This is Heaven

I’m going to say it, shout it from my small studio apartment downtown: I love Turkish and French! And then I say it out loud and my cats stare at me.

I happily clack away at the keyboard with Wicked bouncing around my brain. I love Turkish vowel harmony. I love the uvular [r] of French, even though I swallow it when I try to speak it. In fact, my French pronunciation is so slovenly that Rosetta Stone shakes its finger at me when I say something as mundane as bonjour. I don’t care. The grammar of these two is thrilling, the way Turkish stacks its morphemes like Legos.

I’m playing the waiting game with queries and graduate school. What passes the time is studying obligation in Turkish. I’ve always wanted to visit Turkey, to wander the markets of Istanbul, and my mother wanted to see Çatalhöyük. I plan out what it would be like to see France, to twirl around the streets of Paris. The travel bug is still digging its way into my soul, and the only thing that grounds it is the hope, the tireless hope, that I will one day become a Linguist with a capital L.

Here is the thing: Linguists do not necessarily speak more than one language. I studied the marvelous Arabic in college, and I enjoyed every part of it. Lots of linguists are foreign language fanatics — after all, language and its freedom of movement are our passion — but the scientific study of language can be anchored in a single tongue, or the interaction between two specific ones. In fact, in my application, I proposed looking at the interplay between Nahuatl and Spanish in Mexico.

However, I wouldn’t be opposed to studying every language in the Middle East as well. Thus we are introduced to Turkish. Before buying my handy textbook, I knew that it was probably the world’s most famous agglutinating language and that I wanted to read Orhan Pamuk in his original words, and that was about it. I didn’t know that it would be such a delight to read about, to puzzle over and through. It’s a bit like having a cheerful, optimistic friend, one who is steady and reliable.

And French.

What can I say about French? When I was younger and dreamed of just speaking fifteen languages (like, no big deal), French was always my righthand man after Spanish. It is a more loquacious friend, one who talks a mile a minute and hops around. The entire language is green, the way the colors of it blend is so spectacular. By comparison, Turkish, which is brassy and yellow, tastes like copper. At present, I am going over intonation and stress in both languages. I cleanse my palate with some vanilla tea.

French the Fantastic and Turkish the Terrific make my days special. Where sometimes I prepare for the punch in the face from Russian (it is still a beloved language, people), I look forward to my time in Turkish. It reminds me why I want to devote my life and my very soul to language, both writing and science. The thrill that this provides me surpasses every other daydream. If I have language, I have life. If I have language, no time is wasted.

To quote Wicked: As someone told me lately, everyone deserves a chance to elide. Thanks for the good times, French. And if I am studying solo, at least I’m studying free.

Good luck getting that song out of your head now.