I took my seat in class as a student for the first time in twenty years: Beginning Polish. And so it has begun, in earnest. Not the oldest of his classmates, BorOvich, Josh (spelled phonetically Dzos in Polish) entered and sited himself in the second row, extreme right, by the door. I felt neither trepidation nor comfort, and the natural excitement of learning only came with time, as the instructor divulged tidbits about the Slavic language family. Russian is the most musical, owing to its separating all consonantal sounds with vowels; words never grind to an unpronounceable (or visual) halt against the twisted wire of barbarous consonant clusters like chrz, szcz, prz, scdz, and trz—or fail to start at all. Not true of Polish. Interestingly, Serbo-Croatian is essentially the same language spoken, but it is written in a Cyrillic and a Roman script respectively, demarcating the religious lines, Greek Orthodox (Serb) and Catholic (Croat), that divide the population of speakers. After the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the bloody “cleansing” of Balkan ethnicities, Serbian and Croatian present politically as separate languages (roll eyes here; yet another people, like the English and Americans, separated by a common language). Kasubian, a tongue with Pomeranian influences, aspires to the status of a separate language and not a mere dialect of Polish. Linguists, including our instructor, are not unsympathetic to their claims, which must ultimately be decided by the United Nations. As for Polish, our instructor notes, it is simply one of the more difficult of foreign languages for English speakers.
Among the difficulties—pretty much true of all Slavic languages—is that Polish is highly inflected; it distinguishes seven grammatical cases, whereas English and German manage to get by with three or four: nominative, accusative/dative, and genitive, that is, a subject form (“I”), an object form, direct and indirect in English (“me”), and a possessive form (“my”). The Poles, like other Slavs and the ancient Romans, add three more: a vocative, an instrumental, and a locative. When I signed up, I was aware that Polish was more or less doubly inflective, and could consequently, unlike English and German, have a highly variable sentence word order. (As well as having “different words for everything,” as Steve Martin has so perspicuously observed of French.) But on that first day, we were introduced as well to pronunciation “rules” about the voicing and devoicing of consonants, depending on the vowel sound that follows or its position in the word. The letter “b,” for example, often sounds as an English “b,” but in the presence of other letters is devoiced to sound like an English “p.” Now, Polish has a letter “p” that sounds like the English letter “p,” so why not write the sound with a single letter? It doesn’t seem to make any sense. Who made these “rules,” by the way, and were they vodka-influenced? When our instructor alluded to verb aspect, which we will take up later, my head began to spin.
There are very good reasons, of course, for the bewildering complexity and the seeming irrationalities of all languages (think “knight,” “night,” and “ignite” in English; “there,” “their,” and “they’re”). At least, those reasons seem good and natural and obvious (but unconsciously so) for speakers viewing the language from within. To those on the outside learning it, they’re, well, crazy, okay, maybe not crazy, but weird, or, well, you know, kinda arbitrary. Which they are, at one level; all language derives from an absolutely arbitrary but conventionally agreed upon association between signs (sounds/written words) and things. We agree upon them in time, and we agree upon the changes over time. Language, like life and love, perhaps, is history—a metaphor I’ve been pondering.
A new language is like a new love, fresh, compelling, demanding, complex, and seemingly impossible, especially to a man over fifty. A knowledge of linguistics, like the knowledge of women and love generally, helps, but not nearly enough. A knowledge of other foreign languages, like the experience of other lovers, helps as well, some, but anyone who has ever applied an amorous principle, practice, or trick extramurally can attest to its potential for disaster. The rule for devoicing consonants in Polish proceeds from right to left, in Russian, from left to right (or vice versa, let me double check.) Every language then, like every woman, has an experience of its own, and a logic and coherence deriving exclusively from the interactions of the lives of its speakers in their world. Understanding, mastery require patience, attention, commitment, time, and work, maybe a lifetime thereof, or the rest of a lifetime.
