Languages 2

Latvian and Russian are further difficult to learn because they have so few cognates with English. Of course, recent borrowings back and forth are recognizable: you can figure out that borsč is "borscht" or tehnīka is some form of "technical." But it's the everyday words that completely stump you. Going into the supermarket was hugely instructive in this regard because you can see things in jars or on the product labels so that you can figure things out. Supermarkets are pretty much the same the world over, too -- breakfast cereals come in boxes, they are all grouped together, and if they are for small children, cute characters happily eating said cereal are illustrated on the boxes -- so you can get a lot of vocabulary very quickly. But there is no easy way to guess that olas are "eggs," or that piens is "milk" other than the fact that these items are located in what is clearly a refrigerated dairy case. Likewise, there are innumerable clothing stores all over Daugavpils, but apģerbi isn't a word that I can find any cognate for that hits close to "clothing," nor does apavi resemble "shoes." You figure these words out by going into the store and finding out what it being sold. Or you make up some kind of connection: you wear apavi to walk on the pavement.

Sometimes odd cognates do turn up, though. I've seen various forms of bernu, berniam, and so on, depending on the case (not that I could tell you what it is). The word means "child" or "children," and the first time I saw it it struck me that it must be related to the medieval Celtic word for child that is similar to it and that has survived in the Scottish dialect as bairn. I have to wonder if olas, "eggs," is somehow distantly related to ovulation, and I bet that it is. It's worth knowing that the Baltic language family, which consists of Latvian and Lithuanian, is among the oldest families in the Indo-European language family, which includes almost all modern European languages, not to mention the languages of Iran and some of the languages of ancient India. If there are cognates that Latvian has with English, it's a pretty safe bet that they are either very recent borrowings or very, very old borrowings.

Russian poses its own set of problems. Russian uses the Cyrillic alphabet that consists of 33 letters, some of which are exactly like the letters of the Roman alphabet, though they are not always pronounced the same. Many of the letters have no relationship to Roman letters, or indeed the letters of any alphabet, though the relationship between Russian and Greek letters is sometimes visually clear. For example, here is my name is Cyrillic: Роберт Келлермен. (Many thanks to the nice Russian woman at the USA Info Center who helped me out with this!) I think it looks totally cool, like a secret Russian code, but trying to read a menu in a language that you can't speak followed by a language that you can't speak or read means that I often just point to a picture and hope that I like what I have just ordered. If you want to be adventurous diner, Latvia is not a bad place to be.

Not being able to read Russian means that I can't sound out words the way that I can in Latvian, which tends to be very regular and highly phonetic: words are pronounced pretty much exactly as they are spelled, and Latvian helps you out with a nice set of diacritical marks that indicate syllable accents, changes to consonant sounds, and so on. So my learning Russian here is pretty much going nowhere very slowly because I have enough work on my hands to learn the official language here, and that not even very well.

So there are a set of reasons that I will not come back with any serious fluency in either language spoken here. I expect that this is the case for many Fulbrighters unless they are in the country for the full academic year and are dealing with the language more fully than I am. After all, I am here precisely because I am a native speaker of English; this is what my colleagues and students want from me, so I speak English with them as much as possible. It is gratifying, if a little disconcerting, to be told by students how much they enjoy hearing my accent. It is in fact a standard, classic Midwestern accent, complete with flat vowels and occasionally odd Midwestern pronunciations. I like my accent a lot, actually; I have just never been told that is was a pleasure to listen to. And I still don't quite believe it.