Languages I love the richness of language, as most of us do. But local words die, and are replaced by bland expressions that may be understood internationally yet are devoid of any real texture. Words are debased through excessive use - look what has happened to the word awesome. In Scotland we have three main languages: English, Scots and Gaelic. Gaelic survives as a living language (with native speakers), but has been very much shouldered out of the way by English. Fortunately it is still being taught and supported by the Scottish Government and various cultural bodies. I have read that Australian slang - so colourful - is contracting. What a pity. I have several dictionaries of that particular slang, and the expressions it employs are vivid, robust and often very funny. Here is a poem I have written this evening about hearing Gaelic being spoken not he street in the small harbour town of Tobermory, on the island of Mull. I am often there - when we are in Argyll we go by boat from our house to do the shopping in Tobermory. I was going back to the boat one day and I heard two women talking to one another in Gaelic, a language that is most beautiful to hear. I lingered, and the memory came back to me today. It prompted this poem: On hearing Gaelic being spoken on the street in Tobermory The ear is unprepared: the angle of vowels can change as suddenly, As the sky’s furniture changes here, in the lee of the Atlantic; English can be heavy, and exact; can limit our freedom, To speak with wistfulness about things that are vague and liquid, Things that can only be understood in the light of a very long history, And of a sense of belonging, being of a place rather than from it. Each year we lose so many languages – linguistic obituarists Record their death, write of the last known speaker; How lonely to be the last one to know the words, to know What sounds once filled the silences that are now all that remain, Like the long hiss at the end of a long-playing record, When the needle remains in the groove, and the music fades away. The words, like fallen leaves, are swept away; the young man Cannot tell his girl her eyes are the colour of a certain sort of sea; She cannot tell him that his skin is smooth like the surface Of the rock they once could name, that love Has filled her heart with the fluttering of birds Whose flight can no longer be believed, nor told. Alexander McCall Smith
Posted on: Sun, 27 Jul 2014 22:08:12 +0000
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