before that, and colder
Mar. 13th, 2014 05:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ravenNotes on language-learning:
-So I have a tendency to minimise how much Hindi I know. When so little of it has been usable to me, I've tended to say, when asked, oh, only a few words, or in Hindi, thora-thora. But I've attendedfive six eight(!) Hindi classes now, and the amount of progress I've made wouldn't just be unusual, if I only knew a few words, but probably unknown to science - so I've reconceptualised a little, and acknowledged that I'm not learning the language. What I am doing is becoming literate in the language - transforming a whole life’s fragments of meaning into one structure. You know how language is at once a huge collective experience and something so intimately yours? Like a body, I guess - everyone has one and this particular one is so much constitutively yours it is what is you - and what is magical to me, right now, is that this should happen to me twice. To learn a first language, twice. Though it's not like being embodied twice. More like finding the body you have fits better; that doors you left open years ago have lights still burning behind them; more like endless stupid metaphor after another because what this is, is pre-lingual, before language. (Like Margaret Atwood writes, in a poem I love, before that, and colder / the edge of the forest / the edge of the desert)
-And, you know, the Hindi for "literate" is "parhi-liqqi", and what I like about it is that it's the same word in both senses: someone who is parhi-liqqi can read and write, but you also say, woh parhi-liqqi hai, and mean someone who is educated, scholarly (often, you hear it said of a family: they're good people, parhi-liqqi people) and what I like about it I guess is that right now I'm going for the first, but the second isn't going anywhere, even for me. Many more remarkable things have happened than that.
-My parents' responses to the whole affair have been very different. My father respects, he says, my intention to learn Hindi properly. I think this is another instance of the decolonisation of the mind - that this is in itself respectful, because nothing about this process treats Hindi as "vernacular", or the language we only speak at home. (You hear that so much, you know? What language do you speak at home. Even on the census.) Instead, I'm learning Hindi as though it were a language of literature and culture: as though it were one of the world's great languages; as though it mattered, even when no one but family is listening, to get it right. For it to be right is right for its own sake. In short, treating Hindi as, historically and even now, only English got to be treated. And in practice, this means when I speak Hindi to him, everything has to be perfect: trains and cars are female and ships and aircraft are not; to speak and to do are transitive but to bring and to forget are not; masculine nouns inflect with postpositions but feminine ones do not; gender, case, tense, negation, and not, all again and again until perfect. To be held to that standard, I think, is the decolonisation: it says, you should speak Hindi perfectly, because it is your language; you should be perfect, because despite everything, you can be perfect.
-My mother, on the other hand, says it doesn't matter, and makes fun of shudh Hindi, the pure and elegant register; she rings me up and talks to me in idiomatic, conversationally ungrammatical Hindi, and calls me by one or another of the five thousand endearments Hindi provides, and says, beta, pareshan mat ho your Hindi is so sweet say it in English if you don't know the word sirf bat kar keep talking keep talking. (teri hindi, she says - the most loving pronoun you can use.) They have taken to having vicious arguments between themselves about the genders of nouns, which I enjoy very much.
-As a language learner, I guess this is an ideal scenario? The speaker who constantly corrects your grammar and the one who tells you to just say everything you want to say. But both of these make me think of how families and cultures work: I left home when I was eighteen, but there’s a sense in which I left home at four. I went to school in another language. If that’s not leaving home, then what is? So my mother, and Hindi’s thousand ways to say, baby, darling, daughter, are one way of coming home, of coming home when you’re four; and my father’s insistence on grammar, on purity and perfection, is a way of coming home at eighteen, to a new kind of adulthood. Somewhere with its own space - at least, I think. I think.
-Both my parents have taken to signing off their calls and emails with shubhratri, a beautiful word, one of my favourites in any language; it means goodnight, but with a kind of resonant poetry not in the translation. For the first time I can remember language is not a battlefield.
-So I have a tendency to minimise how much Hindi I know. When so little of it has been usable to me, I've tended to say, when asked, oh, only a few words, or in Hindi, thora-thora. But I've attended
-And, you know, the Hindi for "literate" is "parhi-liqqi", and what I like about it is that it's the same word in both senses: someone who is parhi-liqqi can read and write, but you also say, woh parhi-liqqi hai, and mean someone who is educated, scholarly (often, you hear it said of a family: they're good people, parhi-liqqi people) and what I like about it I guess is that right now I'm going for the first, but the second isn't going anywhere, even for me. Many more remarkable things have happened than that.
-My parents' responses to the whole affair have been very different. My father respects, he says, my intention to learn Hindi properly. I think this is another instance of the decolonisation of the mind - that this is in itself respectful, because nothing about this process treats Hindi as "vernacular", or the language we only speak at home. (You hear that so much, you know? What language do you speak at home. Even on the census.) Instead, I'm learning Hindi as though it were a language of literature and culture: as though it were one of the world's great languages; as though it mattered, even when no one but family is listening, to get it right. For it to be right is right for its own sake. In short, treating Hindi as, historically and even now, only English got to be treated. And in practice, this means when I speak Hindi to him, everything has to be perfect: trains and cars are female and ships and aircraft are not; to speak and to do are transitive but to bring and to forget are not; masculine nouns inflect with postpositions but feminine ones do not; gender, case, tense, negation, and not, all again and again until perfect. To be held to that standard, I think, is the decolonisation: it says, you should speak Hindi perfectly, because it is your language; you should be perfect, because despite everything, you can be perfect.
-My mother, on the other hand, says it doesn't matter, and makes fun of shudh Hindi, the pure and elegant register; she rings me up and talks to me in idiomatic, conversationally ungrammatical Hindi, and calls me by one or another of the five thousand endearments Hindi provides, and says, beta, pareshan mat ho your Hindi is so sweet say it in English if you don't know the word sirf bat kar keep talking keep talking. (teri hindi, she says - the most loving pronoun you can use.) They have taken to having vicious arguments between themselves about the genders of nouns, which I enjoy very much.
-As a language learner, I guess this is an ideal scenario? The speaker who constantly corrects your grammar and the one who tells you to just say everything you want to say. But both of these make me think of how families and cultures work: I left home when I was eighteen, but there’s a sense in which I left home at four. I went to school in another language. If that’s not leaving home, then what is? So my mother, and Hindi’s thousand ways to say, baby, darling, daughter, are one way of coming home, of coming home when you’re four; and my father’s insistence on grammar, on purity and perfection, is a way of coming home at eighteen, to a new kind of adulthood. Somewhere with its own space - at least, I think. I think.
-Both my parents have taken to signing off their calls and emails with shubhratri, a beautiful word, one of my favourites in any language; it means goodnight, but with a kind of resonant poetry not in the translation. For the first time I can remember language is not a battlefield.
no subject
on 2014-03-20 09:28 pm (UTC)