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A language I
never expected to need.
Edward Ordman (c)
2015
(an edited version of this appeared in the Christian Science
Monitor, on July 1, 2015 as Making myself understood )
I had to study French in High School, and did not do well at
it. I knew I eventually wanted a Ph.D. and was told that
studying foreign languages was required for that, but didn’t
understand why. I began to realize that other languages might
be needed, sometimes unexpectedly, when as a college
undergraduate I audited a course in the Old
Testament. One day I asked the professor, the Rev.
Richard Henshaw of the Bexley Hall Divinity School, what sort
of research he did.
“Assyrian literature,” he replied.
I didn’t even know then that there was enough Assyrian
literature to work with. But my next question was, “How on
earth do you learn Assyrian?”
He replied “First, you get very good at German, since the
textbook is in German.”
It was my first realization of the complexity of some sorts of
scholarly work. One of my undergraduate mathematics courses
even used a French-language textbook on the theory that
naturally mathematicians should know how to read French.
My graduate school insisted only that I be able to read
mathematics texts in French and German, but my father insisted
I learn to speak the languages. I have needed to read and
speak both, and have had to pay to have papers in Russian
translated for me, for my research. I’ve even lectured in
French, although not in German.
In 1986 I was invited to lecture in Shanghai, China, in
English. I knew the students would read English better
than they understood spoken English, so I wrote out the big
words on transparencies. (Computer slide shows had not yet
arrived.) My hosts produced a dusty but functional
transparency projector, but to aim it at the only blank wall
in the room I’d need an extension cord. They didn’t seem
to know the words “extension cord” or understand my request or
gestures. The students filed in. In desperation, using some
unknown instinct, I turned to the students and asked, “Haben
Sie ein Verlangerungschnur?” I’m not at all sure I
had the German correct, but a student jumped up and brought me
an extension cord. I asked if he spoke German. No, he said, he
had only studied English. But the only foreign visiting
professors he had encountered before were from East Germany,
and he had learned the German words for the things a visiting
professor might want.
I’ve continued to encounter some surprises of that sort
throughout my life. Quite recently, I was speaking with
Dr. Fred Albertson of the University of Memphis in
Tennessee. His research involves looking at art from
ancient Syria. One of the most useful reference
works in that area is a collection of volumes called the Corpus
Inscriptionum Semiticarum, of which at least some
are available online. A typical page contains a copy of an
inscription written in Aramaic, a transliteration into Hebrew,
and then a translation and a commentary in Latin. Well,
Fred said, that was playing fair. But then he discovered that
to work out the dates and chronology of the objects he was
looking at he had to go to a book by Harald Ingholt called Studier
over Palmyrensk Skulptur, in Danish. A need to
cope with Danish seemed to Fred unreasonable.
I teased Fred a little about his problem with Danish. In
the Fall of 1987, my wife and I were on sabbatical from the
University of Memphis and were teaching computer sciences
(“Informatics”) at the Aalborg University Center in
Denmark. We lectured and collected homework in
English. Students were assigned to us for the same
reason that I was assigned a French-language textbook in
college: they would need to read, and perhaps write, computer
manuals in English. Our colleagues expressed surprise
when I asked where to sign up in the course in Danish for
foreigners. I gained some respect from my Danish
colleagues with my answer: "There are passages in
Kierkegaard's book Fear and Trembling that I want to
understand better." Due to all the similar words
from English and German, I found it fairly easy to learn
to read basic Danish. Unfortunately, Kierkegaard's
convoluted sentence structures often proved incomprehensible
to me.
A semester later, my wife and I were teaching in the Færoe
Islands - a part of Denmark almost as distant geographically
and linguistically from Denmark as, say, Puerto Rico is from
the United States. I recall one day going sightseeing, being
ready to go home, and standing at a bus stop for so long that
I finally figured we had inexplicably missed the last bus. We
had to hitchhike home. Much too late, using a
Færoese-to-Danish dictionary, I deciphered the footnote in the
bus schedule: "This service operates one quarter hour earlier
on the Thursday before Easter."
I realized I was going to have to learn some Færoese.
Edward Ordman
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