, the novel, the endpoint). Which leaves me – where? Am I finally irrelevant?

No – I’m like the tinned tomatoes – I go back to visit both of them, I remind them of that summer decades ago when the air carried the heady scent of tomatoes and their youth glowed scarlet in the Grecian air. I’ve seen the photos of them – him with tousled strawy hair and a beard, lean and tanned – her, gypsy like with long curls and dangling earrings, skinny and beautiful, sea-skimmed.

Cassandra, by Christa Wolf, had just been published when they were living together, in 1986, as flatmates in Cardiff. Now, with mum’s copy in hand, sitting in my dad’s house in Cardiff, so near where I was born, pondering a holiday to Greece, is it any wonder that I’m drawn back to the story of my origin? The story that both my mother and father have now relinquished, the story that’s two decades old – the story that’s fast fading into gold-tinted illusionary myth. Then (it seems) anything was possible. Then they could have been together or not together. Now, they are who they are; they have become themselves, irrevocably.

Who am I to try and recreate the past? The story is old, and mythic, and very valuable. I am its author now.

Cassandra, by Christa Wolf

“Freedom!” shout the Yanks. “Equality!” bellow the Commies. “Life! ” yell the people, but their voices are drowned out.

Christa Wolf wrote about prophetess Cassandra and her role in the war between the Greeks and the Trojans. She saw parallels between herself and Cassandra, between East Germany and Troy - both states insist on absolute loyalty, both keep fighting on when there is nothing left to fight with, both are eventually defeated by a stronger state. In the Greek –Trojan war, the ideological cause of war (Helen, epitomizing beauty and love) is little more than a noble myth to disguise the power struggle over territory and trade routes: namely, the Hellespont. The war between the USSR and the USA was the same - argues Wolf - although portrayed as an ideological struggle, the Cold War was actually about economic control and territory. The Cold War, like the Greek-Trojan war, brought both states to the brink of self destruction with the arms race; the people of both empires lived in perpetual fear of attack.

~~~~~~~~~~

…a few hours after reading Cassandra we start talking about Nicaragua, and the fact that mum was a foreign reporter there in the 80s. She told me she travelled with a Nicaraguan translator. A year after she left he ended up dead. My dad produces a book of photos from the country, taken in the '70s. I flick through the book of photos, trying to get a handle on the political situation of Nicaragua of the last thirty years. Reluctantly I move from the timeline at the back to the beginning – for how can I judge the people in the photos or understand their plight if I do not know the dates and facts of their story?

Fool. Has the Cassandra allegory taught you nothing? Troy could be a state now; the disputes for territory and ideology continue. The earth is the earth is the earth. I look at the photos: the women intently studying pistols; the guerillas with their dirt-studded jeans; one lighting a cigarette below the ubiquitous Coca Cola posters (that hint at the American involvement); the lower half of a body; a skeleton jumped and livewired out of the earth – the remnants of a man, his love, his legs.

The red blood tinge, always somewhere in the frame. I don’t need to know the dates to get the story: humans, suffering, pride, fighting, desperation, intense poverty of materials and intense creativity of spirit – a people to despair of and a people to admire – a people that we first world Westerners rarely have to face and never really understand. We don't get it, because we have not in seventy years been forced to face ourselves, bloody and skeletal in the mirror, with almost nothing left as future or past, and ask ourselves if we will fight.

Blood, feuding, fighting, revenge, death. Revolution, civil war, guerilla fighting, collapsing government, exile. As a Westerner, I find that this is the language of the newspapers. I never have to read it in the mirror.

An article about Christa Wolf from the New York Sun
Another article about Christa Wolf from the Goethe-Institut