Gregor Samsa woke up one morning to discover that he had turned into some sort of disgusting insect.
Kafka had written these words in German.
The Hapsburg dynasty that once ruled the Czech lands had wanted German to be the lingua franca of their empire. German was decreed the second official language in all Czech lands in 1627 and was gradually adopted in all governmental offices, while Czech became the language of the peasantry. German remained an official language until the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Fast-forward thirty-something years after the collapse and the Czech lands were, for the second time in living memory, one with their Slovak neighbors. This time they were the Czechoslovak Socialistic Republic, although still commonly referred to by their pre-WWII name of Czechoslovakia.
Anyhow, that’s why you could buy maps in German in this country, and that’s why there were plenty of Slovak-speaking natives. Not that there was much by the way of difference between Czech and Slovak—it was perfectly possible for two people to have a conversation where one was speaking Czech and the other Slovak. And the older generation, in particular, were in the habit of peppering their Czech-Slovak conversations with a liberal sprinkling of German nouns.
So there were still three languages in this country, really. There was only one official language now, Czech, but there were plenty of landmarks that had a number of names, which could be pretty confusing for tourists when they wanted the Opera House and were given directions to the Státní Opera by one local, the Smetana Theater by another, and the Opernhaus by yet another without realizing that they were all one and the same building.
The many place names, and the many languages spoken by the old folk …
Czech was a hard enough language as it was without having to worry about “interference” from Slovak on one side and German on the other.
“So I suppose that Czech could be considered something of a ‘hard language’ compared to your run-of-the-mill romance languages.” Lucia Sukrova was explaining all this to me as she served tea. “Czech is a Slavic language, just like Russian and Croatian, and like all Slavic languages there are a huge number of possible noun declensions. Some nouns have over two hundred possible different forms, depending on which way you count them.”
“That’s very interesting, ma’am. So you could spend a whole month on a single word and not master it,” I observed, placing a slice of lemon in my tea.
“Yes, although admittedly that’s an extreme case.” Lucia smiled. “But the really tricky thing about Czech isn’t so much the nouns per se, as the difficulty of getting them out in the correct order to say exactly what you mean, and in an accent that comes even close to a native speaker’s. Did you know, for example, that some Czech words don’t have any vowels in them? How’s this for a sentence: Strč prst skrz krk. And we even have our own unique phoneme, the Ř. Linguists call it the raised alveolar non-sonorant trill, and it’s a rare bored housewife who can master that with any degree of panache, I can tell you.”
“I see,” I said.
“That’s why it’s hard to teach this sort of direct interpersonal communication over the Internet. There’s just too much you miss, too many subtleties.”
She was absolutely right, of course. Web-based learning could only ever get you so far, even with the advanced e-learning technologies we had at our disposal these days. Virtual reality learning environments were the order of the day for most of our classroom training sessions, but language learning was still firmly a face-to-face, offline experience, precisely for the reasons she named.
Lucia Sukrova’s livelihood was teaching Czech to foreigners. We were in her studio, a spacious room in her traditional apartment in the center of Prague’s old town, where all her students came to study.
“I have to confess, ma’am, that I’m relieved that your English is so good. You speak like a native, unlike some language teachers I’ve worked with in the past.”
“Well, English does seem to be the hegemonic language these days, after all …” Lucia smiled. If this was a subtle dig, for once it didn’t seem to bother me, even though I was usually pretty weary of having my country’s foreign policy rubbed in my face by disgruntled locals.
“I’m sure it must seem that way to you, ma’am, although you might be interested to know that according to the latest web traffic analysis that might not strictly be true. More content is created by Japanese bloggers than in English, for example. Perhaps because the Japanese like to have a virtual outlet for their opinions and feelings that they suppress in everyday life.”
My cover is that I’m in advertising, recently transferred over here to manage a big new account. Here to be a pioneer in the burgeoning interstitial market. To infest and infect beautiful Czech websites with opportunistic pop-ups of airbrushed models proclaiming their undying loyalty to a diet pill du jour. And these sorts of ads did, as it happened, have a tendency to appear on both English and Japanese blogs.
“Is that so? I have to admit I can’t really relate to that on a personal level, as I’ve never felt the compulsion to document my life for the whole world to read. But if what you say is true, I imagine that the web is drowning in a sea of words.”
“Did you ever keep a diary?” I asked, trying to find a way to relate the conversation to her.
“Hmmm … yes, I believe I did. Some time ago, though.”
“And if you don’t mind my asking, ma’am, where did you learn your English?”
“In the States. I studied linguistics,” she said.
“So you could say you’re a master of words?” I asked.
“Hardly. If I were so good with words I’d have ensnared a man or two to look after me by now, no? I studied the academic framework of language, not its sensual power.”
“Sure, you could describe Noam Chomsky as many things, but sexy is probably not one of them,” I joked.
“I don’t know about that. Not for most people, you’re right, but there are some oddballs in this world who feel the sensuous beauty in his work. Take me, for instance.”
Lucia smiled again. She sure liked to smile, I thought. And not just any old smile. Hers wasn’t the superficial smile of someone trying to make polite conversation. It was the smile of someone who loved words and loved communicating exactly what she meant in her heart. When she smiled she looked so much younger than the thirty-three-year-old she was. When she smiled, she could have probably passed for a teenage girl.
“Where were you based in the States?” I continued.
“I was at grad school in Massachusetts.”
“MIT?” I asked, and she nodded. “Wow! Impressive! I had no idea.”
Not true. I had every idea. It was my job to seem impressed by this piece of information, as if it were new to me, as if Intelligence hadn’t profiled this woman down to the last minute detail. It was my job as a spy to be able to pull off this sort of lie convincingly. Normally I could. Right now, though, I had no idea whether or not she was convinced.
“It’s not that impressive really. It happened to be the only school where I could continue my research in my field, and so that’s where I went.”
“Oh, really? What sort of research was that exactly?”
The conversation that had been flowing so naturally up until this point now hit a wall. This was one question too many for a casual conversation, evidently, although Lucia did her best not to show it.
Who’s asking? she must have wanted to say.
Instead, she chose her words carefully, blandly. “I suppose you could say it was mainly to do with how language can exert influence on people’s behavior.”
“You mean linguistic relativity? Like how Eskimos have over twenty different words for snow, and how the very existence of these words affects their worldview?”
“You mean the old Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? No, not quite.” Lucia smiled again. And truth be told I was relieved. Not so much because I was worried about her being suspicious, but because I didn’t like looking at her face when she frowned. She was a beautiful woman when she smiled.