First buttembly language encountershow to get started 568

Brian Inglis

Smattering about covers it for the Italian.

Thanks to an exceptionally well-funded American public school district that believed in early language instruction, I had Spanish from third grade (age 8) through the first two years of high school (age 15), at which point I opted to switch to French for my last two years years instead (and as it is also a romance language I did well and managed to catch up almost to the level of the best students who had been studying it since elementary school). I did a couple of years of German as an undergraduate at the point, about halfway through, where it became painfully evident that that was needed to do any work at all in historical musicology (reading knowledge of German, English, and French is pretty much a necessity for the secondary literature, plus of course whatever languages the primary historical sources you are dealing with); then, when doing postgraduate work in that field, a couple of intensive summer courses to bring Latin and Italian up to a reasonable level (Italian being useful for both primary and secondary sources, and Latin being pretty much indispensable for looking at anything before 1600 and surprisingly useful for later centuries). In the course of one's musical training, even as an instrumentalist, one does have the opportunity and the requirement to do a bit of singing from time to time, some of it in these very languages, so that a reasonable ability to speak and pronounce (not just the ability to read) is something that one tries to get when studying them; not to mention that it also comes in handy if one also travels as a performer or researcher. (Of course the first time I set foot in Europe I was admirably prepared to discuss watermarks and rastrology you are not supposed to understand this! with librarians and archivists but unable to order lunch from a restaurant or snack bar. Travel does get your priorities back in order, pronto!)

I taught myself Dutch a few years ago with the help of an excellent self-instruction text with audio tapes (Colloquial Dutch by Bruce Donaldson, published by Routledge) when I was invited to perform in the Netherlands. I was probably the last serious viola da gamba player of my generation to pick up some Dutch -- the Netherlands and Belgium having been a major center of the gamba-playing world throughout the 1970s and 80s (and still) and a magnet for students from throughout the world, but I never did study there myself, instead having the benefit of having some of the best of the first crop of Americans who went and returned as my teachers. Except for the pronunciation of some of its famous diphthongs, Dutch is really pretty easy to pick up if you already have German and English and (for numerous loan words, but obviously not for grammar) French. I had visited the Netherlands and Dutch-speaking Belgium many years previously and found myself a bit frustrated not to be able to speak or understand the language at all (even though my hosts and nearly everyone I met spoke excellent English); so I resolved that I wouldn't let that happen a second time. Far the worst part of it was walking around officially bilingual Brussels able to speak and understand only French and not Flemish. (One is well advised to stick completely to English in such circumstances!)

Oh -- and I got a little bit of Russian in an after-school clbutt in high school; we barely got into the second-year school textbook by the end of our third year meeting twice a week or so. I can't really say that I function at all usefully in that language, but it did help enormously when I wanted to acquire a bit of Slovak preparatory to a performance in Bratislava. (I do this sort of thing partly just for the fun of annoying one of my musical collaborators, who is a hopelessly monoglot Englishman. It was from the English that we Americans, as a culture, learned how to be dreadful at languages, dontcha know?)

Now (as you will have gathered) I have a better grasp of some of these languages than others, and only the Spanish was started early enough to be pretty much entirely accent-free. (I have been asked at least once in Spain where in South America I was from, which I found quite flattering, though the young people who asked me were, I am sure, going as much or more by my use of pronouns as as by my accent, both of which are decidedly western-hemispheric.)

Added all up on paper, it does seem like rather a lot of languages for an American, I suppose, but it's not all that many for an American (or anyone else) with a postgraduate education in a historical discipline. I rather regret that I have thus far learned only European languages, but given that the majority of my language learning was ancillary to my study of European music history, thems (as we say) is the breaks.

-- Roland HutchinsonÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊWillÊplayÊviolaÊdaÊgambaÊforÊfood.

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