TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/070290/0702640.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.2 KB | 125 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 70

Excusez-Moi! Speakez-Vous Franglais?


By Pico Iyer


    The best way to deal with a foreigner, any old-school Brit
will tell you, is to shout at the blighter in English until he
catches on. If he professes not to understand, just turn up the
volume till he does. A man who doesn't speak English is a man
who isn't worth speaking to. Robert Byron, the great traveler
of the '30s who wrote so feelingly on Islamic culture, got
great comic effect by treating every alien he met -- even an
American -- as an unintelligible buffoon; and his John Bullish
contemporary Evelyn Waugh all but enunciated a Blimp's Code by
asserting that no man who knew more than one language could
express himself memorably in any. (Take that, Nabokov! Et tu,
Samuel Beckett!)

    To speak or not to speak: it is a question at least as old
as moody Danes delivering English couplets. And every year, as
summer approaches, we face the same dilemma: whether to try,
when in Rome, to speak as the Romans do or to rely on Italian
cabbies speaking English (with brio, no doubt, and
sprezzatura). In some respects, it comes down to a question of
whether 'tis better to give or to receive linguistic torture.
The treachery of the phrase book, as every neophyte soon
discovers, is that you cannot begin to follow the answer to the
question you've pronounced so beautifully -- and, worse still,
your auditor now assumes you're fluent in Swahili. Yet sticking
to English, it's easy to feel that you've never left home at
all (and are guilty, to boot, of a Waugh-like linguistic
imperialism).

    In recent years, of course, the spreading of the global
village has made cross-purposing a little easier. We think it
only natural to ask for hors d'oeuvres from a maitre d' -- as
natural, perhaps, as discussing Realpolitik and the Zeitgeist
with a Hamburger. And as English has become a kind of lingua
franca, all of us are fluent in Franglais and in Japlish. It
really is possible for an un-self-made man, arriving in Paris,
to ask a mademoiselle for a rendezvous and then take her for
le fast food and le dancing and even, perhaps, le parking. But
later she may call him un jerk, and he may get upset if he
doesn't know that the term, in French, means an expert dancer.

    The problems are most acute, in fact, when both parties
think they're speaking the same language: Shaw's famous crack
about England and America being "two countries separated by the
same language" is 30 times as true now that up to 60 countries
claim English as their mother -- or at least stepmother --
tongue. An Australian will invite you to a hotel, and you may
be shocked if you don't know that it's what you think of as a
bar. An Indian will "prepone" a meeting, and only if you're
quick enough to calculate "postpone" in reverse have you any
chance of showing up on time. Above all, as English has become
a kind of prized commodity -- and a status symbol -- in many
corners of the world, those of us born in possession of it are
apt to feel as vulnerable as a bejeweled dowager in a dark back
alleyway. There's always someone waiting to jump out and mug
us with his English -- before we can try out our Bahasa
Indonesia on him.

    And yet, and yet, there is to all this another dimension.
For in speaking a foreign language, we tend to lose years, as
well as other kinds of time, to become gentler, more innocent,
more courteous versions of ourselves. We find ourselves reduced
to basic adjectives, like "happy" and "sad," and erring on the
side of including our "monsieurs," and we are obliged to grow
resourceful and imaginative in conveying our most complex needs
and feelings in the few terms we remember (like a child
rebuilding Chartres out of Lego blocks). Think of how English
sounds as spoken by Marcello Mastroianni: romantic, suggestive,
helplessly endearing. Might the same not be true in reverse?
Peter Falk appearing in a German movie (Wings of Desire) seems
almost as exotic as Isabelle Adjani in an American one.

    Speaking a foreign language, we cannot so easily speak our
minds, but we do willy-nilly speak our hearts. We grow more
direct in another tongue and say the things we would not say
at home -- as if, you might say, we were under a foreign
influence. Inhibitions are the first thing to get lost in
translation: "Je t'aime" comes much more easily than "I love
you." Small wonder, perhaps, that spies are gifted linguists
by nature as well as by training (John le Carre was one of the
most brilliant language students of his day); entering another
tongue, we steal into another self.

    And even when we're not speaking Spanish but only English
that a Spaniard will understand, the effect is just as
rejuvenating. How vivid the cliche "over the hill" sounds when
we're explaining it to an Osaka businessman! How rich the idiom
"raining cats and dogs!" Speaking English as a second language,
we find ourselves rethinking ourselves, simplifying ourselves,
committed, for once, not to making impressive sentences but
just to making sense. English is the official language of the
European Free Trade Association, though none of its six members
has English as its mother tongue. Why? Well, says the
secretary-general disarmingly, "using English means we don't
talk too much, since none of us knows the nuances."

    Besides, whether we inflict our French on the concierge or
not, many of our transactions will come down, in the end, to
an antic game of charades. English may be the universal
language, but it's still less universal than hands and eyes.
So even as we become unwitting James Joyces -- coining
neologisms by the minute -- when we essay a foreign language,
we also become Marcel Marceaus: asking the way to the rest room
with our eyebrows or sending back the squid with a paroxysm of
mock pain. Ask a man in Tierra del Fuego to point you to The
Sound of Music, and he'll instantly reply, "No problem!" (which,
in every language, means that your problems are just
beginning). Then he'll direct you to the Julie Andrews musical
that the Argentines call The Rebel Nun. And when you say "Thank
you" to him -- in Spanish -- it can almost sound like a kind
of grace.