Chickens at the Boulangerie

Word nerd European tour

I had the great luck to get to go to France, England, and Wales this summer with my partner and daughter, which was a) super fun and b) great word nerd fodder. I’m excited to see how the trip shows up in my teaching this year, but for now, some nerdy observations:

Chickens at the Boulangerie

I had been doing Duolingo pretty hard before the trip, and while I have some doubts about that app, partly because it’s so visually focused, it must have helped. For the first time, my French was good enough shopkeepers stuck it out in French, though one person did think I was trying to order a pistachio chocolate chicken (poulet) instead of pistachio chocolate roll (roule). I love speaking French, even though I am just a beginner with big French aspirations, so this made me really happy. Also, you know, I was in France, so that also made me happy.

Tomahtoes, Tomaytoes and Rock and Roll

We got to spend a lot of time with my partner’s English family, which was a delight in many, many ways, including eating the delicious tomatoes his dad grows, and our playful teasing about accents. My daughter almost instantly started sounding British to my ears. She said “tomahto.” She put the uptick on her questions before the end of the sentence. Her vocabulary shifted. I was almost worried everyone else would think she was making fun of them, but it wasn’t noticeable to them through the rest of her American accent. Meanwhile, they maintain that the Beatles sound really American.

Language and History Alive in Wales

We also spent a week in Wales, and while I didn’t learn much about Welsh culture, as we just stayed in one tiny, very touristy town in Snowdonia and mostly walked around in the hills, not getting in a car until it was time to leave, it was interesting to see how the history I’d been studying with my class last year was still echoing forward.

Every other year, my class explores the history of the English language, looking at Old English, the influx of French after the Norman Invasion, how colonization changed English, and how tech and teenagers change it today. We learn about how words change over time, and how words move from one language to another. We think about why we kept some words from Old English, why we ditched some for their French equivalent, and why sometimes we have both. We study a little bit of Lushootseed, a Salish language that was spoken in the Seattle area before the settlers, and is now hanging on by a thread. We think about the question of why we speak English when we don’t live in England. We learn about language families, word roots, and how immigrants change English (we looked at Yiddish words that have joined English this year). We looked at regional dialects and compared word usage (pop or soda?) It’s a really fun inquiry, with space for lots of word nerdery, and I think it also helps make English make sense, as a language and as a force in the world. It gives it a context.

Kaveh Akbar, one of my favorite contemporary poets, and the author of the novel Martyr, used to periodically post links to hard news articles about US foreign relations or domestic atrocities, with the note saying something like, “What does it mean to write in English when this is happening?” It’s a question I carry around as well. I love English: it’s richness, specificity, breadth, and music. It is my only language, fragmentary French and Spanish aside. But it is also a language with a heavy imperial history.

What was interesting, traveling in Wales, was to see that alive and present. Beyond the remains of Welsh castles meant to fight off the English, and English castles meant to subdue the Welsh, the history was visible in the language itself. Welsh is the descendant of the language spoken by the Britons, the people the Anglo-Saxons pushed out of England. It’s a Celtic language, not a Germanic language like English. The Anglo-Saxons didn’t intermix with the Britons, so there are almost no words from Welsh (or other Celtic languages) in English. Wikipedia lists ten, and the only widely used words among them were “bard,” “flannel” (with contested origins), and “corgi.” On the other hand, there are lots of loanwords from English into Welsh, to the point that some of it was readable to me, though the core of the language is so different.

Welsh is making a strong revival, with many elementary schools being taught in Welsh, and the language on all the signs. We heard it spoken by shopkeepers, and by teenage boys jumping off a bridge into a river. (I have to say, teen boy bravado has a more heroic flair when done in Welsh.)

But as far as I could tell, Welsh stopped at the border. I bought some international stamps in Wales and some in England, keeping the art of postcards alive. In Wales, the air mail stickers said “Air Mail” in English and Welsh. In England, they say it in English and French.