Why We Say Orangutan

Arrivederci, Latin

Italian, I discovered, was Latin with all the difficulty removed. Much as a skilled chef filets the whole skeleton out of a fish, some friendly folks somewhere had lifted all that grammar (at least, most of it) out of Latin and called the remainder Italian!

There was no nominative-genitive-dative-accusative in Italian. Not a trace, except in a few pronouns which I knew I could easily take prisoner because we had the same thing in English (me is the accusative of I). Italian verbs did misbehave a little, but not to the psychedelic extent of Latin verbs. And Italian verbs were a lot easier to look at.

I bought Hugo's book and went through it like a hot knife through butter. I could have conversed in Italian within a month if there'd been anybody around who could have understood — a learning aid which the Greensboro of that day, alas, could not provide.

I was clearly a beaten boxer on the comeback trail. Why was I all of a sudden doing so well in Italian after having done so poorly in Latin?

Was it my almost abnormal motivation? No. I'd had that in Latin, too. Was it that Italian was a living language you could go someplace someday and actually speak, whereas Latin was something you could only hope to go on studying? That's a little closer to the mark, but far from the real answer.

My blitz through Italian, after my unsuccessful siege of Latin, owed much to the fact that in Italian I didn't miss day four! I'm convinced that it was day four in ninth-grade Latin that did me in. No other day's absence would have derailed me. When I left on day three we were bathing in a warm sea of pleasant words. If only I'd been there on day four when Miss Leslie explained the importance of grammar, I might have felt a bit dampened, but I'd have put my head into the book, clapped my hands over my ears, and mastered it.

After Italian I surged simultaneously into Spanish and French with self-study books. Though by no means fluent in either Spanish or French by summer's end, I had amassed an impressive payload of each. I was ready to stage my come-from-behind coup.

Regulations in my high school demanded that a student complete two years of Latin with good grades before continuing with another language. After that, one could choose Spanish or French. I had completed only one year of Latin with poor grades, and I wanted to take both Spanish and French.

I had not yet learned the apt Spanish proverb that tells us "regulations are for your enemies." I learned the concept, however, by living it.

Miss Mitchell was the sole foreign-language authority of the high school. She taught Spanish and French. She was considered unbendable – in fact, unapproachable – in matters of regulation-fudging. I didn't know that on the first day as classes were forming. I'm glad I didn't.

I went to her classroom and asked if I might talk something over with her. I told her I was particularly interested in foreign languages, and even though I'd only had one year of Latin and didn't do well in it at all, I'd really like to move into Spanish and French. If she could only see her way clear to let me, I'd appreciate it forever and try awfully hard.

She asked if I had a transcript of my grades from Miss Leslie's Latin class. No, I didn't, I explained, but I had something more to the point. I'd bought books in Spanish and French over the summer and gotten a good head start. I hoped a demonstration of my zeal would win her favor.

Like a tough agent softening sufficiently to let a persistent unknown comic do part of his routine, Miss Mitchell invited me to do my stuff.

I conversed, I read, I wrote, I recited, I conjugated, I even sang — first in Spanish, then in French. Miss Mitchell gave no outward sign of emotion, but I knew the magic had worked.

"I'll have to talk it over with the principal," she said, "but I don't think there will be a problem. We've never had a case like this before. If I can get approval, which language, Spanish or French, would you like to take?"

In a fit of negotiatory skill I wish would visit me more often, I said, "Please, Miss Mitchell, let me take both!"

She frowned, but then relented. I got to take both.

From the ambitious boxer floored early in round one by Latin grammar, I was all of a sudden the heavyweight language champ of the whole high school!


Ingrid Bergman Made Me Learn Norwegian

I did well in high-school Spanish and French. When you've pumped heavy iron, lifting a salad fork seems easy. When you're thrown into a grammar as complex as Latin's at the age of fourteen, just about any other language seems easy. I never quit thanking Spanish, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Romanian, and Yiddish just for not being Latin. I've always been particularly grateful to Chinese and Indonesian for having nothing in their entire languages a Latin student would recognize as grammar.

It was so enjoyable building my knowledge of Spanish, French, Italian, and Chinese, I never thought of taking on any other languages. Then I saw an Ingrid Bergman movie and came out in a daze. I'd never imagined a woman could be that attractive. I went directly to the adjoining bookstore and told the clerk, "I want a book in whatever language it is she speaks."

Miss Bergman's native tongue, the clerk told me, was Swedish, and he brought forth a copy of Hugo's Swedish Simplified. It cost two dollars and fifty cents. I only had two dollars with me.

"Do you have anything similar — cheaper?" I asked.

He did indeed. He produced a volume entitled Hugo's Norwegian Simplified for only one dollar and fifty cents.

"Will she understand if I speak to her in this?" I asked, pointing to the less-expensive Norwegian text. The clerk assured me that yes, any American speaking Norwegian would be understood by any native Swede.

He was right. A lifetime later, at age thirty, I wheedled an exclusive radio interview with Ingrid Bergman on the strength of my ability in her language. She was delighted when I told her the story. Or at least she was a nice enough person and a good enough actress to pretend.

When I arrived at the University of North Carolina, I got my first real opportunity to speak the European languages I was learning with native speakers. Students at the university came from many different countries. The Cosmopolitan Club, a group of foreign students and Americans who wanted to meet one another, gathered every Sunday afternoon in the activities building. I felt like a bee flitting from blossom to blossom until it is too heavy with pollen to fly or even buzz.

A rumor rippled across the campus in my senior year that seemed too good to be true. The university, it was whispered, was planning to start a class in Russian.

Sure enough, the rumor was soon confirmed. It was a historic event. Not only was the course the first in Russian ever offered by the University of North Carolina (or possibly by any university in the South), it also represented the first time the university had offered what one student called a "funny-looking" language of any kind (he meant languages that don't use the Roman alphabet)!

The enrollment requirements were stiff. First you had to have completed at least two years in a "normal" language (Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese) with good grades. I qualified and was accepted.

For me the first day of Russian was a lot like the first day of school. I'd toyed with one funny-looking language already (Chinese), but I knew Russian was a different kind of funny-looking. Would I conquer it, as I had Spanish and Norwegian, or would Russian swallow me whole, as Latin had?

There were forty-five of us in that Russian class thinking varying versions of the same thing when the teacher, a rangy Alabaman named "Tiger" Titus, entered the room. After a formal "Good morning" he went straight to the front of the room and wrote the Russian (Cyrillic) alphabet on the blackboard.

You could feel the group's spirit sink notch by notch as each of Russian's "funny-looking" letters appeared. Students were allowed under university rules to abandon a course and get themselves into another as long as they did it within three days after the beginning of the term. We had defections from Russian class in mid-alphabet. By the time Tiger Titus turned around to face us, he had fewer students than when he had entered the room.

"My soul!" exclaimed one of the deserters when I caught up with him in the cafeteria later that day. "I've never seen anything like that Russian alphabet before in my life. Why, they got v's that look like b's, n's that look like h's, u's that look like y's, r's that look like p's, and p's that look like sawed-off goalposts. They got a backwards n that's really an e and an x that sounds like you're gagging on a bone. They got a vowel that looks like the number sixty-one, a consonant that looks like a butterfly with its wings all the way out, and damned if they don't even have a B-flat!"

The next day there were no longer forty-five members of the university's first Russian class. There were five.

I was one of the intrepid who hung in.

A Lucky Bounce to the Balkans

Writer-columnist Robert Ruark, a talented North Carolinian and drinking buddy of Ava Gardner, once wrote boastfully about a college weekend that began someplace like Philadelphia and got out of hand and wound up in Montreal. I topped him. I went to a college football game right outside Washington, D.C., one weekend and wound up in Yugoslavia for six weeks!

The previous summer I'd been named a delegate from the university to the national convention of the National Student Association. I came back as chairman for the Virginia-Carolinas region of NSA. In October I was in College Park, Maryland, for the Carolina-Maryland game. At half time, at the hot dog stand, who should be reaching for the same mustard-squirter as I but National NSA president, Bill Dentzer.

"Who can believe this?" he said. "We've been looking for you for three days!"??I explained it was our big senior out-of-town football weekend and College Park, Maryland, was a long way from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and there was a lot going on and I was sorry he couldn't reach me. "Why were you looking for me?" I asked.

"We wanted you to go represent us in Yugoslavia," he said. I told him I'd love to.

"It's too late now," he said. "The plane leaves Monday from New York, and it's already Saturday afternoon and the State Department's closed, so there's no way to get you a passport…"

"Bill," I interrupted, "I have a passport. I can easily get back to Chapel Hill and pick it up in time to fly from New York on Monday."

By Wednesday I was attending sessions of a spirited Tito-propaganda fiesta called the Zagreb Peace Conference and enjoying my first immersion in a language the mere mention of which impresses people even more than Chinese: Serbo-Croatian!

To my delight, I understood entire phrases of it from my university Russian. I became aware of "families" of foreign languages, something that doesn't occur automatically to Americans because English doesn't resemble its cousins very closely. They say the closest language to English is Dutch. Dutch is about as close to English as Betelgeuse is to Baltimore!

I'd noticed the summer before that Norwegian is usefully close to Swedish and Danish. Serbo-Croatian sounded to me like a jazzier, more "fun" kind of Russian. They use the Roman alphabet in western Yugoslavia, Croatia, and Slovenia, and in Serbia to the east they use the Cyrillic alphabet, with even more interesting letters in it than Russian uses.

Some of the mystique I'd always imputed to multilingual people began to fade. If you meet somebody who speaks, say, ten languages, your instinct is to be impressed to the tune of ten languages' worth. If, however, you later learn that six of those languages are Russian, Czech, Slovak, Serbo-Croatian, Polish, and Ukrainian — I'm not suggesting you dismiss him as illiterate, but you ought to be aware that he got six of those languages for the price of about two and three-fourths! They're all members of the Slavic family.

The Yugoslav university students, my hosts, sent me back home aboard a Yugoslav ship, leaving me sixteen days with nothing to do but practice Serbo-Croatian with the other passengers. When I got back to school after a solid eight-weeks' absence, I wasn't even behind in my German. German is widely spoken in central Europe and I'd spoken it widely enough during the adventure to float almost even with the class.

Expertise is a narcotic. As knowledge grows, it throws off pleasure to its possessor, much like an interest-bearing account throws off money. A pathologist who can instantly spot the difference between normal and abnormal X-rays grows incapable of believing there are those of us who can't. I find it hard to believe there are Americans who can't even tell the difference between printed pages of Spanish and French or of Polish, Danish, or anything else written in the Roman alphabet. Too bad. If you can't distinguish the easier languages from the harder ones, you miss the higher joys of confronting your first samples of written Finnish.

Finland has been called the only beautiful country in the world where the language is the major tourist attraction. It's utterly unfamiliar to you no matter where you come from, unless you happen to come from Estonia, in which case Finnish is only half unfamiliar to you. There's always a general-knowledge heavyweight around who says, "Wait a minute. Finnish is related to Hungarian too!"

Oh, yeah! True, Finnish, Hungarian and Estonian are indeed all members of the Finno-Ugric language family, but try to find more than six words even remotely similar in each. As you learn more and more about foreign languages, you're able to laugh at more and more jokes about languages. No Las Vegas comic will ever knock socks off, or even loosen them, by standing up and saying, "You know, Finnish and Hungarian are cousin languages, but Finnish took all the vowels!" Look at the two languages side by side, however, and you'll grudgingly accord at least minor-wit status to whoever thought that one up.

You may have experienced the difficulties of tackling Latin and Russian with their half-dozen or so noun cases. Finnish has fifteen noun cases in the singular and sixteen in the plural! Every word in the entire language is accented on the first syllable, which gives Finnish something of the sound of a pneumatic jackhammer breaking up a sidewalk.

I covered the Olympic games in Helsinki but wisely decided not to try to learn Finnish. It was the wisdom of the young boxer who's eager to get in there with the champ and trade punches, but who nonetheless summons up the cool to decline and wait until he's more prepared. I found a much softer opponent on the ship back to the United States.

A summer tradition that vanished after the 1950s with far too little poetic lamentation was the "student ship to Europe." They were almost always Dutch ships offering unbelievably low fares, hearty food, cramped but clean accommodations, cheap beer, and always a bearded guitar player who drew the crowd back to the ship's fantail after dinner and led the kids of ten or twelve nations in throaty renditions of "I've Been Working on the Railroads." The singing, the flirting, the joy of heading over or heading home, and especially the learning of all the other countries' "Railroads" in all the other languages made the summer student ship a delight unimaginable to today's jet-lagged young.

Boarding the ship in Rotterdam was a group of uniformed Dutch airmen about my age. They were all headed for the United States to take their jet fighter training at various American air bases, and we became old friends at once. There seemed to be dozens (I later realized hundreds) of Indonesia servants on board. After four hundred years of Dutch rule, Indonesia had won its independence from Holland only four years earlier. The thousands of Indonesians who chose to remain loyal to Holland had to go to Holland, and that meant that virtually the entire Dutch service class was Indonesian.

I was sitting on deck talking to one of the Dutch pilots, Hans van Haastert. He called one of the Indonesians over and said something to him in fluent Indonesian. My romance with Dutch would begin (in a very unusual way) a few years later, but my romance with Indonesian was born in the lightning and thunder of Hans ordering a beer from that deck chair.

If I had never been drawn to foreign languages earlier, that moment alone would have done it. To me at that time, it was the white-suited bwana speaking something pure "jungle" to one of his water carriers in any one of a hundred and eighteen safari movies I'd seen. It was Humphrey Bogart melting a glamorous woman's kneecaps with a burst of bush-talk she had no idea he even knew.

"Where did you learn that?" I asked. It turned out that Hans, like many of his Dutch confreres, had been born in Java of mixed parents. His Indonesian was just as good as his Dutch. "Will you teach me some?" I asked.

For the next eight days, until we were interrupted by the New York City skyline, Hans patiently taught me the Indonesian language. When we parted, I was able to converse with the Indonesian crewmen, just as Hans had that first day on deck. Lest this come across as a boast, let me hasten to point out that Indonesian is the easiest language in the world — no hedging; no "almost," no "among the easiest." In my experience, Indonesian is the easiest. The grammar is minimal, regular, and simple. Once I began to learn it, Indonesian didn't seem "jungle" anymore. The Indonesians obligingly use the Roman alphabet, and they get along with fewer letters of it than we do. And their tongue has an instant charm. The Indonesian word for "sun," mata hari (the famous female spy was known as the "sun" of Asia) literally means "eye of the day." When they make a singular noun plural in Indonesia, they merely say it twice. "Man," for example, is orang. "Men" is orang orang. And when they write it, they just write one orang and put a 2 after it, like an exponent in algebra (Orang 2). Orang hutan, the ape name pronounced by many Americans as if it were "orang-u-tang," is an Indonesian term meaning "man of the forest."

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