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Weeds: In a manner of speaking

Weeds

Last October, friend Ralph Stadick passed away. His daughter Sue told me that in his final hours Ralph spoke in his first language as he said his goodbyes. Ralph, like a lot of that generation in Brown County, was born into a household where German was spoken by his parents.

That reminded me of when my parents came to visit in Germany where I spent a semester during college. I got to know a young family that fall, and they invited me to bring my parents for a meal in Wiesbaden. The couple spoke German and my parents spoke English. I was left to translate the conversation using my frail German learnt in classrooms. Translating between a table-full of people was exhausting.

Like Ralph, my parents spoke German as very young children. That was long ago, and outside of an occasional epithet (“Oh, that Schweinhund!”) their first language was forgotten. Or so I thought.

We were sipping wine, and Sylvester and Alyce began using a few German words, then some phrases. Finally whole sentences came out “auf Deutsch.” By the end of the night the entire conversation had shifted to German. The casual setting, buoyed by Rhine wine, brought to the surface a language buried deep in their past.

Under quite different circumstances, the language of their early childhood came to light for Ralph and my parents. It is during those early years that our brain is developing rapidly and prodigiously. It is malleable and soaks up skills like a sponge. Things learned then become etched in permanent marker even if unused for decades.

In college, I had a professor who spent alternating years teaching in the United States and Germany. He had young children. He said that they would get off the plane and immediately switch to the tongue of that place. They never took lessons; the very young simply absorb what is around them.

I have thought we do our children a disservice by not exposing them to other languages at a young age. It is literally easy for them to learn. My own German was learned in high school well after my brain’s rapid growth years. I became fair at speaking during my time in Germany, but it has slipped away. Now I only pick up scattered words when I listen to Angela Merkel.

Words and languages have always interested me. I joke to Pam that if I weren’t farming I would be a linguist. Unfortunately there aren’t a lot of career opportunities in linguistics in case this farming thing doesn’t work out.

All these words we use without thought, where do they come from? Some words sound like what they mean, if you use your imagination. A word like “crush” sounds like what it describes. “Zerquetschen” in German makes a crushing sound, too. Blink is another word that sounds like its meaning. It becomes “blinken” in German. But it is “parpadeo” in Spanish. Cat is “Katze” and “gato.” Fair enough. But why is a “tree” in English a “Baum” in German and an “arbol” in Spanish?

I find this stuff fascinating. In the Pyrenees Mountains, completely different languages developed because it was impossible to cross over to the next valley for eons. In the same way isolated island tribes create unique languages. In other places languages got squished together and borrowed heavily from each other depending on wars, trade, and climate, even romance.

In The World That I Grew Up In, I regularly heard German in Sleepy Eye. If you are my age you remember the word “gell.” It was used at the end of a sentence, as in, “Right?” or “Got that?” Terry Helget told me that he heard, “Get the chores done, gell?” often as a boy on the farm.

Now I hear Spanish on the streets and in stores. That change in my lifetime illustrates a cultural shift as well as any statistics. A generation ago, Hispanic families began coming to Sleepy Eye for seasonal work. Gradually many of them stayed. Now they are a significant part of our town, a next chapter in the ever evolving story of America. Some are bilingual and use Spanish with their friends. That is the language of their early years, not unlike German was for my parents.

I enjoy the sound of Spanish. It is melodic and pleasant sounding; a lot of words end softly. The internet tells me that Spanish is a syllable-timed language and English is a stress-timed language. I don’t know what that means. Perhaps I will when I begin my career as a linguist.

My daughter Abby is fluent in Spanish. That began in Gail Bromenschenkel’s class at St. Mary’s and flourished in travels to Spain and Mexico. She has used it in her jobs on the West Coast. Most of her friends in Washington and California speak Spanish.

Through Abby’s influence, I like to listen to Spanish music while I work. My current favorite is a Colombian group called Morat. (Look them up on YouTube.) Sometimes I think it is strange listening to songs I don’t understand. But when I ask Abby about the lyrics, it’s about a boy who likes some girl, or a girl who likes some boy. That describes most songs in English, so I’m not missing anything.

I have made a weak effort to learn Spanish. I have an app on my phone but never get too far with it. This aging brain is not the malleable, flexible brain of a child. I walked by some young men who were speaking Spanish a while ago. I stopped and told them I wished I could learn their language. They had a solution. Laughing, they told me that I needed to get a Hispanic girlfriend. I told that to Pam. She didn’t seem worried.

We were visiting Abby in Spain a few summers ago. Older daughter Anna and I were up late one night at a deli/café in Madrid where we were having a last Sangria. We were sitting on bar stools when some men came in. It looked like they were finishing a late shift at work.

You could tell they were men who did physical work. They were exactly the type of guys that would be coming into the City Limits in Sleepy Eye early before heading off to their jobs. They seemed familiar. I wanted to ask them things, but most Spaniards don’t speak English. Anna knows a little Spanish, and she gamely tried to translate a conversation. That was not getting anywhere fast.

Finally I just started talking to them as if they could understand me: politics, sports, weather. They looked at me like I was nuts, but seemed to appreciate the effort.

In the bible story of the Tower of Babel, the diverse languages we speak are presented as a curse on humanity. It can be frustrating when you can’t talk to guys in a café in Madrid. On the other hand, these languages are part of the rich diversity of people and cultures on our planet. Gell?

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