Teaching language, I’ve discovered, is a strange thing. Much of the process involves tedious repetition, games, and songs, but the actual word-learning has to do very specifically with the shapes our mouth makes, the placement of tongue and teeth, the resulting sound that becomes the word.
Such an anatomical approach to language leaves me questioning the basics. As I was teaching my young students the names of fruit and vegetables, I had to pause and confirm to myself plural versus singular forms. In a general sense, one should say, I like grapes, but I like grapefruit. I like apples, but I like pineapple. I like fruit; I like vegetables. Who decided that?
Grapes, grapefruit, apples, and pineapple lead to an awareness of how arbitrary all words are. The question “who decided that?” works on a scale grander than melon and cherries.
Being an untrained English teacher to very young French students is hard work. Typically I jump around the classroom with the kind of freakish energy I’ve only seen displayed in anime characters, hoping to hold their attention and maybe, in the margins, teach a few words of English. With all my songs and cheap tricks, I feel more like a clown than an educator.
Speaking of, I wish all words were like banana. The kids never forget the word banana. This has something to do with the fact that it’s a “transparent” word, meaning it’s phonetically close to the French translation, banane. But the word is “transparent” on another level– to me, the sound of banana conjures the conspicuous and farcical nature of the banana itself.
It’s easy to sit back and speculate on the arbitrary nature of language. Indeed, it feels natural to do so in a French caf??. However, some words are not arbitrary. Or, at least, they don’t seem to be. A banana seems similar to the word banana. That sheepish yellow thing has some inherent degree of absurdity– an absurdity that’s reflected in the sound of the word. But it’s impossible to know where my understanding of the object itself stops and language’s creeping influence starts. They overlap.
Back to the clown-banana theme, one of my favorite French words is rigolo. Say it. Sound it out.
It means funny, but did you already know that? Isn’t the sound of the word plainly comic?
In Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages, published posthumously in 1781, he writes on the importance of sound in language (“interest is aroused more effectively by sounds”). He imagines the hypothetical first language–an ideal language: “as natural voices are unarticulated, words would have few articulations;” the language would be “flowing and easy to pronounce”; “one would sing it rather than speak it.” In his imagined, perfect language, “onomatopoeia would constantly make itself felt” because in that case sound embraces meaning.
Rousseau’s ideal language depends on the marriage between sound and meaning. It would certainly make my job easier.
In Alexander Pope’s poem Sound and Sense, he says, “The sound must seem an echo to the sense”:
True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learned to dance.
‘Tis not enough no harshness gives offense,
The sound must seem an echo to the sense:
Soft is the strain when Zephyr gently blows,
And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows;
But when loud surges lash the sounding shore,
The hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar;
When Ajax strives some rock’s vast weight to throw,
The line too labors, and the words move slow;
Not so, when swift Camilla scours the plain,
Flies o’er the unbending corn, and skims along the main.
Hear how Timotheus’ varied lays surprise,
And bid alternate passions fall and rise!
I admit I was overly ambitious when I tried to teach the twelve year-old I tutor about alliteration. I should teach her the English language before I teach her to talk about the language. But, like Pope says, sound is necessary to the art of writing and speaking. The dexterous language dance is a three-pronged waltz– physical, auditory, cognitive: our mouths form sounds that mirror the idea. In the best cases, sound can make language musical. Sometimes the music surpasses the words.
Today, I walked through one of Nice’s largest city squares, Place Massena. It was about 4 PM: a time, here, when the sun makes everything golden. More golden than normal 4 PM-sun-trajectory-golden, I swear. It must be something about Nice’s proximity to the water, about old brick’s capacity for absorbing light, about France. A man in the center of the square was playing a piano. He was playing something grand and ebullient, bursting with ascending and descending scales, drawing from all octaves, and in short, so breathtakingly majestic, that it made the value of the moment unusually apparent. Sound can do that. So, let’s all say ba-na-na.
