Connections.

[kiya]

We live for words and die for words
Principles we can afford . . .

--"One By One", Chumbawamba

Discussion on rasfc about languages. Political influence on.

My great-grandparents (great-great? Mom hasn't been consistent) were subversives. Taught Polish when it was illegal.

Need to learn language. Honor ancestors who would have died for it.

Memory.

Comments

Similar thought, had to share.

[frozencapybara.livejournal.com]

My grandmother emigrated from Germany before WWII - not immediately before, but soon enough before that she dealt with bullying over her obviously German name in grade school. When her family emigrated, they wanted to seem more "American" - and so the she and her sisters were only allowed to speak English, even at home. She doesn't know German, since she hasn't spoken it since she was too young to remember.
I have long considered this one of the great tragedies of our family history. It's part of why I studied German in college - that, plus learning more about my ancestry (it's amazing how much you can learn about a culture by studying its language), plus I like the way German sounds.

So, what I'm saying here is: go you! Polish! Good! Yay! Or something like that, anyway. :)

Is Polish a Germanic language, or does it have a different root? I know absolutely nothing about it, which is probably bad - I ought to know more about eastern european languages, though Polish is pretty low on my list of ones to study. Hungarian's pretty high, since I'm part Hungarian and the language is supposed to be very strange (i.e. not germanic or romance or any other category - its it's own thing), and Russian just sounds neat. I've never heard Polish spoken.
(By the way: I'm a closet language geek. Can you tell? :)

[morningwind.livejournal.com]

My mother has refused to teach me Japanese; the little Japanese I can remember is my grandma's contribution from when I was very young, but most of it has flown out of my head. I considered taking Japanese in college, but was surprised at the intensity of Mom's diapproval. The way she talked me out of it was by reminding me of how difficult the language is (she's right about that) and how having to study it in college would be miserable, what with 8:00 classes everyday and Language Learning Lab time and etc.

It's not that Mom's ashamed of Japanese culture (she even majored in East Asian Studies), but she certainly resents it...and I think her opposition to me learning Japanese stems from that, and perhaps a desire to "shield" me from getting hurt. The latter I can understand, but I've never been all starry-eyed about Japan and I fully recognize that in Japan I would only be a gaijin: a foreigner. Still, just learning the language would be awfully nice.