Ádám Nádasdy

A True Romance

 

...

But back to when I was three. My family took this whole English thing with amusement and incredulity. Give me my dog? Is there really such a language? We were a bilingual family, half German half Hungarian speaking, since my grandparents were Austrian. We were three brothers, and had picked up German as a mother tongue alongside Hungarian, without really being aware of its rules or anything. And suddenly little Adam came home from his English Kindergarten singing something about "a green field" instead of "ein grünes Feld" - everyone had to laugh! It sounded like spoilt German. My brothers, both older than me, started "speaking English", that is, distorting German and Hungarian words according to what they heard from me. My father joined in, and soon the whole family called potatoes not krumpli, as in plain Hungarian, but crumply (to rhyme with crumb-fly), and everybody asked How do you do? (which they took to mean "How are you?") whenever I entered the room.
English was the only language that nobody in the family knew. The grown-ups and my brothers had learnt French and spoke it tolerably, as became a Central European upper-middle-class family. My parents spoke Italian because they were musicians, and Grandma did so because she was half Italian. But English? Why? It was a distant language of little practical value, unless you wanted to travel to England (but even then French would suffice). Grandpa actually remembered a few distorted words of English, as he had been to the Far East as a young naval officer and was, in the first half of 1904, a member of the Singapore Hockey Club (not ice-hockey, mark you). He still had his membership card. But otherwise, nothing. I never heard anyone speak English. This made it attractive in my eyes, almost romantic. The mountain that nobody had climbed, there's a challenge for the young mountaineer!

There is indeed something romantic about English, at least for the naive ob-server, which I was as a child and teenager, and which I am no longer, having studied linguistics and having taught it to others. But when I try to recollect how English seemed to me, I get a distinctly romantic image, romantic as defined by aesthetics or literary criticism. The impression that English has few explicit rules, that you just have to feel things, without needing to explain logically why this sentence is good, or this word well pronounced and the other not, makes English similar to a romantic work of art. You might think of it as something organic, grown naturally, like the English garden, not a planned one like the Classicist French garden. There is no visible layout, no right angles, no parallels and perspectives; everything is a matter of feeling, coincidence, and inexplicable sweet tradition. It was fascinating that the main difficulty of English seemed to come from pronunciation (or, conversely, from spelling), since nothing was pronounced or spelt the way it should be by ordinary continental standards. Even the alphabet began "ay-bee-see" instead of "ah-bay-say". This had its advantages: when some member of the family bent over my shoulder to see what I was reading or writing, they couldn't correct me en passant, they couldn't even pronounce what they saw, and if they tried, I would condescendingly correct them. My brothers called me "Double-U" for a while, they found the name of this letter so hilarious. "Come here, little Double-U", they said, and then twisted my ear or pinched my nose. I think I can call myself a martyr to the study of English! All in all, it seemed that grammar was very easy in English, but style and idiomaticity were all-important. Indeed, Uncle Paul (see below) went as far as saying that English had no grammar: it had idioms. This is in line with George Mikes's observation that the English have no sex life: they have hot-water bottles.
I know now that this impression of English is basically wrong. English has rules like any other language, otherwise babies wouldn't be able to learn it as their mother tongue. The 2,000 pages of the Randolph Quirk grammar are not filled with romantic impressions but with rules and their discussion. Yet English is peculiar in a way. Most of the rules of this language are in its syntax, that is, the possible arrangements of words and what they express (e.g. It is certain that he will come is possible, but It is sure that he will come is not, though both are possible if you begin the sentence with I'm...). Another component of English where rules abound is its phonology, that is, what sound arrangements are possible (e.g. English words can end in - own, as town, down, renown, but never in -owm which is a normal phonetic ending in, say, German: kaum, Raum, Schaum); and there are subtle rules as to how sounds change when the word-class changes or suffixes are added (e.g. sane - sanity, social - society). The one component of English that is really poor in rules is morphology, such as the conjugation of verbs (I speak - he speaks) and the declension of nouns (dog - dogs). Morphology is the most shallow and uninteresting part of English grammar.
Well, you might say, such is life: a snake has no legs, English has no morphology, but they are still perfect creatures in their own way. The trouble is that, traditionally, and still so in the middle of the twentieth century (and even today in lay circles), the common belief was that grammar equals morphology; that when you learn the grammar of a language you learn the conjugation of verbs for person, mood and tense, and the declension of nouns for gender, number and case. This is what you have to learn; the rest is "logic", "style", and "pronunciation", things that embellish the basic component but are not essential. So strong was the yearning for morphology in grammarians and teachers that we actually had to conjugate English verbs even where there were no endings to change - because that was the way to learn a language. I had, you had, he-she-it had, we had, you had, they had. This was our answer when the teacher said, "Conjugate the verb 'to have' in the past tense!" We had to learn these "conjugations" by heart, which, of course, was ridiculous compared to French or Latin. The real difficulties, the real rules of English were hardly mentioned. For example, nobody told me until I went to university that there was a sharp difference between sentences like What expresses the irony? and What does the irony express? I thought these were stylistic alternatives, both possible in both meanings (since English has no hard and fast rules!), except that the one containing does sounded more English, it had a more English feeling to it, so one should preferably use that. I was probably saying the right thing instinctively, but I didn't realize that this was a rule-governed phenomenon. It was only at university that I learnt, with reluctant surprise, that these were structurally different sentences, equally good English, but they expressed different things, and the choice was not a matter of feeling or style. An exciting discovery: what you took to be a Gothic ruin was actually the gas meter for the whole estate.

By the time the revolution of 1956 swept away the Aunt Ella project, I was almost eleven. The family agreed that I should continue with English, and Grandma found another teacher: Aunt Mimi. She lived round the corner, so I was allowed to go on my own, from about the end of November, when fighting had ceased and the neighbourhood was quiet again, at least during the daytime. After dusk you could often hear people shouting or running, and the occasional shot too. Children were rarely seen in the street, except for those two or three hours in the morning when the grocers opened and everybody was queueing for food. School would not resume till January 1957. I was proud to have something to do while my classmates were just hanging around at home, but then I was also angry for the same reason. Aunt Mimi was decent and experienced. She lived alone and had a pupil come every hour - this is how she made some extra money, obviously undeclared and illegal, but nobody bothered. I think she was a teacher of German. She had old textbooks, in which a very middle-class England appeared, with stories that were meant to be funny, usually about trains and restaurants. One was about a boy having dinner with his strict uncle, who wouldn't allow him to interrupt his tirade about his military adventures and only asked him at the end of the meal what it was that he had wanted to say so urgently. The boy said, "There was a caterpillar on your lettuce, but you've eaten it." Communication in English had started: the language began to express things beyond itself. Aunt Mimi did her job well, I just didn't like her. She didn't varnish her nails, but she was old-womanish and colourless. I needed a man.
Grandma asked around her social network (at church, I suppose), and someone recommended Uncle Paul. He was a great leap forward. He was a skinny, tired man of about forty-five, with a thin moustache. There was something about him that made me feel he had been in prison. He had studied economics in England and had a PhD, so he was Dr Paul B., but was now working in a miserable job which forced him to travel twice a week to the remote village of Szőreg (even the name sounded ridiculous), and probably he had other jobs elsewhere, which meant that he hardly ever slept. He regularly fell asleep during lessons, especially when I was speaking or reading and he just had to listen. I would watch his eyelids, and the moment they closed I would go silent, waiting for them to open again, when I continued exactly where I had broken off, like a released pause button. Occasionally he noticed and said, "Why don't you go on? I'm listening", but mostly he didn't, as my technique improved. He had interesting textbooks, fallen into disuse like himself, published in Hungary before the war, fascinatingly Boy Scoutish and vaguely Christian. I understood (by now I was twelve) that if the Russians hadn't come in and banned Western languages and Boy Scouts, these would be my English books at school. Uncle Paul spoke English really well; so well that at first I didn't understand him. He had an authentic pronunciation. I'd never heard anything of the sort! He said, "These trees a' nice", and I protested - little cleverclogs that I was - that surely it should be "These trees are nice", shouldn't it? Plural sentence, no? He explained that some words were slurred (he couldn't tell which or why), and this was the natural way to pronounce English. I was suspicious, but the breaking point came when in one passage an English boy called Arthur appeared (coming to Hungary for the Jamboree), and I pronounced his name in the good German-Hungarian way, "artur", and Uncle Paul suddenly said "ah-thuh". I looked at him. Beg your pardon? He said it again, pointing at the name Arthur in the book. It took some time before I realized that he wanted me to pronounce this name as "ah-thuh" (as is correct in refined British), with my tongue sticking out for "th", and all that. It sounded so objectionable, so outlandish, that I had to tell my parents. For a week the family were sticking out their tongues and saying "ah-thuh". Uncle Paul was the first real English speaker I met, God bless him, but he didn't know how to teach. After two years he disappeared - I vaguely remember that he fell ill. No wonder. He took caffeine pills during class, one after the other.

Ádám Nádasdy
has published several volumes of poetry, translated Shakespeare, and teaches linguistics at the School of English & American Studies of Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest.