Friday, August 21, 2009

Kreyol

This really is the coolest language. It’s SO practical and simple – no such absurdities as gendered nouns and conjugated verbs. And really, the verb “to be” is always so complicated in other languages – but in Kreyol it practically doesn’t exist! And since Kreyol was so long only a spoken language, once people decided to start writing it down, they eliminated all the absurd spelling of the French from which most of the words are derived. It is one hundred percent phonetic – no silent letters or letters that change sounds in 14 different ways. The only complicated thing about it in terms of pronunciation is the nasal sound that just doesn’t exist in English. Still working on mastering that …

I love learning languages and I love even more trying to use them with the people who speak them. Almost everyone here speaks English so well, certainly better than I can speak Kreyol yet, but it’s so fun for me to practice all day long, and I think they are genuinely amused by my efforts … or at least they pretend to be! Right now we’re all taking Kreyol classes with some of the “junior staff,” who are kids who graduated from LCS within the past few years and work here now, usually while pursuing some kind of university study at the same time. I managed to get my own private lessons with Barbara because I was the only one who really had any background in Kreyol before coming here. Her French is beautiful and she can read and write English well, but she struggles to pronounce English. So our classes together are so good – she helps me sort out the Kreyol and explains the subtle differences between words, and I help her figure out how to pronounce English.

A few summers ago when I was in Guatemala, some of you followed my quest to be able to say the most complicated sentence imaginable in Spanish – “if I had known you were coming I would have baked you a cake.” I eventually figured it out – “si hubiera sabido que tu venias, te habria hecho un pastel,” and I always have that sentence in the back of my mind in Spanish when trying to construct similarly complex sentences. I think that today I conquered a similarly complex sentence from my little “Creole Made Easy” book. (note …. Clearly this language is easier if I’m able to figure out a sentence like that after about a month of working on the language whereas in Spanish it took me about ten years.) The sentence: ‘If we hadn’t arrived on time, he might have untied the boat.” Nan Kreyol: “si nou pa te rive a le, li te ka demare bato a.’ OK, it did take me like five minutes to figure out how to write it … but I got it eventually. Hmmmmm …. Can I figure out the Spanish sentence in kreyol? “Si mwen te konnen ki ou vini, mwen te ka fe yon ti gato.” Really, I can only do that because there’s no subjunctive or past conditional or anything in Kreyol. So fun.

Now if I could only understand ANYTHING that Kreyol speakers are saying when they talk to each other …. That would be awesome.

1 comment:

Meg said...

I heart the subjunctive. Don't knock it.

P.S. I can't believe you're teaching your classes in Spanish. What classes will you be teaching?