I've mentioned before that my mother's family was Italian. My great-grandparents immigrated from Italy in the late 1800s; my grandmother was born here. My great-grandfather did eventually learn to speak English, but not my great-grandmother, so Italian was the language of my grandmother's childhood home (although she did speak English at school.) She never saw Italian written, however--she learned it phonetically from listening to her parents speak.
My grandfather had also grown up in an Italian-speaking home. He and my grandmother spoke Italian together when they did not want their daughters to understand them, but it was very important to them that their daughters be American and speak English like Americans (this was at a time when assimilation was important)--so their daughters never learned Italian. Some Italian phrases were incorporated into their everyday English conversation, however.
This morning, I was preparing cucumbers to take to my in-laws' house for the Oktoberfest party gurkensalat. Thing Two was swiping them out of the bowl and eating them as fast as I could cut them. In my mother's family, this sort of foodnapping has always been called "pitzking", and the person who does this is a "pitzkaral." Bear in mind that in keeping with the family tradition, I had never seen these words written either--we were all going on what we thought my great-grandmother had been saying. The words in quotation marks here are my best approximation of the way we have all been pronouncing them.
It occurred to me this morning, since my mother happened to be sitting in my kitchen while the cucumber-stealing was going on and I was telling Thing Two not to pitzk, to ask her exactly what that word meant in Italian and how to spell it. She had no idea. Ten minutes on Google Translate later, we were stymied: none of the words we could think of (picking, stealing, robbing, grabbing, etc) translated into Italian looked anything at all like what we have been so blithely saying for so many years.
I was racking my brain fiercely when it finally hit me: the word we were looking for was pescatore. Fisherman. Pesca. Fishing. Fishing a tomato out of the salad bowl. No pesca. Don't fish.
Essentially, we have been playing a multigenerational and multilingual game of Telephone, and have lost things in the translation as a result. But it gave me a real sense of accomplishment to figure that out.
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Funny! Maybe one of your children will be inspired to learn Italian.
ReplyDeleteSometimes the language loss happens even quicker - I had many students who were American-born to Spanish-speaking immigrant parents, and often their Spanish - even though they had many opportunities of usage/exposure to real Spanish - becomes a mush of grammatically incorrect Spanglish. When kids would pass notes in class I'd too often confiscate them and then correct the spelling and grammar with a red pen, arguing about academic Spanish I know versus the street mishmash Spanish they were trying to use. Look, I love living language and slang and all that, but (a) it's possible to be wrong, and (b) you should master something before trying to riff on it.
My dear friend G is a daughter of immigrants from Hong Kong and didn't speak a word of English until she started school, and still only speaks Cantonese with her parents and some extended family around but not many other people. Her husband is the son of her mother's best friend who came to the U.S. as a teenager so has pretty perfect Cantonese AND English. Once we were out when they were dating and she was trying to teach me something and he sighed in disgust. "What you and your mother speak is some made-up language and not real Cantonese!" She decided to spend the summer in China and came back to report, yes, it was sadly true - she uses strange constructions that she thought were normal but are her mother's weird use of language.
And on and on. It's especially sad when you see the issues come up as a language is dying, like when I lived in an Eskimo village. The kids would just use a few phrases but only the elders knew their language. The middle-aged had been forced into boarding schools and their native language beaten out of them, yet English never really mastered by any. My theory about one of the causes of the horrific substance abuse and domestic violence is that if people cannot express themselves in words, they will do so in other negative ways.
Sorry - going on and on. I do love linguistics and sociology!
That is so funny! You figured it out! Yay, you!
ReplyDeleteIf you use any language in isolation, it makes sense that it would become corrupted over time. To borrow an example from evolution (the science dork in me coming out again...), it is like a finch species that becomes isolated on an island and changes over time so that it isn't like the main population of that finch species anymore. And I love the idea of correcting the grammar in passed notes with a red pen. I would so do that too if I were a teacher! I have great respect for anyone who speaks Cantonese...it's even more tonal than Mandarin, which is saying something. I lived in HK for six years, but the dialect we studied in school was Mandarin, so my Cantonese was mainly limited to basic functional getting-around type stuff and really fluent swearing. :)
ReplyDeleteWe lived in so many countries while I was growing up that our immediate family homespeak is liberally sprinkled with bits of foreign languages: Arabic, Farsi, German, Thai, and Swahili, to name a few. As a kid, I never thought about the fact that these bits weren't in English: I knew what they meant and didn't think much about it when I heard them. We did get some funny looks from friends when we switched languages mid-sentence, though.