On Studying a Language

This is just a muse about my return to the intensive study of several languages, for whatever the thoughts be worth.

The desire to study languages not one's own may come from any number of directions – from practical ones like wanting to become a professional translator to ones the source of which is lost in the "dark backward and abysm" of childhood and, as with so much we value most, not available to our waking selves. So put it down to whimsy if you will, but the currents of our interests – indeed of whimsy itself – surely run deep.

The study of languages might be thought a sign of shallowness, since a person may know ten languages and yet be a villain or a fool. Still, it seems better to say that the pursuit of language competence is the mother of studies. And in spite of all the memorization and grammar-conning involved, it's also a fine proof of Rabbi Moses Ben Maimon's assertion that learning itself is not a matter of aggregation, of permanent acquisition, but rather a series of insights that seem to come from nowhere and that are gone as soon as they have come, leaving us again in darkness, under the sway of various necessities. It induces humility as well since whatever of wisdom and knowledge is gained, whatever unlooked-for advances in comprehension come as if from the workings of a power akin to Coleridge's silent, secret "ministry of frost," will most likely be lost along with all else when we die. In the shadow of the Preacher's injunction, the study of a language, too, is vanity.

But in favor of language studies is the prospect that there's something in them of pure love of words – a capacity much derided in this age of virtual bronze, where to lose what Hamlet calls "the name of action" is considered shameful. Even the poorest of paragraphs can sell a product or teach us how to use a software program. But such a paragraph remains a pitiful thing in its own right, and shows little regard for the deep humanity that precision of speech or writing may reveal.

A language is something we have made collectively and over time – something mostly beyond our individual efforts at manipulation, though we may have some small success there, some power of innovation and precision. And to this power we must respond, and within it, to a large degree, work out our felicity or infelicity. To speak a "foreign" language is to speak with the voice of another that beckons us outside ourselves even as it takes us back to our earliest and most intimate experiences, moments when an illusory but nonetheless powerful bond was forged between words, ourselves, and the world around us. In a sense, to return to language is to return to our mother and father, to an experience not unlike what we may surmise to have been our earliest conscious days, months, and years – the ones that made us what we are. The child is father of the man, just as Wordsworth said.