My Favorite Toy

My favorite toy is language.

In the shower this morning, I was thinking about a recent discussion I had with some friends about pronouncing Latin. It seems that not everyone pronounces it the same way--some of us pronounce the 'v' as a 'v', and some of us pronounce the 'v' and a 'w'. (Someone had the very good point that, somehow, Julius Caesar's "Veni, vidi, vici [I came, I saw, I conquered]" doesn't have the same ring if you pronounce it "Waynee, weedee, weekee".)

The thing I kept thinking during the course of the discussion is none of us knows how the Romans pronounced it, and that I'd be willing to bet pronunciation had changed over the centuries the Romans were Romans. On top of that, look at all the differences between French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish--romance languages one and all. You can tell the languages have a common root, but they're also very different.

From there, I played with my recent realization that the Champs Elysées was French for Elysian Fields. Since I'd known the Latin campus means field, you'd have thought I'd made the connection, especially since Elysées isn't all that different than Elysian.

But no.

Yet that's what I love about language: those nooks and crannies and surprises. That's also why I love English. It has this way of stealing from other languages, a kind of magpie going, "Oh look, shiny", then snatching the new thing up. The language I use has its roots in Old English, Norman French, and Latin, and it's borrowed from every other language English-speaking people have come across. Opossum, pajama, skunk, circus, abalone, get: each of those words has a different root language, yet all live together in English.

And then there are the surprising ways people put all those words together. Poets and prose stylists and people you meet who speak vividly, all of them bending the language to their needs. I love that.

Love it. Playing with language is the best game there is.