Speaking Out

Frederick Bodmer's "The Loom of Language" was first published by Allen & Unwin in 1944. The copy I have is a reprint of the first paperback edition, dated 1996. When I was a young teenager I borrowed this book so often from our local library that I began to feel it was mine; then someone else borrowed it and never returned it. Luckily I found one later in a local bookshop. It has never lost its charms for me. For anyone interested in languages, it is an amazing book. It tells the story of languages from earliest times, and traces how the different ones we have today developed. It discusses language learning, the origins of script and writing systems, artificial languages, everything to do with languages. Here you will find tables translating English into all the common Germanic languages, and separate ones translating English into the more common Romance languages. It is a book to take up again and again. If such a book had been written and handed down from the times of Linear A and Linear B there would be a lot of happy scholars now.

The Dictionary of Languages by Andrew Dalby, which describes itself as "The Definitive Reference To More Than 400 Languages" is another fascinating book. I bought it from Amazon, havng come across a review of it by chance. My copy is a paperback published by A &C Black of London in 2006. It details 400 different languages, giving maps of where they are to be found, their origins and relationships with other languages living or dead, and the number of speakers using them as a first language. As you read you realise what treasures our spoken tongues are, how they enunciate emotions and feelings and ideas, how important it is not to let these go, how they are as important a part of our heritage as any artefacts in museums. The Irish Times today had a small piece on a session at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting which is underway in Vancouver. At the meeting it was said that the technology of the internet and the social media which use it will be the saviour of dying languages. The importance of all languages was stressed. The Times reported that 'The loss of languages spoken by only a few hundred people may not seem an issue when there are plenty more languages to replace them. Yet languages are a unique repository not just of words but also of cultural identity, linguists stressed'......"Languages become a repository of information on plant and animal species, cultural practices, traditional medicine and much more," said Prof David Harrison of Swarthmore college in Pennsylvania. "Through the digital technologies these languages can talk to the world." he said. And I have to say I think that sounds right to me. Owning and reading language books is a personal experience, but sharing this experience with a large number of other people has only been made possible since the arrival of the internet.

"Contemporary Linguistics – An Introduction" by William O'Grady, Michael Dobrovolsky and Francis Katamba, published by Longman, London & New York in 1996, was a college book from about fourteen years ago. It is one of those hefty books I discussed in an earlier instalment of my blog, having been revised and upgraded a number of times, so that shelves and shelves of the earlier volumes teeter in corners of student bookshops. I read recently that a university bookshop in Dublin had thrown out mountains of this type of textlbook because they couldn't sell them. A terrible waste, and definitely a pointer that the looseleaf type of textbook or some other similar system should be produced, where pages with revisions could be easily inserted, and also, the portions of the book required for certain classes could easily be carried in to college as needed and later returned to their place in the book. In this way a textbook would remain relevant for the duration of a particular course, the purchase of the revised pages being easily and cheaply accomplished when necessary, and the whole could be of value as a secondhand book when an individual student has finished with it. No doubt this would affect greatly the sales of college textbook publishers, who are not in the business for purely altruistic reasons, but when the sheer waste involved in producing these updated textbooks year after year is considered, these days there should be no contest, in my opinion. We just cannot live any longer with the squandering of resources which took place in the so-called boom years. They were really the bust years in the true sense, though we were pitifully unaware of it.

In a sale I found a volume entitled "Webster's Third New International Dictionary and Seven Language Dictionary" which appears to be part of a set published by Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., Chicago, in 1981.. The section on languages, entitled "The Britannica World Language Dictionary" gives the grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation and useful phrases for French, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish and Yiddish. English, the source language, is apparently counted in the seven. The grammar section for each language is short but comprehensive. The best thing about this book is that it includes Yiddish, which I have never come across before in any language book. According to the text "..this is the first time Yiddish words have appeared in dictionary form in Roman characters so that they are understandable to all who read English." There are probably quite a few of these old dictionary parts to be found in sales if you're lucky.

For anybody interested in languages I would like to mention www.freerice.com, which is a website run by the United Nations World Food Program. . When you go on you will find yourself on a page giving English words and asking you to give the correct meaning. Questions to which wrong answers are given are given again, until a right answer is obtained. Every time you get an answer right some rice is donated to poor countries. The donors are the advertisers on the site, it is all explained under 'Rice' on the top menu. On the top right of the box where you find the questions, you can click and find a menu of subjects, including mathematics, art history, from tomorrow Anatomy and most importantly from my point of view, there are vocabulary tests for German, French, Italian and Spanish. I would have been more pleased if there were a section for Russian and Chinese vocabulary, the latter in Pinyin for those of us who have not got around to mastering Chinese characters. It is easy to spend hours on this website, but you won't feel you are wasting time because you are testing your knowledge of languages and at the same time donating rice.

Another website is How To Learn Any Language:
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/e/mezzofanti/biography/index.html and on the page to which this link leads on that site, you will find the fascinating story of one Cardinal Joseph Caspar Mezzofanti, born 17^th September, 1774 at Bologna, who was renowned for his vast knowledge of languages. One thing he and I have in common is that apparently he was not a great traveller, which often puzzles people who seem to think that if you are interested in languages you are of necessity interested in visiting foreign lands. As far as I am concerned this is definitely not the case. Of course in his day they didn't have aeroplanes, however, from my point of view air travel is just one more reason to remain at home.

An Irish site which has a very good section for those interested in learning languages is www.boards.ie, The page link is http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?f=217 .

There is no shortage of websites for language lovers, but those are my particular favourites. Perhaps if you have a personal favourite, you would be kind enough to put a link to it in the comment box on this blog so we can all try it out.

I have been collecting language books for many years. Some have more merits than others, for instance, there are books which are better at explaining grammar, or at providing the learner with colloquial phrases, and some systems are more suitable for certain types of learner than others, but they all have something of value to offer, and are worth holding on to and passing on to posterity.

Old but still good

At a car boot sale a lovely smiley man was selling boxes of old books.  I looked through one of them and said without thinking "You know, some of these could be quite valuable."
"I'll tell you what, love"  he said. "They were my old mum's. I'm not selling them for the money.  I want them to go to someone who really wants them".  Then he looked firmly at me. " A fiver a box, love.  A whole box or nothing."
There was every sort of reading matter in there; instructions for old washing machines and Hoovers, a pamphlet on how to service an ancient-looking boiler, an inky-looking advertisement for a sale-of-work in a country school in October 1965. Underneath was the book which had drawn my attention first, a lovely copy of "Rambles in Eirinn" by William Bulfin, published by M.H. Gill of Dublin in 1908, together with a set of history books, in not such good condition:  "History Of Ireland From The Earliest Times To The Present Day", by The Rev. E.A.D'Alton, LL.d. M.R.I.A. The publishers were the Gresham Publishing Company, London and the date in Roman numerals 1912. The six volumes were described as Half-Volumes 1,2,3,4,5,and 6, a term I have never come across before.  At one time they must have been very handsome, with their green cloth covers with green lettering on a gold base and gold illumination. One had a damaged spine, and they bore the resigned air of books which had lain in an attic for many years.  However, they had been well used and loved - there were
very lightly pencilled notes in many of the margins, and here and there a pressed autumnal leaf marked a page. Looking through them again today, if the first chapter of the very first volume, entitled "Various Names of Ireland" is anything to go by, these books  are  unputdownable, although if I manage to get even part of the way through the 284 pages of the initial one, I will be doing well, for I have come across so many books I want to read since I started this blog that I would need another ninety years of life to have any hope of doing so.

In the box also, quite incongruously, were two fairly modern paperback editions of James Bond books, "The Spy Who Loved Me" and "Live and Let Die".
I handed over the money, and in the course of a short conversation I discovered that his mother was dead two years, and he had only now started to sort out her things.  She had been almost ninety when she died.  I had to ask if she was a James Bond fan.  He laughed.
 - "She were a bit of a James Bond herself".  I was interested, but he turned away to talk to someone else and then went to root in his van.  I sensed the conversation was over.

Old books are so much about the people who owned them - where and why they bought them or who gave them to them, what they meant in their lives; fiction or non-fiction, books draw other stories in their wake as long as they exist.

In the first paragraphs of his book about his cycling tour around Ireland, Bulfin tells us -
"It was the last day of June, and the weather was perfect. The people along the road said it was "shocking warm" and "terrible hot, glory be to God", but after seventeen sweltering years at the sunny South I found it just charming.......it was a splendid dawn.  We seemed to have brought with us some of the sunshine of the South, for earth and sea and air were flooded with morning gold. It flamed in the soft clouds which dotted the sky.  It flushed the blue.  It lay on the hills.  It rippled on the water."  and so on, in warm words which mitigate a little the grey blue of the winter afternoon outside my window.  The book has many photographs of Irish locations, worthy of a visit for reasons of scenery or history or archaeology.  The photos particularly fascinate because of the changes in the depicted places since they were taken; the traffic in the Dublin and Cork of this book would not have offered the same threat to Bulfin that modern vehicles do to a cyclist.  How free it must have felt to travel the country's roads without fear of the monsters which now loom around every corner.

The front cover of Bulfin's work is quite undamaged, the title and author's name illuminated in gold and decorated likewise.  The smooth, cream-coloured pages bear some inconsequential marks but in general they are sound.

The technological and scientific advances we have seen today, unthinkable only a few years ago, make me speculate that there may well come a time when it will be possible to identify the people who once opened this book, maybe all books that survive. We have already overtaken James Bond and goodness knows where it will end.

 Such, I suppose, are the thoughts of many like myself who read their books and dream.