Tinkering

In the last post I mentioned "tinkering" with languages (a term that linguist Michael Erard uses briefly in his book Babel No More).  Tinkering with language is no more or less than playing with words, experimenting with them.  Certain images come to my mind with the word. You tinker like an old man in an old cap, taking apart grammars like small engines and rebuilding them.  You learn without pressure and only for delight in the simultaneous beauty and functionality of things.  I love this tinkering not only because it is fun, but because it forges brain connections that can come in handy later.

I was inspired to learn Hebrew when when my mom made friends with Israeli 20-somethings selling Dead Sea products at the mall.  They came for Thanksgiving and, to my delight, burst into spirited Hebrew exclamations over our dinner table every time they got excited about something.  My head was swimming.  At fourteen I was too shy to invite myself into their world. However, the next summer found me pacing the dining room with a copy of Hebrew for Dummies and a glass of milk, attempting to prime my vocal chords for pharyngeal fricatives...which I simply knew at the time as that sound my cat makes when she's got a hairball.  All that to say, I didn't get far with Hebrew, but the experience prepared my vocal chords in some small way for what they would encounter when I began studying Russian.

Then there was my discovery about Kyrgyz.  Since I am going to Kyrgyzstan I have been learning a few phrases, and one of the first things I looked at were numbers.  I had heard that Kyrgyz and Turkish were part of the same language family, but I imagined them to be sort of cousins that visited each other on holidays.  To my great joy, I found that the numbers I studied looked more like fraternal twins! Below are the numbers 1-10 in Kyrgyz and Turkish, taken from Turkey Travel Planner and the Kyrgyz Phrasebook on the School of Russian and Asian Studies website.

Number	Kyrgyz	Turkish	Pronunciation
1	бир	bir	bir
2	еки	iki	eki
3	уч	üç	uch
4	торт	dört	tort
5	беш	beş	besh
6	алтй	altı	alty
7	жеди	yedi	jeti
8	сегиз	sekiz	segiz
9	тогуз	dokuz	toguz
10	он	on	on

Native speakers might see a big difference in pronunciation, and I don't know enough about the languages yet to tell if the numbers are indicative of the two languages as wholes.  BUT that little light of recognition going off in my brain was exciting.  To strike out into the dark unknown and smack up against something familiar...that is good.  And that familiarity would not have been possible without the funky urge I had to learn those Turkish numbers several years ago.  Because of that little connection, I suddenly felt smart and able, maybe even falsely proficient!

You never know when those three phrases of Indonesian you learned on a whim in high school will make someone's day.  So I see my eventual goal (besides actually settling down and becoming fluent in one of the languages I'm interested in and/or studying) as having a Mary Poppins bag of phrases with me wherever I go.  To tinker with and delight in, and to make bridges with people around the world.