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Tongue-Tied
It’s amazing –the power there is in language.
Earlier today, I had to place a call to the hotel I amthinking about booking in Manila when I go on holidays to check if they would honourthe Ozzie gold card gift voucher we had. The minute the phone picked up and I heard the lady on the other endspeak, I felt a pang of nostalgia.
The funny thing was, I opened my mouth fully intending tospeak in Filipino, and then blanked out. Filipino was never my strong point –it is my third language after alland because my head was struggling with what my mouth was saying, I ended upsounding stilted and caveman-like. So I started laughing at myself. Yes, the lady at the other end was confused, and when she finally strungtogether what I was trying between laughs to say, she pulled the reservationup, looked at my new last name, my stilted accent and assumed the worst.
So she valiantly held up the fort and rallied forth with hertwang, while I pulled myself together and struggled to not to make each wordsound like a sentence. But howamazing is it that in the course of two minutes, she and I had compiled aseries of impressions about each other based on language?
And then there was that lady at the shop who bought a prettypair of open toe pumps. I askedher if she was Japanese and she said quite guardedly “yes I am”. You should have seen her face light upand heard her laugh when I said “moshi moshi”.
Then there was that guy who came up to me at a camping spotbetween Katherine and Darwin, asking if it was okay for them to park theircaravan right beside our ute. WhenI asked “Vous etes francais?” he gave his friend this very French look and saidin an embarrassed tone “’Ow can you tell? Ees it by my acc-unt?” Itold him, yes, it was the accent but I also had to reassure him that it wasonly because I have French friends and because I had studied it that I pickedup on it.
And this sweet old man who at a roadhouse who was trying sohard to describe what he was looking for (a memory card). He was clearly German, knew littleEnglish and I had to scrounge around in my head for what to say but ended upsaying “Nein sprecken deutsch, ma frantsosich ist besser al mein deutsch (I don't speak German, my French is better than my German!” andthen he just started to describe in random French words what he wanted “is unecard, with grande memoire? Memorie? Pictures!” And his funny wife who was inher own world, yelling out “Mais c’est la-bas! Les chapeaux! (But it's over there! The hats!!)” LOL