52 Ancestors Week 10: Language

Question

From Amy Johnson Crow: The theme for Week 10 is "Language." This is a theme where you can let your creativity shine! While you might want to write about an ancestor who spoke a different language than you, you could also explore someone who worked with like (perhaps as a writer or teacher). Any relatives who liked word puzzles?

Da Amy Johnson Crow: Il tema della decima settimana è "Lingua". Questo è un tema in cui puoi far risplendere la tua creatività! Anche se potresti voler scrivere di un antenato che parlava una lingua diversa dalla tua, potresti anche esplorare qualcuno che ha lavorato con una lingua simile (magari come scrittore o insegnante). Qualche parente a cui piacevano i puzzle di parole?

De Amy Johnson Crow : Le thème de la semaine 10 est « Langue ». C’est un thème où vous pouvez laisser briller votre créativité ! Même si vous souhaitez peut-être écrire sur un ancêtre qui parlait une langue différente de la vôtre, vous pouvez également explorer quelqu'un avec qui il a travaillé (peut-être en tant qu'écrivain ou enseignant). Des membres de votre famille qui aimaient les puzzles de mots ?

Comments

The brain is a very mysterious place. There's still much to learn about your noggin: https://allroadhaverhill.blogspot.com/2024/03/52-ancestors-week-10-language.html

Answer 1

Multilingualism was kinda taken for granted among my relatives, so I'm going to pick someone who was strictly monolingual: my father-in-law's sister-in-law, Aunt Gwen.

She was a competitive Scrabble player who was often underestimated due to being a small and mild-mannered old lady. (But yes, she cheerfully played the f-word, if that's what gave her the most points.) She also did the New York Times crossword puzzle every day, in ink.

But the linguistic talent she chiefly demonstrated for the family was her versification. She wrote ditties for every special occasion, filled with delightful observations in rhyme. Perhaps her offspring preserved some examples; I will inquire whether any of them would be appropriate for posting on WikiTree.

Comments

I would love to hear any of her "offerings."

Answer 2

My paternal grandfather knew 21 languages.

Jack (Battiscombe Gunn Gunn-1707 , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battiscombe_Gunn ) was an Egyptologist, specializing in the Ancient Egyptian language (there is even a rule of Ancient Egyptian grammer, Gunn's Rule, named after him). He taught himself to read heiroglyphs as a schoolboy, and then took some classes from Margaret Murray, at University College, London.    He had gone to English "public" (i.e . private boarding) school, but a change in fanily finances meant he didn't go to University. None the less, in 1934 (when he was 51) Oxford University gave him an hororary M.A, and appointed him Professor of Egyptology.

He knew most of the modern European languages (German, Italian, French, etc.), the languages of the modern Near East (including Arabic and Coptic) most of the classical languages (Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Sanscrit, etc), and many of the ancient langauges, some of which only exist in written form, and nobody knows how they were atually spoken (Ancient Egyptian, Hittite, Sumerian, etc.).

My father (Jack's son) once asked him how many languages he knew. First they had to decide on a definition of "knowing a language", and agreed on "read, write, and speak where spoken" (since some of the Ancient languages are no longer spoken).

The answer, after some consideration, was that Jack knew 21 languages.

That did NOT include Spanish (he would read Cervantes (author of Don Quixote) in the original, and he could write  a business letter in Spanish, but he was not fluent in conversation), or the various languages he "learned" from missionary bibles.

 One of the missionary societies published bibles in the languages of the people they were trying to convert.  They expanded to publishing bibles in all sorts of languages, even ones that were not related to their missionary work.  Jack used to get lumbago (fancy word for lower back pain) each winter, and would be bedridden for several weeks.  While in bed he would use one of these missionary bibles to earn how to read a new language.  But he could neither write nor speak those languages, so they did not count.

Comments

I've read in novels of such extraordinary scholars, but it still boggles my mind to know they really exist(ed)!  

Thanks so much for enriching my day to read about a "real McCoy" (or MacKay, as they called them in 19th century Scotland).

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Thanks, but it is a hard precedent to try to live up to!

Answer 3

My great uncle Harry (William Henry) Richards, https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Richards-13896 who I have written about before, was the second child of 11 of my great grandparents Samuel and Jenny Richards. They lived in what was then and is still called the Black Country in south Staffordshire, England.

The area has one of the most peculiar dialects in England. it has more in common with of a language spoken a thousand years ago, than it does with current English language pronunciation and word use. It is one of the last places in Britain where you will hear an Anglo-Saxon dialect used amongst a modern population.

Quite why Harry had a strong Black country accent and my grandmother the 6th child in the family didn’t, perhaps had something to do the finances of the family at the time the various children grew up. Harry had to leave school at 14 and work full time to support the family of his then widowed mother and his 10 siblings.

Often language use changes over time, but in the Black country the old dialect is still in use.

My dad who grew up in the area on occasion used some odd phrases.

Some examples: in the 1950s, aforetimes (‘in the past’) unbeknownst (unknown), thenadays (‘in those days’), thataway (in that way’’), most ingenerally (generally), blackguard (villain), and glassen (‘made of glass’).

Bobowler (a large moth), snout (nose) and cake-hole (mouth). The use of the word bit is another Black Country hallmark: for example, ta-ra-a-bit is a Black Country way of saying ‘see you later’, and you’re more likely to hear ‘wait a bit’ than ‘wait a minute’.

I remember vividly being chastised at school for telling people to shut your cake hole, in other words ‘Shut up or stop talking’. Actually, one of the reasons for the choice of school for myself and other siblings was to learn proper pronunciation and word usage.

‘Wait a bit‘ was in common usage in my home. And I was frequently reminded that 'tara' was unacceptable as a substitute for good bye or see you later.  

Thanks Chris for asking this question answering it has made me remember lots of small details about my childhood, before my family emigrated to Canada

If you want to listen to some Black Country accent and dialect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrZwHQ464do

Comments

That's quite interesting, but coming from Minnesota/North Dakota, we used some of those phrases too. Cake-hole for instance and that-a-way. We would say "in a little bit", but my mom steps it up with "quite a little bit", which is the same as "a fair amount" (a bit more than normal). Unbeknownst is not commonly used, but I knew the meaning immediately. The others are new to me, including ta-ra-a-bit.

We also say boughten, meaning store-bought. Bread for instance, can be either home-made or boughten. And "batching it", for a husband who's temporarily a bachelor (his wife is traveling for instance).

Answer 4

One of Dad's grade school stories caused my friends and I to use an expression for a while when we were the same school age as him, about 9.

 When Dad was 9 it was 1925 and the kid in the desk beside him was lifting the lid a crack to sneak bits of cake hidden inside the desk.  The next time he lifted it, the lid came down with such force it nearly trapped the kid's fingers.  The teacher loomed over the kid and the words echoed around the classroom: IS YOUR SUFFICIENCY SUFFONSIFIED?

So I'm over 70 now and that teacher stuck an expression in my brain and I wasn't even alive when he said it.

Dad and I used to sit down with Tintin books and we'd read through them together in French. It's like a hard cover  comic book.  I just loved them.  Tintin's companion besides the dog, Milou, was the drunken Captain Haddock.  Captain Haddock was always swearing.  The one I remember the best was Bashi-bazouks. I just looked that up. Irregular soldier in the Ottoman Empire--crazy head.  I never knew that until now.  The beauty about any language is there's always more to know, to use, to learn.

Comments

Great stories, Pat! I had to look up suffonsify after reading your post.

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Thank you, Star.  And of course, why use the superfluous English swear words when you can open eyes wide across the street with a bellowed Bashi-bazouks.

Answer 5

To be a bit different I’ll write a little about my son. Born in Hawaii, our multi lingual neighbours looked after him a lot in his first few years. One side Hawaiian and the other Portuguese, they held two parties at key times like Christmas, one for each side, because they were the affluent ones of both and the families didn’t mix.  Our son picked up smatterings of both languages. Moving to San Francisco, his ritzy preschool taught French.  

Next in Saudi Arabia, we lived “off-base” for the first few years and a Sudanese who worked for me would pick him up when the American school let out after lunch and take him to their school in town until I picked him up after work, so he got about 4 hours a day in an Arabic-speaking environment studying math, etc. When I’d ask him what he learned, he’d say things like how to play soccer in Arabic. We had a deal where I’d buy him any toy he wanted in town provided he’d bargain the shopkeeper down 15% or more in Arabic.

Next came Australia where he had two years of elementary school Japanese before we moved to PNG where he picked up Tok Pisin.  He was also tutored by a German masterworker on my team in carpentry/joinery and learned to swear (and speak) in German. Back in Oz, he had some more French until we moved north where his school taught Mandarin.  He went to uni and taught Scuba to Japanese students perfecting jokes, then was privately tutored in Japanese for a year before six months in Japan teaching stunt people hired at Universal Studios Osaka for its grand opening.

Then 9/11 occurred and he joined the army, getting commissioned in the Infantry. He went to language school in Arabic and was then assigned to Norforce (Aboriginals in Australia’s Northern Territory) before Iraq and Afghanistan (where he picked up Dari with Spec Ops). Along the way he worked with Thai Rangers and Gurkhas.

Anyway, you get the drift.  One thing that always amused his high school friends in Brisbane was that he’d call up local talk radio pretending to be a foreign student learning English. His theory was that it’s easier to learn another language if you can perfect the accent using English. Another milestone was being able to successfully carry out joking in the language.

Comments

I'm in awe of such a polyglot!

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Thanks, Teresa.  One of the most impressive things is how much children and even infants can pick up.  He had been a baby in Thailand for six months with a Thai nanny and a Thai cook and had no trouble as an adult picking up conversational Thai.  Was there a connection?

Answer 6

I've already bragged about my son, but thought that I'd sneak in an anecdote about one of my favorite topics, languages. I grew up trilingual on the Navajo Rez and worked on mega projects around the world, always trying to learn enough of the local language to get by.  As an Engineer, my only formal language education was three years of high school German (by Patton's former chief interpreter) and I served in the US Army in Germany.  Bechtel paid for 10 months of intensive Brasilian-Portuguese before my assignment in Brasil and I've studied Biblical Hebrew and Greek. There's more, but I wanted to address my experience learning Arabic.

I was aware that I would be working in Saudi Arabia about eight months before I went and set out to learn some rudimentary Arabic.  I had successfully experimented with sleep learning Thai a few years earlier and acquired some highly regarded Arabic language tapes.  I'd play them in the car to and from work and also placed the cassette player under my pillow at night running a tape on loop.  Months drug on and I found myself rushed to Saudi Arabia where, of course, my new boss had no idea what to do with me so he said to take a few months to learn ops of the world's largest exporting oil terminal. So I would go to a unit, usually all Saudis except, in most cases, for an expat foreman.  I'd introduce myself and ask if I could shadow them for a week or so.  No problems.  I decided to cover all shifts to get a better feel.

So one day at around midnight I found myself on the Sea Islands, a group of interconnected offloading platforms about 100 feet above the waters of the Arabian Gulf.  I had been working with Fadhil's crew and he asked if I'd like to go out on the middle of a narrow walkway with him to catch a fish for the evening's kabsa.  When there I noticed that he had a long fishing line with a large bare hook that he swung as a pendulum just above the water.  He wasn't having any luck and asked if I wanted a go, so I sailed the hook out into the water and pulled it back, immediately hooking a barracuda which was cooked and served on rice.  What I didn't know then was that they despised barracuda but were too polite to let me know.  Fadhil had been deliberately fishing for hamour, a delicious form of cod.

Later Fadhil and I were again in the middle of a very narrow open grate steel walkway when Fadhil turned to me and said gruffly, "You know, Ray, we don't like how you speak Arabic!"  Mind you, it was 95 or 100 feet down to the water and several km to shore and Fadhil sounded serious - and he was a big man.  "You sound like you're from Egypt and we don't like people from Egypt!  If you want to speak Arabic, you should learn to speak like us!"  Talk about deflating!

Of course, I found Eastern Province dialect tapes and studied them religiously, including running them under my pillow every night.  It worked almost too well as I found myself having long conversations in Arabic without much comprehension of what I was saying.  See, I'd internalized the Arabic phrases but they were often decoupled from their English translations; however, my crew seemed to think that I knew what I was saying and responded with recognizable phrases that prompted further memorized responses.  Anyway, it came out okay in the end.

One of the teams working for me later were educated Saudi translators with a minicomputer designed to translate English to Arabic.  We'd write technical and training stuff in English (for Special Purposes) and their job was to translate it into colloquial Arabic.  Fortunately, they had a separate office because all day long they'd howl and howl at the Arabic translations that the computer spewed out.  We worked out that it was about 90% accurate.

BTW, when I called for experienced Saudis to join my team, Fadhil was one of the first to respond.

Comments

Fascinating accounts, Ray, about you and your son. You have a brilliant aptitude for languages, then increase your success by determination and hard work.  But it does start with an aptitude.  Do you ever wonder which ancestor passed it to you?

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Hi Pat, to be honest I find learning languages hard work but sometimes that effort seems to just click, like when a Dutchman was having trouble getting his car out of an Italian parking garage and I was able to defuse the situation by translating for them with German and Italian (with some Spanish and Portuguese).  It just happened.  My father's Finnish side were all polygots with Swedish, Finnish, English, and assorted other languages like Russian and German.  My mother's side were mathematical, with engineers, railway people, scientists, etc.  Can you guess which side we inherited a propensity for bad (i.e., good) puns from?

Oh, one amusing thing was that when in Brasil I'd come up with a blank for a word or phrase, it was likely German that would pop into my head.  As a native English speaker, I found that somewhat disconcerting.

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I've studied a few languages, not real well. But when searching for a word in the newest language, I often think of the word in the previous language I learned. I think the brain is just saying internally "what's the non-English word for xxxx"?

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So, Ray, you get the aptitude from your father's side. My father grew up with people who spoke only English back several generations and yet he learned French, Spanish, Russian, German, Hebrew.  But he was always better at writing the language than speaking.  He never tried Arabic, even though the interest was there.  He told me it was one of the hardest languages to learn so you did very well indeed.

Answer 7

My mom and I do the New Yorks Crossword puzzle together every Sunday.  We have been doing this for over 25 years.  My brother in Dallas and my brother in Phoenix also work the puzzle.  They call us on Sunday evening to see how we did and give/get hints.

Family lore has it that my 4th great-grandmother Elizabeth Secrest never learned english/only spoke german even though she spent her entire life in America.

Answer 8

I have an interesting story to drop here. I grew up in a family that was Catholic. That meant learning Latin for mass. My adopted maternal great grandmother was Polish and didn't speak any English. I learned some Polish to communicate with her.

The other story has to do with French. Ohio law at the time I was in High School required that all students take at least a year of language to graduate. I chose French. My French teacher told me that I spoke French like a native. I was shocked.

Fast forward to 2021. I took my DNA test. Found out I have French in my genes. That would explain my teacher's comment.

Answer 9

Well, Tody I was straightening my mom side of the genealogy and I came my grandmother's senior high school picture. Talk about a find. I will post it latr, but anyways not only did I fing out that she was in the Glee Club, Black and Blue Boosters, but she was learning Spanish as well.  Talk about a Shocker Spanish? She grew up Catholic so she had to know Latin, her parents were Czechoslovakian, so she knew Slavic, During the Depression she worked for a Jewish family so she probably picked up some Jewish. When she married grandpa, a Hungarian,  she probably picked up on that too.

That is pretty amazing for a woman to speak three languages and a little of 2 other languages in the 1930's. It is too bad her parents could not afford college for her. She was one amazing lady.

added 3/8 My aunt told me today that she spoke Greek too.

Answer 10

[[Shelton-4420|John William Shelton]], my 3rd Great-uncle, handwrote in pencil a family genealogy spanning 1901 to 1903. He gathered details from all of his siblings about their families. He was the youngest of 14 children born to Josiah Cyrus Shelton and Mary Elizabeth Orrand.

John's handwritten manuscript was kept by a distant cousin who shared it with another cousin who had it transcribed and bound in a book. I was lucky enough to obtain one of them. It's a pretty thick book. John was quite descriptive and complimentary in his descriptions. One young relative was described as quite good looking, and another had a musical talent. He fleshed out the genealogy with very nice details that would be lost to us otherwise. He even shared details of a 5th child for his sister, my 2nd great-grandmother, whose details would have been forever lost without his genealogy manuscript. Thank you, Uncle John William! You are much appreciated!

Answer 11

My dad's side is German-from-Russia. Catherine the Great (czarina of Russia) was raised in Germany and invited Germans to settle in southern Russia, along the Volga, Black Sea coast and into what is now Ukraine. My ancestors migrated by the 1840's, settled in a group (as they did) in a village with their own school and church. They all spoke the same dialect of German. But after some time conditions deteriorated for the Germans, so in the late 1800's to 1917 they migrated out in large numbers to the northern great plains: Kansas to Manitoba.

Despite 3 of my 4 grandparents speaking German natively, I never learned a word of it, except for a couple food dishes. So when I went to college I decided to take some classes in German. I visited my great-aunt about that time, and she had a big wall hanging, with a religious German phrase on it. I couldn't make it all out, so I asked her what it said. "Oh, I have no idea" she said. "That's in the standardized German, we don't speak that." The family (like probably thousands of others) had been out of the country for generations and still spoke an old dialect that had been officially dropped in the father-land. Why she chose to display a wall hanging that she couldn't read I really don't know.

Answer 12

This week I went into the "New York Unconnected" list to find an immigrant. I found there John Duclos who was born in France. Turns out I start to look for a connection with his son Harold. His wife had to be created, but her mother's profile already existed. (I had to do a name change with her, since her LNAB was americanized, but on Sarah's marriage record it was written with the German "sch"-combination.) The branch with Sarah's mother wasn't connected as well, so I had to look further. That branch went to Elizabeth's granddad, who was born in today's Germany. When I looked in the Surname-list, there were many profiles from the particular area Conrad was from, and it turns out that Conrad's father is already connected.

Answer 13

My husband Tom is from a Danish background with the Last name of Thomsen. His grandfather Thomas Jensen Thomsen spoke Danish, but he also learned to speak English.  Tom's daughter Sarah, the great-granddaughter of Thomas Jensen Thomsen, started learning French in school. She also began learning Swedish. She was able to learn to read, write, and speak Swedish. She received her doctorate in Sweden, all in Swedish. Since then due to her work within the government and for the government in Sweden and around the Health Care Industry, she now speaks 5 additional languages that we are aware of. We are very proud of her.  In addition, her daughter has begun to learn and speak other languages besides Swedish and English.