vlad.tribnet.com / Issue #555 / Vladivostok by Braille / Reading article...

A colleague of mine once said of Vladivostok, “This is a port city, English is in the air.” English is indeed the language of business and commerce. Yet here in Vladivostok with English in the air, Russian on the streets, and living in an academic community where French, Japanese, Chinese, German, Dutch, and Korean are generally just around the corner, one finds oneself in the center of a semiotic implosion.

Often as an American living abroad I rail against the fact that too few of our youths are given an adequate education in languages other than English. As I listen to Europeans who easily unwind swarthy yarns of past adventures in a litany of successive languages, my inner school-child snarls at the memory of whatever sheltered high-school principle decided that one year of Spanish was good enough.

The lurking question, which comes as carry-on with any English-speaking traveler, is whether or not English is truly enough. For those of us who have pulled this question out of the overhead compartment and given it a resolute “no”, the journey is only beginning.

Learning a new language, whether it is your second or your tenth, is a gauntlet. Yet I have found that in swearing yourself to this adventure you find yourself suddenly surrounded by knights of the same order. Though not necessarily of the same origins, and that friendly skirmishing in the ranks is to be expected, and highly enjoyed.

Native Russian speakers assure me that learning English sentence structure is by far the most difficult task to undertake, while I rebut with testimony of my experiences wrestling their six grammatical cases. A fellow student who is from Japan recounted to me in Russian, and in wide-eyed horror the insane phonetic systems of English, while I countered with the six verbs and their nearly 100 constituents which varyingly conjugate to mean “to go”.

In the meantime a young Frenchman assures me confidently that you just pick any word in Russian and it will have a French root. The Chinese rarely comment since it is without question that their language would kick all of our languages rear-ends.

This linguistic fencing, this semantic shoulder punching, I have found, is one of the great rituals among the multi-linguists. But what does all of this really say? If a language is a mirror held up to the culture which speaks it, what does it mean that American sarcasm cannot translate into Russian, and that Russian humor cannot translate into any language whatsoever? Perhaps language is more than sound and more than symbol. Perhaps it is experiential.

In my experience near the end of my Russian language lessons my mouth is generally no longer physically capable of stringing together coherently even the words of my own language. I take these moments of muted reflection to puzzle over the paradoxical, the intransigent, and the laborious love that is language. I muse over the moments which have illuminated for me the central mysteries.

In one such moment, while walking down the street in Vladivostok with that same Japanese student we passed a manhole whose cover had been permanently removed. The word for a pit in Russian is yama. She turned to me and said, “You know, it is kind of strange, yama in Japanese means mountain…” All I could offer in return was that slightly modified the word, in English, would refer to a hairy mammal found in Peru and some parts of southern Ecuador, a mystery indeed.

Being only an initiate to these mysteries I do not yet know if it is truly vital for English speakers to branch out into the wilds of foreign languages. All I can say is that many of us are so compelled and much rewarded, in both our friendships and in our experiences of cultures not our own, for our efforts. And that while Shakespeare may be correct in saying that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, a yama in any other language is certainly not as deep.