French, Spanish, Russian, Klingon, Seneca
Languages have always fascinated me. I was very excited to discover online recently a primer for the Seneca language. In the U.S. and Canada, small groups of Seneca are working hard to teach their language to their younger generation so it won’t die out with their elders. This is important work because not long ago, there were fewer than 50 fluent native speakers of Seneca remaining, so the language was in real danger of extinction.
In my second novel, The Passage, I used a little of the Seneca language and I’m hoping to use more in The Way Home. I love to think I might be contributing, in some tiny way, to the preservation of the Seneca language for future generations. After all, if Star Trek fans were motivated to learn Klingon, and fans of the Avatar movies learned Na’vi, who knows, maybe one day, fans of my stories will learn Seneca! Wouldn’t that be cool?
My love of languages comes from my mom, who at 86, still remembers enough of her high school French to respond in conversation as if she hails from Paris or Marseille, instead of Lemasters, Pa.
When I started high school, of course I signed up for French; in fact, I took all four years of French (loved it!) and a year of Spanish (meh). When it was time to figure out what my college major should be, it seemed a no-brainer that I’d major in a language. But not just any language!
My interest in politics and current events came from my dad, who was a news junkie. A child of the late 70s and early 80s, I followed Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Leonid Brezhnev, and Mikhail Gorbachev with his policies of perestroika and glasnost. Back then, America was largely focused on the then-Soviet Union. So I thought, “Hey, I’ll major in Russian! Why not? What’s the worst that can happen?”
Growing up, I had a poster on my bedroom wall of a beautiful ballerina. The caption read: “If you can dream it, you can become it.” I looked at that poster everyday and in my innocence and naivete, I believed what it said. I asked my dear, elderly French teacher what she thought of my plan to major in Russian. God love her, she said, “I think you can do anything you set your mind to.” Sounds like the poster! Okay, it’s decided, I’m majoring in Russian. I can work at the United Nations! Why not?
As a freshman in college, my first Russian language course was a disaster. I didn’t do well with later courses either, and the handful of professors in the Russian Department all took it as a personal affront that I wasn’t picking up their beloved language with ease and delight. They seemed to view me as a loser and more than once, humiliated me in front of my classmates with my low GPA. I hope all people of the Baltic states are not as cold, humorless, and authoritarian as they were.
I take great satisfaction and comfort in the knowledge that given how old they were at the time, they’re surely all dead by now. Ha! Too bad so sad.
Anyhoo, I sucked at Russian, and therefore hated it. But I loved the political science courses I took as electives, with a particular interest in international foreign policy. I was desperate to change majors, but my dad wouldn’t hear of it (that’s another story). So to get around his short-sighted decree, I thought, “Fine! I’ll just double major.” Russian and Political Science it is! A friend at the time told me, “If you don’t get a job after college, nobody will.” Yes, you’d think so, wouldn’t you?
Turns out my grades never improved much and I was lucky to get out of there with a diploma. Nowadays, my major has been reduced to a quirky topic of conversation at cocktail parties and icebreaker fodder for meetings where they tell you to “share three things about yourself, two of which aren’t true and one that is true” and everyone has to guess which one is true. Nobody ever guesses my true one and I’m usually the only Russian-Political Science major in the room. So… there’s that. Lesson learned: Never make significant life decisions based on a schmaltzy saying on a poster.
