09 June 2016
The Gift of Tongues
Foreign travel for the English.
By Chin Chin
The polls may be inconclusive, but there is one certainty. Once the referendum is over, we will all need a holiday; and this year, of all years, it should be a holiday abroad. Either Remain will have won, in which case we should travel to France to receive their thanks for allowing them to remain in a union with us; or we will have decided to leave, in which case it would be as well to take a final look at our continental cousins before we cut them off completely (rather as you might pay a last visit to the zoo, knowing that next year you will be too busy to go there).
Whatever the reason for travel, however, there is no excuse for forgetting the basic rules. The English abroad have standards to keep up. They need to be looked up to and to cut a dash. There are two ways in which this can be achieved. The first is to wear a Panama hat. Presumably everybody knows that, but it is a little superficial. The second, much more important, is to make themselves understood in the local lingo without using a phrasebook.
The reputation of our linguistic skills is not particularly high, and it is true that when we English go abroad we use our own language rather more than other races. But that isn’t because we cannot speak foreign languages. No indeed. It is because people of other nationalities slip so readily into English, hoping, no doubt, to be mistaken for English tourists themselves (well, I suppose you can see their point). If you do wish to speak the local language, then you have to make it clear that you will not speak English and – English tourists being much too well-mannered to openly defy their hosts – the best plan is to pretend that you do not speak English at all.
Whether you can pass yourself off as a local depends on where you are. For example in Germany they, like us, use little gesticulation so that, unless they hear you speak, it is hard for the Germans to work out that you are not one of them. It would be easy, therefore, to pass yourself off as a German mute although, unless you are good at German sign-language, that may have practical disadvantages when you try to order a meal. In France or one of the other Latin countries, your restrained body language will give you away immediately. There you can smoke cigarettes and chew garlic all you like, you can wear a beret and pinch bottoms ‘till your fingers ache; it will all be to no avail. They will still know you for what you are, an Anglo-Saxon cuckoo in the Latin nest.
If you cannot cut it as a local, you had better pretend to come from somewhere quite different, somewhere where English is not spoken at all – Siberia, perhaps, or Australia. That’s the ticket, then. Before leaving home, ditch the Panama in favour of a fur hat, pull on Cossack boots and a greatcoat and hum a Russian tune. Now you are ready to take on the locals. But a word of advice, perhaps. If the locals are French, do not hum Tchaikovsky’s 1812. In my experience they are not particularly fond of that.
With the possibility of speaking English out of the way, you are now committed to speaking the local language so it is best if you have done a little preparation beforehand. How difficult that is depends upon where you are. We all learnt a little French at school and can keep the conversation going with references to the pens of our aunts. Southern Europe is more difficult, but the local languages down there are Latin based, so you can improvise by using French and then adding a bit on.
Suppose, for example that you wish to say “a good day” in Italian. We all know that the French word is “Bonjour” and the Italian “Bonjourno”. Not very different, you see, just a little bit more, and to cover the fact that you don’t know which endings to add you can make the sounds rather indistinctly, perhaps by keeping a golf ball in your mouth. Again in France “yes” is “oui” but in Italian it is “si”. Here too the golf ball should cover the difference and your audience will assume that you got it right but have a speech impediment. The important thing, of course, is not to forget what you’re doing and swallow the golf ball since the expression “Doctor I have a golf ball stuck in my throat” is beyond most of us and indeed beyond most phrasebooks as well.
Sometimes, though, it is more difficult and you have to learn the language from scratch. One easy option is to learn a couple of phrases by rote and simply wait until you get the opportunity to use them. That can take some time. Many years ago I tried to learn Russian. It wasn’t a complete success and after a year’s course I only had two expressions off pat. One meant “hello comrade”, an expression much in use in the 60s but now out of fashion. The other, meaning “this is a stained glass window,” was less contentious but I needed the right opportunity to use it. Fortunately Orthodox churches are well endowed with windows and I spent many hours standing in front of them, waiting for a small crowd to gather before unleashing my phrase. I did so in a deep bass voice but reflectively, as though I was talking to myself. I think it made a very good impression. Anyway, a couple of American tourists came up and addressed me in Russian and, when I shook my head and looked rather severe, went away disappointed. Probably they concluded that their accents were just not good enough to be comprehensible.
If you forget to learn a few words of the language in advance, you can generally pick a bit up by looking round the aeroplane. Notices are usually in two languages, one of them English. This is the tourist equivalent of the Rosetta Stone. If, on a flight to Bulgaria, you see the word “toilet” next to “тоалетна“, well, you know the Bulgarian for the loo. But be careful. The system is not foolproof. Different languages use different word orders so that the first word in the foreign equivalent of “please, to ensure your safety …” may be “safety” not “please”. Never mind. For one of little confidence, beginning every sentence with the word “safety” might be a problem; “Safety, some soup”, “Safety, could you tell me the way to the cathedral”. But boom it out confidently enough and you will still be all right. The locals will assume that it is they who misheard- or perhaps that you are some sort of robot, misprogrammed by the health and safety executive of the EU.
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