Pedro Lilienfeld

In my autobiography I glossed over the subject of my experience with languages, their acquisition and development, and related insights.

I want to emphasize that the linguistic processes that I underwent as a child may have the appearance of having been chaotic. Perhaps, psychologically, the manner in which I was exposed to languages and learned how to speak and, eventually to read and write may be considered potentially confusing to a child’s intellectual development. Rather, I want to believe that my experience demonstrates the inherent pliability of the young mind. In fact, I have come to consider that the apparently confusing exposure to various languages during my childhood may have contributed positively to my intellectual development.

My first uttered words were in Spanish, sometime during my life’s second year. I was being taken care of by a Spanish governess, in Madrid. Most probably, I was concurrently exposed to German as my parents and grandparents would have been interacting exclusively in that language. When I was 2 years and 4 months old we left Spain and arrived in Paris, abruptly terminating my Spanish language immersion. The German exposure probably predominated at that point but, soon after, I was faced with a new language: French, spoken occasionally at home, at my grandmother’s house, and then exclusively in nursery school and kindergarten. I soon became entirely bilingual as we escaped to Vichy France and attended first grade in Sète. This initial bilingualism, however, was limited to the spoken language. I learned to read and write exclusively in French. German was, for me, only a verbal language. My French in Sète, however, got infected by a Provençal accent, presumably because I was surrounded by classmates who all hailed from that surrounding region. It is truly amazing how easily the language of a six year old can be molded. I can still do a passable imitation of that Languedocian intonation. At the age of seven we returned to Spain, reacquainting me with the dormant and inchoate Spanish of my toddler period. Now, I was speaking three languages: German, French and Spanish. French continued with me as I was attending 2nd grade at the French Lycée in Madrid. About a year later we arrived in Quito, Ecuador, and my French went into remission with a brief interruption at the age of about 12 when I had a few lessons of that language by a private teacher. Spanish reading and writing became totally predominant.

At the age of 21, I traveled to France to spend my summer vacation there, principally with the Fourestiers. I will quote from my autobiography: “What did, indeed, take a bit of time to be reawakened was my French language fluency. During the first two weeks, or so, I mostly listened as the Fourestiers spoke to me almost exclusively in French, and I would respond mostly in German. Suddenly, thereafter, the mental dike broke and I was spewing forth in accent-less Parisian. It had been stored away in the deep recesses of my memory banks from the time of the French Lycée in Madrid”. Thirteen years of linguistic dormancy had thus been overcome.

I acquired the English language very gradually, starting in my early teenage years, principally listening to shortwave radio (mostly the BBC) and reading magazines (mostly TIME). English language classes in school complemented the learning to some degree. By the age of 16, or so, I was already quite competent in that language and soon after was able to read technical literature so that when I visited the U.S. years later, at age 23, I had no difficulties communicating at any level. Finally, when I came to study at Columbia U. I was totally fluent. When I was 21, while visiting Venice, British tourists with whom I spoke thought I was American while American tourists believed I was British.

I have been able to preserve the knowledge of those four languages that I had learned in my youth. Remarkably, I speak each one of them essentially accent-less. My vocabularies in English and Spanish are rather extensive, less so in French because of lack of use. My German word knowledge is quite ample considering my limited use of it over the last two decades since the passing of my father. My writing ability in German still leaves to be desired but is passable considering that I never learned it formally. Come to think of it, I never went to school in an English speaking country either, until graduate school in NYC. Knowledge of those four languages has led me to engage in frequent comparisons between them. I find it fascinating to identify idiosyncratic differences and nuances of meaning when translating from one to the other. Equally interesting is identifying the drifts in meaning in the case of cognates, from genuine ones to false ones. My involvement with the meaning of words in different languages has been a source of intellectual stimulation.

As an example, my concurrent involvement with classical music and linguistics has made me aware of an interesting subtle difference in the meaning of “hero” in English and its German translation “Held” (remember the need to capitalize German nouns). The word hero, in English, implies a specific event in time; e.g., a hero is a person who saves another under extreme circumstances. The German equivalent, as exemplified by Richard Strauss’ tone poem Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life), implies permanence, a life’s condition.

Since I did not have any linguistic inferiority complex about English when I arrived in the U.S., I soon engaged in jousting with Americans about the “true” meaning of words. Case in point: early in my first job, my boss used the word “discolored” when some device had changed to a different color. I decided to set him straight and told him that he was wrong, that the object’s color had not faded but changed. After lengthy argumentation I found out that the dictionary meaning of “discolor” is, in keeping with typical American “freedom of speech”, either of those two different ones. I argued vainly that the prefix “dis” invariably implies removal or negation just as “disagree”, “disappear”, “disarm”, “disbar”, etc. and not change. I have since found that the phenomenon of word meaning ambiguity appears rather frequently in the English language (perhaps more so in American English).

I have also found what in English would be considered an extremely learned word is not so in, for example, Spanish. Case in point: how many people would know the English word “proparoxytone”; its Spanish translation is “esdrújula” which you learn in elementary school and which means a word having its stress on the antepenultimate syllable. Or the English word “aleatory”, meaning dependent on chance, whose near Spanish cognate is “aleatorio”, a common scientific term meaning random, an interesting case of a small drift in meaning. How many Americans would know the meaning of “scalene” triangle?; I learned the Spanish term “escaleno” back in school, it means a triangle whose three sides are unequal.

This reflects an idiosyncrasy of English as compared to, for example, Spanish, that I have found. The former language may possibly have more words than the latter, but most of those additional words remain forever buried in the dictionary. As the above examples illustrate, word usage, I believe, is more extensive in Spanish than in English. The average American English speaker uses far fewer different words than the average Spanish speaker. Here, I am not referring to “Latino” speakers in the U.S. but those with comparable levels of education in the U.S. and Spanish speaking countries.

My multilingualism has also made me aware of another, to me, fascinating linguistic idiosyncrasy: the sounds of vowels and, to a lesser extent, consonants, in various languages. There are two aspects to these peculiarities: the differences in pronunciation for a given letter and the fact that there are sounds that are unique to a given language. Both of these characteristics tend to create obstacles to the appropriate pronunciation when trying to speak a non-native tongue.

One of the first peculiarities I became aware of was the sound of standard English language vowels; both their names as well as their pronunciation within words differs completely from the same vowels in other European languages. When I researched this phenomenon I came across what is linguistically called the Great Vowel Shift which was a series of changes in the pronunciation of the English language that took place between the years 1400 and 1700 beginning in Southern England.

One of the major and most pervasive of these shifts was the diphthongization of long vowels which I noticed early on. Whereas in Continental European (e.g., German, French, Spanish, Italian, etc.) these vowels have a single sound, in English they often – but not always – become diphthongs. For example, the sound of the letter a in ‘lane’ consists of two coupled sounds, that of the e in ‘lend’ and the sound of the double e in ‘bee’. Or the sound of the o in the word ‘one’ is a combination of the sound of the double o in ‘boom’ and that of the a in ‘and’. The name itself of each vowel itself is either a diphthong (a, i, o and u) or has changed from the sound of the other related languages (the letter e whose name sounds like that of the letter i in those languages).

Then, there are vowel sounds, for example in German (ü, ä and ö) and French (u), that do not exist in English, and vowel-consonant sounds in French (an, en, in, on and un) that are unique to that language. There are the two different sounds of the combination ch in German, depending on the vowel preceding it, and one of these pronunciations happens to be the same as the j in Spanish so that Bach in German has the same sound as Quijote in Spanish. The other sound of the German ch is nearly unpronounceable by most English speakers, as in the word “echt” (genuine), or the name of the cataloger of Mozart’s works, Köchel.

Comparing the English language, especially as spoken in the U.S., with those other languages I’m familiar with, I find that it is significantly more versatile and adaptable, i.e., it evolves much more rapidly being able to incorporate new expressions. This adaptability, however, I believe comes at the price of chaos, ambiguity, and unruliness.

There is little consistency of pronunciation of words in English creating a challenge to those who want to learn the language. Take the word ‘grocery’; it should be straightforward, but no, it is made to sound like ‘groshery’. As if the word ‘larceny’ should sound like ‘larsheny’! Another sort of distortion occurs when English attempts to adopt foreign words. Example: the French word ‘lingerie’; our American linguistic heroes pronounce it as if the French word were to be ‘lingerais’, a sound that does even exist in the English language! And not to speak of the pronunciation of the French syllable ‘in’ which is usually pronounced correctly, although it is not an English sound either. There are innumerable examples of this pronunciation chaos in English which I could cite. The lesson is: if you want to learn English well, start at the earliest possible age. Later on in life, it’s a Sisyphean battle that many continue forever to fight unsuccessfully.

It also fascinates me how related languages, take Spanish and Italian, have developed different idiosyncrasies. For example, the Spanish tendency of requiring a vowel at the beginning of a word that starts with an s followed by another consonant, whereas Italian requires the vowel at the end. Examples: the English word ‘stoic’; in Spanish it become ‘estoico’ whereas in Italian it is ‘stoico’. The Spanish ‘español’ becomes ‘spagnolo’ in Italian. The English ‘stable’ translates to the Spanish ‘estable’ and the Italian ‘stabile’. ‘Scappare’ in Italian becomes ‘escapar’ in Spanish, etc. Is it the Arabic influence that is related to the Spanish initial vowel tendency? Where does the Italian end vowel quasi-rule come from?

There are numerous language idiosyncrasies that we can identify, and when you speak several languages one becomes quite aware of these characteristics and quirks. Among the western European languages that I am familiar with, it is German that stands out. It has been stated that “The German language is sufficiently copious and productive, to furnish native words for any idea that can be expressed at all”^[1] . There are two peculiarities that converge to achieve this in German: a) the possibility to imagine almost any complex idea, and b) the linguistic mechanism to create a single word concatenating several concepts into a single word, whatever its length. An extreme example of those rather strange properties is the German word ‘Kraftfahrzeugsinnenausstattungsneugeruchsgenuss’! Its meaning is (more or less): Pleasure at the smell of the interior furnishing of a new automobile. That single German word describes a thoroughly unique and specific feeling.

The English language has its own peculiarity that, however, provides a great deal of conceptual versatility: the two-word verb. In some cases, this linguistic quirk gets out of hand. For example, combining the word ‘up’ to create almost any verb: wake up, come up, speak up, up for, up to, write up, call up, brighten up, polish up, warm up, clean up, lock up, fix up, stir up, line up, work up, think up, dressed up, opened up, stopped up, open up, take up, are up, give up, wind up, clearing up, mess up, dry up, wrap up, time up, shut up! Most of these expressions are idioms.

English is full of idioms, indeed, perhaps more than any other language, which further complicates learning this tongue. Take these examples: a) how can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites?; or, your house can burn up as it burns down; or, an alarm goes off by going on; or, when the stars are out, they are visible, but when the lights are out, they are invisible; etc., etc. No wonder everybody wants to learn English while very few can speak it properly.

I’ve been battling another written American English oddity (if not idiocy): the placement of quotation marks in combination with comma and period punctuation. To my knowledge, in every civilized language of the western world which I can read, Spanish, French, German, and… UK English, the comma and the period follow the quotation mark, which is the logical sequence. Not so in American English. For example, here is a fraction of a sentence: …. has been described as “practically Confederate aristocracy”. In the U.S. it would be written as: …. has been described as “practically Confederate aristocracy.” This latter sequence makes no sense to me since the period signifies the end of the entire paragraph, and not the end of the quotation. Another questionable American exceptionalism! The attentive reader of these essays will observe that I often do not follow my own rule, but these inconsistencies stem from the fact that I have often used quotations copied verbatim from their source.

I find the mode of acquisition of languages by children particularly interesting, especially the learning of the meaning of words. Obviously, a child does not gain knowledge of what each new word means by looking it up in a dictionary. He/she learns that by listening to the context within which a word is used by adults and other children. I believe that that learning process involves trial and error: the child slowly converges on the “true” meaning of a word having narrowed it down – perhaps after several errors – gradually, after multiple exposures to that word in various contexts. I also venture to think that that same process may apply to the collective incorporation of the meaning of a word into a language, and that “errors” of identification by such entire groups may be the cause for drifts in the definition of words. Hence, divergences of the meanings of cognates in different but related languages, and “errors” of definition of words such as the above mentioned example of “discolor”; the Spanish cognate “descolorar” means unambiguously fading of color and not changing of color as it now has become in (American) English.

I also believe, based on my own experience, that the richness of the vocabulary one acquires in one language also dictates the need to acquire a comparably ample knowledge in all languages one uses. I possessed a very broad knowledge of Spanish, principally through assiduous reading of books in Quito, and when I started to be immersed in the English language, after my arrival in the U.S., I unwittingly acquired a comparable vocabulary and writing ability in that new language. This became quite helpful, for example, in achieving repeated professional success when writing technical proposals.

Of course, my quadrilingual language proficiency pales in comparison to that of my spouse, Evelyn. She, as an octogenarian, speaks fluently those same four languages I speak, plus Italian. In addition, she once spoke Polish, Rumanian and Hungarian and started to learn Russian. She also communicates now with Brazilians in Portuguese.

Both my example, and even more so Evelyn’s, demonstrates that this early exposure to many languages has no deleterious effects on the communications skills and mental development of a young person, to the contrary, I submit that it provides an intellectual enrichment to the growing mind. There is no mental “overload” as a child learns concurrently a diversity of languages, even under unstructured conditions.

As I have discussed in my professional memoirs, I’ve written some 40 refereed journal papers and book chapters which is a somewhat unusual accomplishment for a non-academic scientist. I have thoroughly enjoyed penning, and sometimes presenting such papers. During the last few years, a number of my publications have been searched by scientists worldwide through the ResearchGate portal. My most successful paper, cited some 2,000 times on that website, has been my Blue Sky History published in 2004, one of my forays into the history of science. It is also cited in several Wikipedia entries. Apparently, some of my early papers, published as far back as the 1960s are still being sought and read.

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^[1] Charles Follen, A Practical Grammar of the German Language, Hilliard, Gray, 1835