From Language to Language

I find myself at the beginning again.

A Word about Etymology

The phrase From Lingua to Lugha means “From Language to Language.” I’ll explain how I understand this phrase in a moment, but first, follow me on a quick trip through the origin of the terms.

Lingua is the Latin word for “language” (pronounced leen-gwah). In Spanish and Italian, it conveys the same meaning through a metonymic sense meaning “tongue” (the associated piece that represents the speaking function as a whole). Then the word shifts slightly but retains the same meaning to become langue in French (pronounced lahn-ghuh).

Lugha is the Swahili word for “language” (pronounced phonetically, as loo-gah). While it looks deceptively similar to the Latin term when written, it actually derives from the Arabic لغة (pronounced luh-hrah, with more of a guttural “gh” sound, somewhat like the French “r” in the back of the throat. I’m not an Arabic speaker though so take my pronunciation note here with a grain of salt).

The English translation, From Language to Language, looks straightforward and repetitive, like we’re using the same word twice. But when we use Lingua and Lugha, we see that these words are diverse and contain multitudes. They connect the phrase back to different language families, histories, pronunciations, and geographic locations. How expansive and deep the phrase then becomes.

The Process

Beyond the phrase itself lies the deeper question(s) it implies: How do we move from one language to another? What does the process really entail?

These are my two guiding questions as I embark on the journey of learning Swahili, which will be my third foreign language. Even though I’ve learned both Italian and French as an adult—through a combination of university classes, individual study, extensive reading, immersive courses while living abroad, and an unquantifiable amount of personal passion and drive—starting at the beginning of the process with a new language is still hard. There is no way for it not to be hard. Being a beginner again is profoundly humbling.

Although I may have “natural aptitude” and be “good at languages” (thank you to all my friends and family who’ve said these encouraging things), being a beginner means embracing the same-old struggle, again. The frustration of not knowing, the constraint of speaking word by word, and the mental anguish when thought far exceeds communicative capacity are all very familiar to me. The language may be different, but the feelings are the same.

How To Conceptualize The Process

As I contemplate my own process and think back on my past experiences, I’m tempted to linger on the prepositions. Now don’t worry. I recognize the risk here of getting tangled in my own metacognitive musings, so allow me to indulge this little digression for just a brief moment: what does “from” really communicate in the statement “from one language to another?” Is this mental image too linear, as it seems to express a starting point and an ending point? I’ve been in airports a lot lately and so “from” brings to my mind the process of hopping on a plane, as if language learning were like traveling from Seattle to Nairobi. If only it were that simple.

Acquiring a language is certainly never a finished process, and we don’t leave one language to learn another, so maybe “from” isn’t the best choice. The process isn’t even very linear. Rather, it’s additive and expansive. It can grow in bits and spurts, both horizontally and vertically like a rhizome. Perhaps it would be more accurate to approximate the nebulous and continuous nature of the language learning process with something like “between” or “through” or “within?” Or even “with” one language as we exist “with” another, since we can possess multiple languages at the same time and use them concurrently. When we learn a language well enough to exist in its context, we live within it and it lives within us. It is especially reciprocal in an immersive experience. Maybe the right metaphor would be something about layering, scaffolding, or creating interconnecting webs or Venn diagrams (as long as we remain the still point at the center of the overlapping language circles).

From My Past Experience

When I started learning French, someone told me that language learning was like building a chain: your first foreign language adds a link onto your native language. Then, you link your second foreign language onto your first, and so on. The underlying argument here seems logical and simple: language learning is a progression and it’s easier to link your developing language to your most recently acquired language and not all the way back to your native language.

This metaphor served me well when I was learning French because my previous language was Italian, and those two are SO similar in their grammatical construction and Latin roots (if not so much in pronunciation). They belong to the same family. So, the linguistic chain theory really worked, as I consciously tried to connect French to Italian and not to English. For why should I mentally connect a verb like the French vouloir to the English “to want” when I could link it instead to the Italian volere?

Devoir—dovere

Pouvoir—potere

La fin—La fine, and so on.

The connection was obvious and easy. My existing Italian foundation helped catapult me into the French language, and it felt amazing and easy. I didn’t have to re-memorize vocabulary, re-learn conjugation rules, or re-conceptualize word order or sentence structure.

Looking back, I realize that my language learning has been limited to the Romance family, with Latin-based roots, and much of what helped me learn French (and even Italian, as I had previously taken Spanish in high school), will not work or just not be applicable this time around. Swahili, as a Bantu language heavily influenced by Arabic, belongs to a totally different family and exists in a very different context from what I know. This is all deeply intimidating. I feel like I’m standing before a vast lake, and I don’t yet have a feel for how deep and dense that dark water truly is. What am I going to link Swahili to—English, Italian, French, all of the above?

The First Step

The only way to start is to take the first step. This process of moving from existing language(s) to new language is going to be very different from what I’ve experienced before. I hope some of my existing tools will work and the foundation will still hold, but I also know I’ll have to develop new tools and new frameworks to hold this differently-shaped language. While I don’t yet know how I’ll move through this uncharted territory, the one thing I do know is that it’s sure to be a transformative process of discovery.

Join me along the way for the ups and downs, obstacles and breakthroughs, frustrations and exhilarations. We certainly will be changed.