I Wish I Could Sprechen Sie Deutsch

Danke Schön Bitte Schön Wiedersehn........I Wish I Could Sprechen Sie Deutsch.

This is an extract from the lyrics of a song released by Eddie Wilson in 1961. It is a song about the desire and difficulty to learn German. Maybe I should compose a similar piece based on my current struggle to gain proficiency with the Turkish language. It's very difficult - çok zor - perhaps because it is hard to get an old brain to adapt to an entirely new set of linguistic 'rules'. The main problem being whatever 'rules' appear to exist, they are invariably broken. I'm getting there albeit very slowly - çok yavaş - but I will persevere.

As I navigate my way through the maze of ambiguities and inconsistencies of the Turkish language, I realise that there are far more imperfections in English and how my command of English is perhaps not as good as I thought it was! This is particularly apparent when I participate in Internet discussion forums, which attract an international audience. It has been said that Britain and America are "two nations divided by a common language", a quote attributed to Winston Churchill, George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde! Whoever said it, I can empathise with the sentiment as many of my discussion points have been misinterpreted by American participants, so what chance do non-English speakers have?

There have been attempts to introduce more logical languages. Esperanto was created by Dr Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof in the late nineteenth century, his aim being to foster harmony between people from different countries. Although it is the most widely spoken constructed language in the world, the current estimate of Esperanto speakers is between one and two million people, which equates to less than 0.03% of the world's population. I would suggest this is insufficient to help improve relations between different nationalities. A more recently introduced constructed language is Loglan, which was developed in 1955 by Dr James Cooke Brown. It was the first among a number of languages known as logical languages. But Loglan has fewer followers than Esperanto and despite it's 'scientific' origin, there are no native speakers.

So in spite of attempts to introduce perfect languages, the old idiosyncratic languages survive and evolve. The evolution is, compared with other evolutionary timescales, quite rapid. For example, grandparents often have difficulty communicating with their grandchildren and vice versa. Keeping abreast of linguistic changes is difficult, particularly given most humans' natural resistance to change. The idiosyncrasies and lack of stability of human languages means that trying to learn a language by using an existing language as a 'reference' and developing translation 'rules' is fraught with problems. But that's exactly how I have been approaching my Turkish learning process, aided and abetted by my technical and analytical bent. One-to-one correlations between English and Turkish simply don't work, which is not surprising when you look at how the two languages have developed, almost independently of each other.

My teacher is very good and extremely patient, which he needs to be because my memory retention is sorely lacking. Beyond the basics he has taught me a considerable amount (but certainly not all) of Turkish grammar, which he believes will provide me with the 'foundation' and 'building blocks' of language construction. I agree with this approach but the proof of the pudding will be in the eating. Between lessons my Turkish is limited to a few short conversations each day interspersed with continuing to use my mother tongue. I now believe the next stage needs to be total immersion! I am not yet sure how I will immerse myself but I do know swimming is much more fun in the water!!

Watch this space and you will know I have cracked it when I publish a blog in Turkish........İnşallah........Hopefully!