As the past perfect in my title makes clear, I have lost a number of languages I once befriended.
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ENGLISH. Native speaker of Southern vernacular English.
FRENCH. Near-native speaker of French from 1966. Experience living in Grenoble, Paris, Montréal, Bordeaux. Worked as simultaneous translator at the 1976 Olympics and was Dean of Arts at uOttawa. Write and publish in it.
LATIN. Two years of schoolbook Latin, 1959-1960. Returned to it as grad student in 1969 to read Virgil, Ovid, Propertius. Still follow, but from a safe distance.
PORTUGUESE. Started in 1967 a two LP -set I took to Africa. Have published on and can sing some bossa nova. Academic reading knowledge. Oral skills peaked around 1999.
KPELLE. Had a tutor for six weeks in 1967. Retain only a phrase or two of this Liberian language, which belongs to the Mande family. Instead was intrigued by Liberian English, which led in part to my book Entwisted Tongues (see below).
GERMAN. Had a private tutor at age 13, but it didn’t take. Studied academic German starting in 1969. Well-read in modern German literature. In 1999, took a renewed interest in things teutonic. Lived in Innsbruck in 2003 and visited repeatedly since. Intermediate speaking skills
ITALIAN. Travelled there first in 1966. Academic reading from 1970 on. Lived and taught in Cortona in Tuscany, 2000. Translated D’Annunzio, Quasimodo and Montale. Oral Italian peaked in 2003.
CHINESE. Started in 1978, then did a four-week intensive course at UC-Berkeley 1979. Continue to dabble via Pinyin yet oral skills flailing.
SPANISH. Some street Spanish from adolescence. Visited Mexico repeatedly 1981-1985. Much reading of modern literature in it. Month long immersions in Seville, 2003 and in 2004 (flamenco). Level currently high intermediate.
PERSIAN. Married into the language in 1986, actively studied till 1992. Still possess “mother-in-law Persian”. One of my failures as a language learner though still pursuing it via Pimsleur and Glossika.
HAITIAN KREYÒL. Strongest of my creole languages, though still pretty weak.. Finished the Valdman, Basic Haitian course in 1988. There is a Haitian Kreyol Wiki page on me: https://ht.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lang
As for the other creole languages in my book Entwisted Tongues: Comparative Creole Lamguages 2000, (the FRENCH ANTILLEAN ones [Guadeloupe, Martinque, Guyane], plus PAPIAMENTU; SRANANTONGO; and KRIO), I still have reading knowledge, but orally am increasingly inept.
DUTCH. Academic reading knowledge acquired circa 1994. No oral skills.
JAPANESE. Finished five levels of Pimsleur in 1999. Oral skills remain formulaic. Associated with my black belt in Aikido, which I got in 2002.
CHINUK WAWA. Wrote Making Wawa: The Genesis of Chinook Jargon, 2009. Never fluently spoke this West Coast pidgin-creoles but do know a lot about it.
TURKISH. Did the old FSI program in 2012. Travelled to Istanbul. Could carry on simple conversations. Almost entirely gone.
GAELIC (Irish). Completed Pimsleur course in 2016. Had some conversational chops but have lost almost everything.
DANISH. Also completed Pimsleur course in 2016. For personal reasons, my take on SWEDISH and the two varities of NORWEGIAN is filtered through Danish. We watch a lot of Danish and other Scandi TV. Which means that I have an affinity for this language. We’ll see where it goes.
MOROCCAN ARABIC. Studied briefly before our trip there in 2019. Spoke a few words and learned some phrases from our guide, Wahid. All gone.
KOURI-VINI, aka Louisiana Creole French. I neglected this “local” creole till now but my knowledge of Haitian Kreyol helps, as do my East Texas roots. The first creole I ever heard spoken while working in a refinery in Houston in 1966. I can almost read, no longer just decrypher it.
VIETNAMESE. Just started via self-learning texts and Pimsleur and Glossika. Forthcoming blog: What Am I Doing Studying Vietnamese? There’s amazing stuff in the internet. About Vietnamese, that is.
