Language

Since I was a very small child, language has always fascinated me. I once read an article on how for some children, language is a code to be broken -- the reels slide into the correct order on the drums in their brains, and suddenly the world comes alive in combinations of letters that make sense. Such was the case with me. I learned to read so early that I can't remember ever not reading. And that was merely English. When I was in kindgergarten, I attended a private day school for a time, where they engaged us in pursuits such as horseback riding and dress-up play, as well as rudimentary French. My days were long drawn out hours of waiting until I could see the familiar sketchy illustrations of our elementary French text. Le rasoir. Les pantalons. Le poulet.

Later, in public school, there were no language studies to amuse me until high school. I settled for an obsession with English grammar. "Conjugate the verb 'to be' -- present, past and past perfect. If you can conjugate more tenses, you'll get extra credit. " I conjugated them all. All the tenses. Tenses some of you were probably not aware we had in English. I actually did this, not for extra credit, which I assuredly did not need, but out of love for conjugation, out of desire to be conjugating something besides my native tongue.

In high school I took the two years of French available to me, as well as a third independent study course when there were no other options. My senior year, I quit band to study Spanish. When I went away to college, and I needed an elective it was always a language class. Advanced French. Intermediate Spanish. Latin. Beginning Russian. Each of the languages I learned featured those reels spinning into their correct places on the drum, the code suddenly becoming clear to me in the form of a dream or an offhand answer to a foreign friend's question.

My field of study should have been clear to me then, but I was muddled. I didn't think there was anything I could do with my love of languages other than travel and not be considered an Ugly American, or perhaps translate and be paid a tenth of what a polyglot should be worth. Linguistics didn't occur to me until the degree program had been discontinued at my school. I didn't even know what linguistics _was_, but it sure sounded like a lot of great fun. For a time, I branched out into computer languages, but their syntax was odd, and used a different, rusty part of my brain. The reels never quite clicked.

So now I want to go back and do it over. I want to learn more French, I want to learn German, Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, more Russian. I want to learn languages nobody speaks like Sanskrit and Ancient Egyptians, and ones that few people speak like the Ohlone dialects, Inuit, and Finnish. And I want to compare them, contrast them, document them, and classify them. My goal for the end of this year is to learn one simple sentence in at least fifty. This is a flighty, whimsical goal that will go hand-in-hand with serious study, so of course I'm going to ask for your input. What, just exactly what, should this simple sentence be?