Flirting With French (5 page)

Asking the time happens to be a stock phrase, found in every guidebook, learned in every French course, so I knew what he was saying. But a response? I never really learned my numbers—even up to sixty—so almost certainly I was going to end up shrugging, shaking my head, or inelegantly sticking my wrist in his face to let him see for himself. But when I glanced down at my watch, I realized my extraordinary fortune. It was
exactly noon.
“
Il est midi,
” I said as coolly and fluently as a native. He thanked me, and I nodded and tossed off another stock phrase, “
De rien,
” don’t mention it.

In my book, that qualified as a conversation, and this brief escape from the tourist’s cocoon had me walking on air for the rest of the trip. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to do that all the time? Wouldn’t it be nice to never again accidentally order organ meats? If so, I’d better dramatically improve my French. Maybe Anne was right; I did need to bury the ghost of Madame D—— and get into a classroom.

Your French Is Killing Me

The French . . . always tangle up everything to that degree that when you start into a sentence you never know whether you are going to come out alive or not.

—
MARK TWAIN

“
Quel âge avez-vous?
” the young instructor I’ll call Mademoiselle D—— wants to know. I can see her grainy image in the corner of the computer screen, but she can’t see me. And good thing, because the other question she might logically be asking is, “Why are you sweating like a
cochon
?” having pretty much covered “How stupid are you?” and “You’re pulling my leg, right?”

I
think
that’s what she said, or something to that effect, but no English is allowed in this online immersion class. It’s as if Madame D—— has managed to get reincarnated as a younger, only slightly gentler version of herself in order to torment me once again. At least this time I’m not embarrassing myself in front of the other students. This is because I’m the only student who’s signed up for this 7 a.m. lesson, a huge miscalculation on my part, and Mademoiselle seems none too pleased at having lost her lunch hour in France, where it’s 1 p.m., to a clueless, middle-aged American who can’t even state his age. I can’t state my age partly because the pressure has made the word for “fifty” fly out of my head and partly because French has a numbering system that is only slightly less complicated than the Babylonian calendar. It reminds me of Alice’s encounter with the queens in
Th
rough the Looking-Glass:

“Can you do addition?” the White Queen asked. “What’s one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one?”

“I don’t know,” said Alice. “I lost count.”

“She can’t do addition,” the Red Queen interrupted.

The problem with numbers in French is that to count, you must utilize arithmetic—specifically, addition and multiplication. In the United States and most of the civilized world, children learn the numbers first and then learn to use those numbers in mathematics, but in France you need to know some mathematics in order to learn the numbers. To count, you must multiply; to multiply, you must count; to count, you must multiply . . . It’s a numerical Möbius strip.

Things go fairly smoothly until
soixante-neuf.
If you don’t speak French and that number rings a bell, congratulations: you’ve read your
Kama Sutra
(or your
Joy of Sex,
which, to its credit, used the classy French numeral rather than the cruder English “sixty-nine”).
Soixante-neuf
is the last “easy” number in French. Should you want to turn your lovemaking up a notch to seventy, you’ll find out there is no “seventy” in French. This is undoubtedly due to French frugality. A country that doesn’t have a dedicated word for weather (
temps
can refer to either time or weather) isn’t about to waste a word on “seventy.” Just add ten to sixty. Thus, after sixty-eight and sixty-nine, there’s “sixty-ten” (
soixante-dix
), followed by “sixty-eleven” and so on, right up through sixty-nineteen. But they’ve already employed this additive strategy in naming their high teens—nineteen is itself ten plus nine (
dix-neuf
)—so seventy-nine is sixty plus ten plus nine:
soixante-dix-neuf.

Well, you may be wondering, how far are they going to go with this? Is every remaining number up to a hundred going to be based on sixty? Of course not. We haven’t done any multiplying yet. The next number, eighty, is
quatre-vingts,
literally “four twenties.” Guess what ninety is:
quatre-vingt-dix
. That is, four times twenty, plus ten. You continue in this fashion until you hit ninety-nine, the tongue-twisting, five-syllable, SAT-suitable
quatre-vingt-dix-neuf.

We say “ninety-nine.” They say
quatre-vingt-dix-neuf
. You could get orally injured singing “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall” in French.

To recap, the French use a base-ten (decimal) numerical system from one through sixty, after which they switch to a base-twenty (vigesimal) system. There are other cultures, including the Mayans and the Basques, who use a vigesimal system, but to my knowledge, French is the only language that uses a mixture of decimal and vigesimal, probably a result of the unification of several number systems in existence in France after the Revolution.

By the way, this base-twenty concept shouldn’t be totally foreign to you. Abraham Lincoln harkened back to a vigesimal system when he began the Gettysburg Address, “Four score and seven years ago,” but since Americans are lousy at math, it never caught on as a replacement for “eighty-seven.”

Think I’m making too big a deal of this oddity? Well, the “four times twenty” stuff was serious enough to split the francophone world. In Belgium and Switzerland—even in Rwanda, where half the population tried to exterminate the other half, sometimes even if they were married to them—they had enough common sense to invent words for “seventy,” “eighty,” and “ninety”:
septante, huitante, and nonante.
Just don’t say
huitante-trois
in France, or you risk being taken for either a Belgian or an idiot, and it doesn’t much matter which: in France they are synonymous. But that’s a topic for another day. My problem right now is how do I say I’m fifty-seven when I can’t remember the French word for “fifty”? I sputter for what seems like an eternity. Finally I ask, “
Comment dit-on ‘fifty’ en français?
”

“
Ne parlez pas anglais!
” Mademoiselle D—— scolds me, and I almost feel her tugging me by the ear. Jeez . . . how can I ask this question without using one word of English? My mind races.

Ha! I do remember how to say “forty-nine.” “
Quel est le nombre après quarante-neu
f
?
”

“
Cinquante.
”

“
J’ai cinquante-sept ans.
” Whew! (Okay, so score one for the immersion approach.) We move on to the future tense. I knew the future tense. Two weeks ago. Problem is, now I’m just getting into the past imperfect, which is quite similar, on my podcasts, and I’m confusing the two. How do you conjugate the future? I don’t know, because Rosetta Stone hasn’t given me the actual rules, only examples that I’m supposed to “absorb.” Everything I say is wrong. Nervous, I start stammering in French as if I’m back in Madame D—— ’s junior high class. What if I just close the program or feign a computer crash? Will I get blacklisted from future classes? Would that be such a bad thing?

Eventually, mercifully, the class ends, and I’m not sure who’s more relieved. I change out of my sweat-soaked shirt and drive in to work, thoroughly rattled and feeling fifteen again. That very night I wake before dawn, feeling really strange, as if a sparrow has hatched in my chest during the night and is flapping its wings, trying desperately to get out. I put two fingers to my neck but can’t pick up a clear pulse. I wake Anne, who, being a physician, can. It’s over two hundred.

“AFib,” she says. Next thing I know, I’m being whisked into an emergency room bay. An EKG confirms that my heart is in atrial fibrillation (AFib), a type of arrhythmia where the atria flutter out of rhythm with the rest of the heart owing to a short circuit of sorts in the heart’s nervous system. The fluttering itself will not kill me, but if one of the clots that can form in the blood that’s sloshing around in the atria moves out and reaches the brain, it’s
au revoir.
Thus the first thing they do in the ER is to start an intravenous anticoagulant in my arm. Meanwhile the doctor quizzes me. Any unusual alcohol consumption? No. Drugs? Don’t be silly. He continues down the list, and I continue shaking my head. No reason for this to have popped up now—none! Finally he asks, “Any new stress in your life?”

We lock eyes.

“Well, I
am
studying French.”

The Event

“Suppose I wanted to—have a party?” I said.

“Like, what kind of a party?”

“Suppose I wanted Noam Chomsky explained to me by two girls?”

“Oh, wow . . . You’d have to speak with Flossie,” she said. “It’d cost you.”

—
WOODY ALLEN
, “The Whore of Mensa,” 1974

Unable to sleep in my room in the telemetry ward—with two intravenous lines in my right arm and a blood-pressure cuff and heart monitor connections on my left, I am virtually chained to the bed, unable to turn over or get comfortable—I switch on the TV and come across an infomercial that I have more than a passing interest in. “Learn a language the way you learned it as a child,” the host says. What does that mean, exactly? How
did
I learn language as a child? As I recall, I picked up English pretty easily without conjugation charts or language tapes. And that’s the paradox that all linguists grapple with: For infants, language comes effortlessly. It is a skill that virtually every child, regardless of his or her intelligence, masters by the age of three or four. Witness this conversation between a three-year-old and Art Linkletter, from his popular 1950s television show
People Are Funny
. Linkletter has just asked the boy, “And who is in your family, Scott?”

“My mommy, my daddy, and my brother Henry. Oh, and when Daddy goes away on business trips, Uncle John comes and stays with Mommy.”

Safe to say that language is acquired before the filters that govern its use are in place. Yet for adults, learning a new language is work, hard work, and we fail far more often than we succeed. How do children manage to do it so easily? It’s an unfair contest because babies are born with a head start on language. With really not much else to do, they’ve been listening to the chatter on the other side of the womb since about the thirtieth week of gestation, and they emerge with a demonstrable familiarity with their mother tongue.

How do we know what’s going on in babies’ heads? In one experiment, scientists Jacques Mehler and Peter Jusczyk ingeniously fitted a baby’s bottle with a nipple that, when sucked on, would play a tape of either spoken French or Russian. The researchers found that four-day-old French babies suck harder when they hear French than when they hear Russian, and that their sucking picks up in intensity when the tape switches from Russian to French, but not when switching from French to Russian.

As an unrepentant Francophile, I’d like to think that this is because French is the most beautiful, most melodic language in the world, but if you do the experiment with Russian babies, they show a preference for Russian over French. Interestingly, the experiment yields the same results even if the audio is muddled so that specific words cannot be distinguished. In other words, after just ninety-six hours out of the womb (and most likely from birth, but there’s a limit to how early you can rip a newborn from its mother’s breast for a linguistics experiment),
*
babies have already picked up the cadence, the rhythm, and the characteristic sounds of the language.

And languages do differ greatly in this respect. You can easily tell when someone is using French or Italian even if you don’t speak a word of it yourself. Italian draaaws out and almost sings its syllables, as if every sentence is from an operetta, and is filled with
i
and
o
sounds, while French uses hardly any variation in intonation at all and is distinguished by its nasal vowels. Scandinavian languages feature hard
g
sounds that emanate from the nether regions of the throat. In fact, Belgian scientists have determined that newborn babies cry in their mother’s tongue, meaning, for example, that French babies cry with a characteristically French rising inflection.

This ability of babies to distinguish and learn the sounds of their native language comes at a price, though, and one that gets to the root of a problem that vexes many adult foreign language learners: our inability to reproduce some of the phonemes (a phoneme is the smallest distinct unit of sound) of that language. We all know the difficulty, for example, that native speakers of Asian languages have with the English letters
r
and
l
—the “flied lice” problem of bad Chinese-waiter jokes.

What is less widely known is that the core problem isn’t that they can’t pronounce these two letters; they can’t pronounce the letters because they can’t even aurally
distinguish
between them. To the ear of someone who has grown up surrounded by the Chinese or Japanese languages, which don’t employ the
r
and
l
phonemes,
rice
and
lice
actually sound the same.

Infant brains, unlike adult brains, can distinguish all the thousands of different sounds that make up human speech, but that skill is short lived. Researchers have found that seven-month-old Japanese babies can easily discriminate the sound of an English
r
from an English
l
. Yet by the age of ten months, these same babies can no longer tell the difference. This makes me feel a little better about the fact that I cannot master the French
u
sound as in
tu
or the guttural
r
in
rouge
because we don’t have anything quite like either in the English language.

You wouldn’t know that from watching this Rosetta Stone infomercial, where everyone seems to speak foreign languages perfectly with no effort. I turn it off and eventually fall asleep, which is the signal for the phlebotomist to show up to draw blood again, for only the seventh time today. I don’t mind too much, but my poor veins shrivel up and hide whenever Miss Transylvania walks in the door. Well, the veins had better get used to it. I’ve been told I’m going to be here awhile, at least several days, perhaps as much as a very long week, or until my heart returns to a normal rhythm.

“Courage,” the cardiologist says to me, patting me on the shoulder as he leaves the room during morning rounds. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard an American other than Dan Rather use that valediction.
**
I smile to myself, recalling the French taxi driver who’d good-naturedly wished us “
Courage!
” when we told him we were from the States.
Courage,
one of those words the French use a lot (pronounced “
cour-AHJ
,” the accent on the second syllable), and in different ways, is from the French
cœur,
or “heart.” Thus
courage
means literally to “have heart,” a connection which, sadly, is totally lost in English. However, many of the heart-related idioms we have in our language—“heartbroken,” “bighearted,” “learn by heart,” “lionhearted”—have surprisingly close French equivalents, more so than with most idioms, which tend to be localized. The heart, it seems, is a special case. Mine in particular is real special.

Courage
indeed. If I’m going to be imprisoned here for a week, shackled to intravenous drips and monitors, I’d best stop whining and make use of the time. After all, the Marquis de Sade didn’t spend twenty years moping about the indignity of confinement (and the lack of young girls and younger boys) while imprisoned in Vincennes; he wrote like mad.
***
It occurs to me that for at least the next several days I have no job to go to, no appointments, and no obligations whatsoever. I don’t have to cook, and—the lazy man’s dream—I don’t even have to get out of bed to pee. (Which is a good thing, since with multiple IVs dripping into me I have to go about every twenty minutes—all that liquid has to go somewhere.) Why, I can spend all day and half the night studying French!

In theory. This bird fluttering inside my chest is a little distracting. Discussions of the difficulties baby boomers face in learning a language tend to center around our brains, ignoring the other eight-ninths of us that’s holding up that head. My heart troubles are not making things any easier, for sure, and I realize, as I lie in my hospital bed, that I’ve come to a crossroads,
un carrefour
. One path leads to, well, Carrefour, the French department store and supermarket chain; the other, to lots of free time and a free pass—the unassailable excuse that “I gave up French to focus on my health.”

Which road will I take? I’m still undecided when Anne asks, “Can I bring you anything from home? A book? Radio?”

I think for a moment. “My laptop and headset, the French-English dictionary on my desk, and maybe the collection of Sartre plays in French.”

Et puis, merde—
screw it! I’m going to Carrefour.

COINCIDENTALLY, ROSETTA STONE, AS
if it has been spying on me through the bushes, has moved on to emergency room vocabulary—“hospital,” “ambulance,” “broken,” “burned,” “wounded,” everything short of
mort
. This is considerate of them, but it means that there are a whole lot of more useful words we’ll never get to. Like “draft beer.” If I want to order a draft beer in Paris, I’m out of luck if relying on Rosetta Stone; linguistically, I’m better off showing up at a French hospital with a broken collarbone.

The most difficult part of French so far is remembering the new words. This is frustrating, especially considering that the typical child entering kindergarten has a vocabulary of fourteen thousand words. To put that into perspective, a child is learning a new word every two hours of every waking moment. Without trying. How does this almost magical acquisition of language happen? I’m killing myself trying to learn French; who taught me English?

UNTIL THE RENAISSANCE, LANGUAGE
was thought to be bestowed on humankind by God, or the gods. The ancient Greeks credited Prometheus with bringing to earth not only fire but language as well, although as far back as the third century BC, Epicurus (whose writing credits include publishing the Western world’s first cookbook) argued that language is not the creation of a god, but rather a biological function akin to vision. Nevertheless, the view of language as something mystical, inexplicable, or God-given prevailed and may explain the comparatively late start of the science of linguistics. A book by the Swiss philosopher and linguist Ferdinand de Saussure,
Course in General Linguistics,
published shortly after his death in 1913, is considered to mark the inception of modern linguistics, putting the science of language a century or two behind the founding of biology, chemistry, and psychology—even half a century behind Darwin.

Into the mid-1800s, linguistics research and activity were focused mainly on vocabulary and on cataloging and translating newfound languages (helped in no small part by Bible societies, which provided the funding for researchers to go into remote areas, discover and learn an undocumented language, and translate the Bible into that language). If there was interest in the origin and nature of language, it was largely relegated to the realm of psychology—until 1957, that is, when what is still remembered as “the event” shook up the sleepy world of linguistics.

The event was the publication of
Syntactic Structures
by Noam Chomsky, a professor of linguistics at MIT. Chomsky’s book moved the discussion from vocabulary to syntax—that is, the fundamental rules of language—and raised an interesting question that, surprisingly, hadn’t been given a lot of thought until then: How is it that a young child, with limited cognitive development, can acquire such a complex, daunting skill as language? Especially considering that a toddler trying to make sense of the babble around him is surrounded not only by grammatically correct language but also by incorrect, incomplete, and garbled sentences (think of the Watergate tapes). Yet the child somehow learns the syntactic rules of language, that “John hit Mary” is not at all the same as the reversed “Mary hit John,” but that “John threw the ball to Mary”
does
mean the same as the reversed “John threw Mary the ball.” Language isn’t acquired from mere mimicry, Chomsky argued, or children wouldn’t say things like, “Tommy hitted me.”

Furthermore, language involves combining a finite set of words into an infinite set of combinations and meanings, and Chomsky wondered how children are able to develop a rule system, not only for the finite sentences they’ve heard, but also for the infinite variations of sentences they haven’t heard. Here’s an interesting thing about language: Take nearly any sentence on this page, and chances are that this is the first time it’s appeared in print. Ever. Yet I was able to effortlessly compose each sentence, almost without thinking. (Let me rephrase that—without thinking about
syntax.
)

This intrigued Chomsky. As did another question: How is it that all the languages of the world, even those that apparently have no common origin, have a common basic grammar, a similar set of rules for how language is constructed? Noam Chomsky’s answer to these mysteries of language, the theory that galvanized and divided the world of linguistics in 1957, is that humans are wired for language, are
born
with an innate ability to understand the basic rules of language: what Chomsky calls a universal grammar (UG), a “genetically determined . . . language acquisition device” in the human (and
only
the human) brain.

Chomsky’s theory was so divisive that the first question a linguist at a convention in the 1960s was likely to be asked was, “Are you pro-Chomsky or anti-Chomsky?” The detractors claimed that Chomsky was essentially trying to solve a problem that didn’t exist; that children learn language from the adults around them; and that the common syntax of the world’s languages can be explained by a single, common origin of the world’s tongues. Plus, they maintained, the theory falls apart when you look at primitive languages in parts of the world Chomsky didn’t probe. There were also objections that the sudden appearance of UG in humans defied the Darwinian theory of natural selection. Yet studies done by, among others, psycholinguists Elissa Newport and Jenny Singleton on deaf children who, even though they weren’t exposed to a proper syntax and grammar, “intuitively” used American Sign Language correctly, support Chomsky.

Fifty years after the publication of
Syntactic Structures,
Noam Chomsky’s controversial theories have become nearly universally accepted, as the focus of the research has moved from observational studies to the search for a human “language gene,” with some promising but as yet inconclusive results. So accepted is Chomsky’s work today that he is as much remembered for his left-of-center politics as for his groundbreaking linguistic theories. Yet his work continues to inspire and spark debate. At my son’s wedding reception recently, I found several of his former college classmates sequestered near the bar, engaged in vigorous debate on Chomsky’s universal grammar theories as they relate to computer languages.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.