The Great Italian Conundrum

I did an impulsive thing and bought an Italian grammar.

Here I am, sitting in my living room with hours of Gilmore Girls warbling on the television, parceling out my schedule for the GRE studies that I will be embarking on for the next few months. Almost mindlessly, I opened up Amazon and purchased the grammar and then went back to my short story. Just like that.

Except that it was not just like that.

Many years ago, there lived an eleven-year-old named Savannah who decided to study Latin and proceeded with her copy of Latin for Dummies, reading it instead of doing her required sixth-grade algebra. Being a child, she was impressed by the Latin word for troglodyte (troglodyta). She had always loved language as a machine, of course, but Latin proved to be a red doorway lined with potted plants, opening her into a world of studying various languages as dialects and living bodies. Savannah decided that she liked these living languages so much that even an extinct language still had an animate soul and that she would like to learn fifteen of these babies. Because Savannah loved to make lists (she once made a list of hotels on the Vegas Strip and was perturbed when she found herself unable to compile each and every one), she hastily sketched out four requisite languages to master: French, Spanish, German, Italian.

The thing is, though, that, when I (er, Savannah) truly stopped to think about it, I was more interested in Latin than Italian. I deleted Italian from my list of interesting languages and shrugged it off. For years, it floated out of my life like inconsequential flotsam and I gave it no mind. By the time I was fourteen, I was dedicated to Latin with no feeling for its daughter tongue. My mother purchased for me a copy of Wheelock’s Latin (a definite step up from Latin for Dummies) and a dictionary. Giddy, I shot my professor many questions about modern words in Latin. “How do you say screenplay in Latin?” I cooed.

Time went on. I found myself attracted to Portuguese, a language that I had never been remotely interested in until I discovered Fernando Pessoa. I realized that I was passionate about Akkadian. Persian. Swahili. Icelandic. Russian. Maybe even Hindi or Hebrew or Korean. I made myself a promise that I would excel in Japanese after a coworker cast doubts on the possibility of my being able to learn hiragana and katakana. With Arabic, it was like I was on an elevator, zooming up and down, trying to learn a spoken dialect and Modern Standard. I never even considered Italian.

But a curious thing happened a few weeks ago. Was it my plan to read The Divine Comedy? My perusal of all these comparative literature PhD websites in preparation for my own application? The number of people who identified Italian as a target language? I mean, I don’t speak Italian or Classical Nahuatl and how can I expect to get into Columbia if I don’t speak Italian or Classical Nahuatl?!

Do I only want to learn Italian now because I feel some inadequacy?

Since I reconsidered Italian, I have vacillated between wanting to devote myself to it in conjunction with Latin and panicking about squeezing it into my schedule as I prep for PhD applications. Really, the idea that I have to commit myself to a language, as though it is a requirement handed down from God, is absurd. But Italian is abruptly an old friend reappearing in my life, and I want to approach it in a historical, Latin-based context.

Every new language is a new journey, as kitschy as that sounds. Italian is yellow, full of bubbling words that froth and spill over. I have never studied a yellow language before — Swahili is tan; Icelandic is blue; Latin is crimson —so it might just be like acquiring a bouquet. But I find myself enthusiastic about this upcoming quest. How does one count to ten? Do the adjectives fall before or after the noun? Head initial or head final? I am going to find out, go on a few dates with this language.

And perhaps the next time I mindlessly purchase a book, it will be Classical Nahuatl.