The Oaths of Strasbourg were kind of like our wedding, at which various participants, in order to bond with the other side of the family, chose to address the crowd in languages of which they did not have an entirely sturdy grasp. Jacques stood up and talked about “a very nice American movie, Love Story.” My friend Helen, in from Wilmington, kicked off with a four-syllable “Bienvenue.” Olivier alternated between French and English. So did I, having sent off my speech to a translator I found on the Internet. Fortunately, he was more conscientious than the celebrant who, in the Maldives in 2010, led a Swiss couple in a renewal of their vows. “You fornicate and make a lot of children,” he said in the Dhivehi language as the couple looked on, clasping hands. “You drink and you eat pork. Most of the children that you have are marked with spots and blemishes. These children that you have are bastards.”
Both Frankish and Gallo-Romance were members of the Indo-European language group, meaning that—among some five hundred languages, including English, Spanish, Russian, Sanskrit, and Hindi—they are thought to share a common ancestor, which likely emerged in Eastern Europe and Central Asia somewhere around 3500 BC. Frankish was part of the Germanic branch. (So is English.) Gallo-Romance, on the other hand, derived from Latin, which had dominated the lands that would eventually be France since 50 BC, when the Romans had conquered the Celts.
The meeting was extraordinary, not for what the brothers said, but for the fact that it was recorded in the manner in which they said it. Most contemporary documents of any importance were written in Latin, but the scribes at Strasbourg chose to render the day’s events verbatim. The Oaths of Strasbourg thus constitute the first written example of what will eventually become modern French. The next year the Treaty of Verdun dismantled the Carolingian Empire, dividing the continent among the three brothers from the Atlantic to the Rhine. Monique Fuchs, of the Strasbourg Historical Museum, has written, “Thus began the history of the peoples of Europe, each identifying itself with a specific language and political organization.”
French, at the turn of the first millennium, was coming into its own. Its influences were various. Gaulish, the language spoken by the Celts, had surrendered to vulgar Latin five hundred years earlier, but its traces persisted, most palpably in the vocabulary of botany and agriculture: alouette (lark), from alauda; chêne (oak), from cassanos; mouton (sheep), from multo. In the late fifth century, the Western Roman Empire fell to German invaders. They failed to impose their languages on the continent, but they left their mark in words such as gant (glove) and guerre (war). Their presence accelerated the fragmentation of colloquial Latin. As the empire splintered, so did its patterns of speech, giving rise to a rustic spin-off of Latin called Romance. Speakers of Romance dropped the inflected cases of Latin, reducing them to the nominative (subject) and the accusative (object). To indicate gender and number, articles multiplied.
Romance itself spawned subcategories, which became the Romance languages. By 1000, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and French were being spoken in recognizable but unstable forms. In the thirteenth century twenty-two varieties of Romance—Angevin, Auvergnat, Berrichon, Bourbonnais, Bourguignon, Champenois, Croissant, Français, Franc-Comtois, Gallo, Gascon, Languedocien, Limousin, Lorrain Roman, Norman, Orléanais, Picard, Poitevin, Provençal, Saintongeais, Tourangeau, Walloon—existed in France alone. Français—the dialect of the Île-de-France region, encompassing Paris—would eventually elbow out the others, claiming the title of what we now know as French.
In 1539 François I issued the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts, requiring that all official documents be written in “the French mother tongue and not otherwise.” The decree institutionalized a reality that had been emerging for several centuries: for pretty much everyone but the priests, Latin was dead. The Académie Française—the world’s first national body dedicated to the stewardship of a language—was established in 1635, “to give certain rules to our language and to render it pure, eloquent, and capable of treating the arts and sciences.” Competing with the Italian states throughout the Renaissance, France pursued rayonnement—literally, “radiation,” but more generally, standing—via French, its most glorious tool of public relations. The state’s linguistic chauvinism justified itself elegantly: so many amazing things were produced in French that it stood to reason that French produced amazing things. In 1782, much of the European elite would have agreed with Antoine de Rivarol, who wrote, “If it’s not clear, it’s not French.”
• • •
“MON CONJOINT, MON CONJOINT, mon conjoint,” I whisper to myself as the tram inches past medical-equipment emporia and a hundred men wearing the same thinly striped cashmere scarf. “Mon conjoint, mon conjoint, mon conjoint, mon conjoint, mon conjoint, mon conjoint, mon conjoint, mon conjoint, mon conjoint, mon conjoint, mon conjoint, mon conjoint, mon conjoint, mon conjoint.”
Dominique has a theory, not scientifically proven, that to memorize a word you have to say it seventeen times. I start at the top of the worksheet she’s given us about the family. Mon conjoint: “my spouse.” I wonder why the compiler of the list has chosen to leave out the direct cognate, époux, as well as mari/femme, the words I’ve heard more often for husband and wife. Conjoint sounds like an army rank, or something you would say at a convention, while wearing a lanyard: “Jerry, shake hands with my conjoint.”
My vocabulary is improving. The dictionary app that I use allows you to track the words you’ve looked up. It reads like a diary, a logbook of my days:
shelf
planche
frustrated
agacé
cote
quotation
côte
slope
coté
sought-after
côte-a-côte
side by side
côté
side
coter
to price
courriel
mail
lettre
letter
require
exiger
racheter
to buy some more
scissors
ciseaux
aspire
aspirer
squash
potimarron
soupière
tureen
rêve
dream
I treasure each acquisition, remembering the exact circumstances—time, place, company—under which it was made. English is a trust fund, an unearned inheritance, but I’ve worked for every bit of French I’ve banked. In French, words have tastes and textures. They come in colors and smells. Ruban is scarlet and scratchy, the stuff we bought before a costume party to tie a letter A around my neck. Hirondelle will always be an easy hike on a gray day in May. We’re ticking off the stations of the cross, which a Savoyard devout has installed on a rocky slope side. We’re scampering up it, Olivier becoming the first man to ascend a pre-Alp while carrying a golf umbrella. “Une hirondelle ne fait pas le printemps”—One swallow doesn’t make spring—he says, citing a typically gloomy French proverb. The sky rips open as we reach Calvary.
I continue down the list. There’s a section for la famille recomposée, the blended family. The prefix seems a two-letter proof of the French insistence on history versus the American faith in fresh starts. (I later learn
that the French, amazingly, call life insurance “death insurance.”) The inclusion of Ramadan strikes me as the equivalent of putting quinceañera in an English book, but at least it’s a gimme. La belle-mère is a lovely phrase. I fail to understand, though, how it can simultaneously mean “mother-in-law” and “stepmother.” Even homonymically, does anyone want her husband’s mom to be the same woman who married her father?
I finish chanting the sixteen members of the close, extended, and blended families and proceed to the first written exercise. “The relations between members of the family are sometimes complex,” it asks. “What unites them or divides them most often?” The worksheet gives five choices: respect, trust, complicity, jealousy, and rivalry. You’re supposed to match them with prompts—“The brothers and sisters _____,” “The mother and her daughter _____,” “The father and his daughter _____”—like some kind of Freudian Mad Libs.
“Open your books to page nineteen,” Dominique says when class begins.
The textbook is Latitudes 3, by Y. Loiseau, M.-N. Cocton, M. Landier, and A. Dintilhac. I skim the table of contents. Chapters 9 and 4, respectively, are entitled “Green and Against It All!” and “Are You Zen?” Mon conjoint, the eighteenth time around, starts to make more sense.
“Today,” Dominique says, “we are going to make a time capsule.”
We divide into groups. I’m with Jorge, the Argentinian architect, and Claudia, from Bolivia.
“What is the most important event of the past twenty years?” I ask, reading aloud from the lesson. (The time capsule is to consist of our thoughts.)
“Pope Francis!” Jorge says.
Claudia and I exchange a look.
“Or the Internet?” she ventures.
Claudia and Jorge begin debating the events of 1994–2014 in a sort of unfollowable Sprench. I remember that I hate working in groups. Technically, we’re all speaking French, but each national faction mangles the language uniquely, as though we’re a bunch of convalescents, each with a different injury, trying to partner up for a ballroom dance. The paradox of foreign language classes is that they isolate you with perfect precision from the population of which you’re attempting to become a part. A French class is, by definition, the one place where you’re never going to find a person who speaks French.
Eventually I jump in.
“Definitely the Internet.”
Jorge really wants to talk about the pope.
“Corruption is everywhere in Argentina,” he says, in English. “But Francis is a good man.”
“D’accord,” I say, giving up.
Dominique clears her throat and asks which group would like to share its conclusions. No one volunteers.
“Spring,” she says, gazing at snowdrifts melting on the eaves outside. “Emotionally, it’s not always easy.”
She decides that we’ll go around the room.
“What personalities have made the biggest contribution to the world?”
“Mandela, Obama, and Jobs.”
“What food product have you discovered for the first time in the past twenty years?”
“Foie gras, sushi, and goji berries.”
Before dismissing class, Dominique suggests that, as a learning aid, we paper our apartments with Post-it Notes, each listing the French name of the object on which it’s stuck.
“Be creative!” she says.
Before the end of the term, she announces, we’ll each be expected to give an oral presentation.
“It’s a test, yes, but also a psychological experience.”
• • •
DESPITE ITS PRETENSIONS TO CLARITY, French can be trying. Vert (green), verre (glass), ver (worm), vers (toward), and vair (squirrel fur) constitute a quintuple homonym, not even counting verts, verres, and vers (you don’t pronounce the final s in French). Folklorists have argued for decades over whether Cinderella’s pantoufle en verre might have come about as a mishearing, on Charles Perrault’s part, of pantoufle en vair. The subjunctive is a wish. Gender’s a bitch. Le poêle: a stove. La poêle: a frying pan. A man’s shirt, une chemise, is feminine, but a woman’s shirt, un chemisier, is masculine. Imagine everyone you’ve ever met looking exactly alike, and then, four decades into your acquaintanceship, having to go back and try to figure out who’s a man and who’s a woman. And then, to make matters more complicated, some of the men are women and some of the women are men.
French isn’t actually exceptionally difficult. In fact, it is becoming ever easier, as large languages are wont to do: one linguist found that every verb created since 1950 uses the regular -er ending, making it easy to figure out that the past participle of zlataner—to dominate, like the football player Zlatan Ibrahimović—is zlatané. The Malian language Supyire has five genders (humans, big things, small things, groups, liquids), while the Australian language Ngan’gityemerri has fifteen (males, females, groups, animals, vegetables, body parts, canines, trees, liquids, fire, strikers, digging sticks, woomeras, two different types of spears).
It is a truism of linguistics that every language is equally complex. This is true in that every language is complex—“When it comes to linguistic form, Plato walks with the Macedonian swineherd, Confucius with the head-hunting savage of Assam,” the linguist Edward Sapir wrote in 1921—and in that no language is any harder or easier for a native speaker to acquire. The !Xóõ language of Botswana has a hundred and twenty-five consonants (including seventy-eight clicks), but no !Xóõ-speaking child grows up thinking that !Xóõ is too hard to learn. For non-native speakers, though, some languages clearly present more of a challenge than others. Which ones those are depends on the language with which you begin. A colleague who grew up speaking Mandarin moved to America when she was eight. She recalls feeling exasperated in her middle-school French class: “Most of the vocabulary sounded similar, and as someone who had just struggled to adjust to English, I couldn’t believe that French wasn’t regarded as just another dialect of English.” For her, English was a vexing thing to speak aloud. As Charles Ollier pointed out, fish might well be spelled ghoti (gh as in tough, o as in women, ti as in mention). Recently, the Facebook page of the European Commission’s interpreters featured a post entitled “This is why we love (and hate) the English language!” It included a poem called “The Chaos,” by the late Dutch anglophile Gerard Nolst Trenité:
Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.
Pray, console your loving poet,
Make my dress look new, dear, sew it!
The poem went on for 104 more lines.
Linguists have attempted to make an objective assessment of the relative difficulty of languages by breaking them down into parts. One factor is the level of inflection, or the amount of information that a language carries on a single word. The languages of large, literate societies have larger vocabularies. One might think that their structures are also more elaborate, but the opposite is true: the simpler the society, the more baroque its morphology. In Archi, a language spoken in the village of Archib in southern Dagestan, a single verb—taking into account prefixes and suffixes and other modifications—can occur in 1,502,839 different forms. This makes sense if you think about it. Because large societies have frequent interaction with outsiders, their languages undergo simplification. Members of relatively homogeneous groups, on the other hand, share a base of common knowledge, enabling them to pile on declensions without confusing each other. Small languages stay spiky. But, amid waves of contact, large languages lose their sharp edges, becoming beveled as pieces of glass.
Another way to try to rate the difficul
ty of languages is to consider their unusual features: putting the verb before the subject in a sentence, for example, or not having a question particle. Coders analyzed 1,694 languages for twenty-one semantic quirks to create the Language Weirdness Index, anointing Chalcatongo Mixtec—a verb-initial tonal language spoken by six thousand people in Oaxaca—the world’s hardest language. The most straightforward was Hindi, with only a single unusual feature, predicative possession. English came in thirty-third, making it a third as weird as German, but seven times weirder than Purépecha.
According to the US State Department, French is among the easiest languages for an English speaker to learn. It requires an estimated six hundred hours of instruction, versus eleven hundred for Pashto or Xhosa and twenty-two hundred for Arabic or Mandarin. Thanks to the Normans, who invaded England in the eleventh century, somewhere between a quarter and half of the basic English vocabulary comes from French. Modern-day English speakers, in fact, are able to read Old French more easily than their French counterparts, due to the persistence of forms of words that have disappeared from the latter language: acointance, plege. An English speaker who has never set foot in a bistro already knows an estimated fifteen thousand words of French.
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