Chosen by Ian Irvine
Travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor at home in Greece in 2001, aged 86
On 27th January 1658, John Evelyn writes in his diary about his son Richard, who had died at the age of five:
“At that tender age [he was] a prodigy for wit and understanding... At two years and a half old, he could perfectly read any of the English, Latin, French, or Gothic letters, pronouncing the three first languages exactly. He had, before the fifth year, or in that year, not only skill to read most written hands, but to decline all the nouns, conjugate the verbs regular, and most of the irregular... got by heart almost the entire vocabulary of Latin and French primitives and words, could make congruous syntax, turn English into Latin, and vice versa... and had a strong passion for Greek.”
On 6th December 1816, Lord Byron writes to his friend Thomas Moore from Venice:
“By way of divertisement, I am studying daily, at an Armenian monastery, the Armenian language. I found that my mind wanted something craggy to break upon; and this as the most difficult thing I could discover here for an amusement I have chosen, to torture me into attention. It is a rich language, however, and would amply repay anyone the trouble of learning it. I try, and shall go on; but I answer for nothing, least of all for my intentions or my success. Four years ago the French instituted an Armenian professorship. Twenty pupils presented themselves on Monday morning, full of noble ardour, ingenuous youth, and impregnable industry. They persevered, with a courage worthy of the nation and of universal conquest, till Thursday, when 15 of the 20 [gave in] to the six-and-twentieth letter of the alphabet [the Armenian alphabet has 38 characters]. It is, to be sure, a Waterloo of an alphabet that must be said for them. But it is so like these fellows, to do by it as they did by their sovereigns—abandon both.”
In 1932, Patrick Leigh Fermor, aged 19 and walking across Europe, arrives in Budapest. An accomplished linguist, he finds himself at a loss with Hungarian:
“There was a book on learning Hungarian and I made a fumbling assault on it, though my vocabulary never got beyond a hundred words or so, most of them nouns. Coming from a great distance and wholly unrelated to the Teutonic, Latin and Slav languages that fence it in, Hungarian has remained miraculously intact. Everything about the language is different; not only the words themselves, but the way they are formed, the syntax and grammar and above all the cast of mind that brought them into being...
“One of my new friends told me... that the language closest to Hungarian was Finnish.
‘How close?’
‘Oh, very!’
‘What, like Italian and Spanish?’
‘Well no, not quite as close as that...’
‘How close then?’
Finally, after a thoughtful pause, he said, ‘About, like English and Persian.’”
Janice Galloway learns Latin at Ardrossan Academy in Ayrshire, 1968:
“Dr Nisbet, who taught with such enthusiasm her face bloomed like a sunflower when she conjugated the simplest of verbs, was as baking soda upon the grimy suggestion that Latin was useless. Latin was a way of seeing. Inspired, I read the textbook even when I didn’t have homework. Girls were forever adorning the temple with roses. Soldiers repeatedly and for no apparent reason admired the boys. Omnia mutantur, nihil interit. Everything changes, nothing perishes. If every flip from Latin to lumpy English gave me a rush, it was not necessarily because of what the sentences said in themselves; it was because translation was so realisable at all. Words and phrases that at first glance were alien, obscure or downright weird could be broken down into components, which joined and split apart like pop-beads to reveal meaning. It was astounding. Unsuspected, there under my nose all the time, language—of all deceitful and slippery things, language—was made of rules... Some people went to Scripture Union every lunchtime.... Others sacrificed their dinner-break to netball as their chosen means of finding satisfaction. At 13, I found Latin declensions, the chime of nominative, vocative, accusative, genetive, dative and ablative as the signposts on the Road that not only led to Rome but to Damascus.”
Alice Kaplan, now professor of French at Yale University, recalls her time at a finishing school in Switzerland in 1971:
“Every night I lay in bed on my bottom bunk and listened; sometimes I felt I had radar or an antenna sticking out of my ear that could capture any sound. Our rooms had loudspeakers in them, and every morning we were awakened by the Swiss news in French, and then the monitrice, Laurella, got on the mike to tell us ‘five minutes to study hall.’ Every morning those sounds woke me up. I understood more and more until I could anticipate the morning greeting of the Swiss news, and lip synch, word for word, the standard formula... I always had five or six new words on a personal in-progress list. Each time I heard one of the words on my list, I would notice the context and try and figure out the meaning. When I thought I had the meaning I would wait for the word to come up again, so I could check... Finally, I’d try the word out to see if a strange look came over the face of the person I was talking to. If it didn’t I knew I was home free. I had a new word.”
Travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor at home in Greece in 2001, aged 86
On 27th January 1658, John Evelyn writes in his diary about his son Richard, who had died at the age of five:
“At that tender age [he was] a prodigy for wit and understanding... At two years and a half old, he could perfectly read any of the English, Latin, French, or Gothic letters, pronouncing the three first languages exactly. He had, before the fifth year, or in that year, not only skill to read most written hands, but to decline all the nouns, conjugate the verbs regular, and most of the irregular... got by heart almost the entire vocabulary of Latin and French primitives and words, could make congruous syntax, turn English into Latin, and vice versa... and had a strong passion for Greek.”
On 6th December 1816, Lord Byron writes to his friend Thomas Moore from Venice:
“By way of divertisement, I am studying daily, at an Armenian monastery, the Armenian language. I found that my mind wanted something craggy to break upon; and this as the most difficult thing I could discover here for an amusement I have chosen, to torture me into attention. It is a rich language, however, and would amply repay anyone the trouble of learning it. I try, and shall go on; but I answer for nothing, least of all for my intentions or my success. Four years ago the French instituted an Armenian professorship. Twenty pupils presented themselves on Monday morning, full of noble ardour, ingenuous youth, and impregnable industry. They persevered, with a courage worthy of the nation and of universal conquest, till Thursday, when 15 of the 20 [gave in] to the six-and-twentieth letter of the alphabet [the Armenian alphabet has 38 characters]. It is, to be sure, a Waterloo of an alphabet that must be said for them. But it is so like these fellows, to do by it as they did by their sovereigns—abandon both.”
In 1932, Patrick Leigh Fermor, aged 19 and walking across Europe, arrives in Budapest. An accomplished linguist, he finds himself at a loss with Hungarian:
“There was a book on learning Hungarian and I made a fumbling assault on it, though my vocabulary never got beyond a hundred words or so, most of them nouns. Coming from a great distance and wholly unrelated to the Teutonic, Latin and Slav languages that fence it in, Hungarian has remained miraculously intact. Everything about the language is different; not only the words themselves, but the way they are formed, the syntax and grammar and above all the cast of mind that brought them into being...
“One of my new friends told me... that the language closest to Hungarian was Finnish.
‘How close?’
‘Oh, very!’
‘What, like Italian and Spanish?’
‘Well no, not quite as close as that...’
‘How close then?’
Finally, after a thoughtful pause, he said, ‘About, like English and Persian.’”
Janice Galloway learns Latin at Ardrossan Academy in Ayrshire, 1968:
“Dr Nisbet, who taught with such enthusiasm her face bloomed like a sunflower when she conjugated the simplest of verbs, was as baking soda upon the grimy suggestion that Latin was useless. Latin was a way of seeing. Inspired, I read the textbook even when I didn’t have homework. Girls were forever adorning the temple with roses. Soldiers repeatedly and for no apparent reason admired the boys. Omnia mutantur, nihil interit. Everything changes, nothing perishes. If every flip from Latin to lumpy English gave me a rush, it was not necessarily because of what the sentences said in themselves; it was because translation was so realisable at all. Words and phrases that at first glance were alien, obscure or downright weird could be broken down into components, which joined and split apart like pop-beads to reveal meaning. It was astounding. Unsuspected, there under my nose all the time, language—of all deceitful and slippery things, language—was made of rules... Some people went to Scripture Union every lunchtime.... Others sacrificed their dinner-break to netball as their chosen means of finding satisfaction. At 13, I found Latin declensions, the chime of nominative, vocative, accusative, genetive, dative and ablative as the signposts on the Road that not only led to Rome but to Damascus.”
Alice Kaplan, now professor of French at Yale University, recalls her time at a finishing school in Switzerland in 1971:
“Every night I lay in bed on my bottom bunk and listened; sometimes I felt I had radar or an antenna sticking out of my ear that could capture any sound. Our rooms had loudspeakers in them, and every morning we were awakened by the Swiss news in French, and then the monitrice, Laurella, got on the mike to tell us ‘five minutes to study hall.’ Every morning those sounds woke me up. I understood more and more until I could anticipate the morning greeting of the Swiss news, and lip synch, word for word, the standard formula... I always had five or six new words on a personal in-progress list. Each time I heard one of the words on my list, I would notice the context and try and figure out the meaning. When I thought I had the meaning I would wait for the word to come up again, so I could check... Finally, I’d try the word out to see if a strange look came over the face of the person I was talking to. If it didn’t I knew I was home free. I had a new word.”
