Word to your mother tongue

When I was an eighth-grader still drinking milk out of cardboard boxes, our science teacher split us up into groups and instructed each group to come up with an “invention” that we’d like to see made. It didn’t matter how outlandish, unfeasible or outright physically impossible these inventions were. The exercise was meant to flex our imaginations, get us thinking along the lines of a better society. And to blow through 40 minutes of class time, I’m guessing.

I don’t remember most of the inventions, but we were in middle school, so I’m assuming the majority were dumb. Slap bracelets that played New Kids on the Block songs or something. And now I’m dating myself.

One of them I’ll never forget, though: A language translator. The group that came up with this idea -- and it wasn’t mine -- envisioned this as a set of headphones you would wear, and if someone spoke to you in, say, German, the headphones would translate their speech into English (or whatever your native language was). This may have been impractical from a technological perspective, especially back then, but the impetus behind this fictitious invention was pure pragmatism. Imagine how much easier this would make international travel. Business relations. Understanding rap music.

For my money, the kids who came up with this idea get the coveted gold star. Because even in the internet age, language barriers can be an issue.

Flash forward to my college years: Early 20s, naive, dandelion wisps for hair. A friend of mine was taking an intensive month-long course in French at a university in Quebec City, and when she invited me to spend the weekend up there to do a little sight-seeing, I thought nothing of printing out some vague Mapquest directions and dashing on up to Canada, alone. Never mind that the only phrase I could speak confidently in French was “Grandpa smokes his pipe.” Mapquest, I reckoned, would just dump me off right at her dorm room door and I wouldn’t have to interact with a soul. C’est facile! Which I think is French for “Please pass the jackhammer.”

If GPS technology had been more prevalent in those days, a construction detour might not have mattered. But it did. The route I needed to take to the university was blocked off due to road work, forcing me to improvise, and that meant talking to people. People who spoke French.

“Bonjour!” I said to the woman in the convenience store. “Parles Anglais?” (“Speak English?”)

The woman shrugged and pointed to a man who could put together simple words and phrases, like “meat” and “Enjoy this button.” Between his horrid English and my appalling French, we communicated effectively enough so that I was able to make some progress -- to within shouting distance of the campus, anyway. I got lost a couple more times, and the cycle repeated itself: Can you help me? No, but this person can. On and on, until eventually I met my friend at the campus center, five hours late, and collapsed in a big ball of man-that-was-horrible.

If one fewer person I’d met had been able to cobble together some rudimentary English, I’d have ended up in the middle of a wheat field in Saskatchewan. I’d still be there today, farming and wondering if my family missed me.

Now if I were a typical European, I’d have been raised speaking three languages and these barriers would be less of an issue. Our friends across the Atlantic have got it all over us when it comes to proficiency with a variety of tongues (France, I’m looking at you). But I’m not European. I’m American, and American tradition dictates that I be fluent in English and nothing else. I’m also supposed to act super annoyed and off-put when someone else can’t speak it as well as I can. This is mandated by a little-known law called the Speak ‘Merican or Go Home Act of 1896.

As a monolingual individual, language barriers can frustrate me, but maybe not for the typical reasons. I just start obsessing over the evolution of language over the centuries -- how they evolved, together yet separate, over the course of millennia.

Think about it. Language, like life, has evolved over mind-boggling spans of time, starting first as a series of glottal grunts and then developing certain characteristics: nouns, verbs, adjectives. Languages branched off into other languages -- Latin into German, German into English, French into Italian. Most of these languages share the same basic characteristics, and their speakers use them in much the same ways, conjugating verbs and asking questions and making observations and ordering soup at restaurants. Words and sentences are at the very foundation of what it means to be a human being, and yet if a Mexican came up to me and said, in Spanish, “I like your shirt,” I’d stare at him uncomprehendingly, trapped on the other side of an evolutionary divide. He could very well have said, “I eat string cheese by the gallon,” and I’d have no idea. All these languages evolving side by side, and yet these barriers persist, subdividing humanity into insulated pockets. Words bind us together and separate us at the same time. It’s quite the trick.

English has become a lot more common, and many of those multilingual Europeans feature it in their arsenal. Perhaps the next step of humankind’s linguistic evolution is to pare itself down to a single global language. Purists may bristle at the notion, claiming that it would erode certain cultures and traditions. But throughout history languages have spawned and died off like animal species; there are roughly five people left on the planet who still speak Latin. It may not be so bad if everyone all knew what everyone else was saying. Human progress is about tearing down walls, not building them. Communication is a huge part of that, and it’s a lot easier to communicate without a translator.

Unless of course your translator is an electronic device conceived by a bunch of middle schoolers. I really should start taking credit for that.