From Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love", by Julie Sedivy:
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"At that time, Italian was to me a bewitching confusion, boiling and streaming in all directions. Its connection to the actual world was tenuous and constantly shifting. It was only now and then that I caught a word with my mind; words were like fish, solid things making sudden, unexpected appearances, flashes of substance and meaning in the liquidity of language flowing all around me. You had to be quick to snatch them before they were lost in the fast-moving stream."
Book Review: Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love"
The quote above is Julie Sedvie talking about how she grew up learning five languages before kindergarten (Czech, German, Italian, French, and English) as her family moved around the globe. Maybe inevitably, she earned a doctorate in linguistics, studying language scientifically in a laboratory setting. Having now stepped away from the academic setting, she has written a memoir of her own lifelong love of language. In it she moves easily from one aspect of language to another. Altogether, it's a grab bag of fascinating aspects of human language.
She begins by asking what sets humans apart from other animals when it comes to language. Birds use song. But they don't "sing to offer advice, enact laws, make promises, protest their leaders, admonish their young, or do anything resembling the conversion of symbol into sound." And most mammals make even less use of sound than birds, being more attuned to scent than sound.
She explores how infants react to language as soon as they are born, having been accustomed to it in the womb, responding differently not just to their mother's voice than a stranger's, but to a stranger who speaks their mother's language rather than an unfamiliar one.
She points out how many words we as a nation cannot agree on meaning: citizen, greatness, person, female, science, corruption, fairness, heritage, injustice, progress, treason, and many more. "Lexicographers know [dictionaries] do not legislate."
Unexpectedly, language can be a trait more likely to split society than even race. Studies show that, "as preschoolers, they choose friends more readily on the basis of accent than on the basis of race.
She spends time examining why learning to read is so much more difficult than learning to speak. "To raise a fluent child, it is enough to simply include her in the back-and-forth reciprocity of daily language. Parents instinctively speak in a way the child can learn to understand; the child instinctively discerns the patterns that make up her language. Reading is different."
She recommends reading as a subversive force in her own life. "With my nose in a book, I was granted an extraordinary exemption, permitted to have any thoughts that came to me, even when they sprang me loose from everything I had ever been taught. Under the placid gaze of my parents and teachers, who no doubt felt that by encouraging my bookishness they were molding me in their image, I plotted my escape. It amazes me still that I got away with it."
She examines cultural differences in the meanings people give to language. "A much-cited article introduces Western readers to sixteen ways in which a Japanese person might refuse a request without saying 'no.' "
Finally, she explores the effects of aging on language. She dismisses advice to keep your mind sharp by doing puzzles, sudoku, brain-training exercises on a computer. Instead, she recommends something that I like, perhaps because it seems to fit my own lifestyle. "If you are to become a person who can’t help but drag their entire history into every intellectual task, your precious hours are best spent discerning what is true and insightful, in reading widely and deeply, in stuffing your vault with diverse and nuanced experiences that can inform everything you learn and read and think about thereafter."
Grade: B+
"Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love" is available from the Richardson Public Library. :-)
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