Ein Tisch ist ein Tisch

I am in Florence. I walk alone in the cold.

All this moving around has not changed my habit of talking to myself out loud while I am convinced (and most of the time I am convinced) that there is nobody around to hear me. The empty streets around Campo di Marte make sure that I wont be mistaken (?) for a crazy person.

So, I talk to myself, or to imaginary others. Nothing wrong with this, do not try to make me feel that I am weird. Everybody does it. Yes, even you. But I am weird, I know it. Simply because I can define the language I use to talk to myself. Being me, I understand most of my languages. Mixing and matching them as I walk past traffic lights, supermarkets, and bus stops, makes perfect sense to me. I think though few others would feel the same.

The problem starts when one leaves their country and changes the default language, the one of common reference. The second and most important level is when one starts developing concepts in the second default language that did not exist in the first. Now imagine one makes this move several times…

I ended up in a situation where my default language is not the language of my country of origin, not the language of the country I live, not the language of my significant someone and not the language of the people I hang out with.

I work, talk, dream, write, speak in English, but I buy bread in Italian, read French at breakfast, talk on the phone in Greek, have the occasional drink in German, and overhear conversations in Spanish. The rest of the languages I ignore in an attempt to keep my sanity. The result though remains the same. My head contains a language soup.

My Chinese colleague, who has spent all her adult life in Germany, speaks perfect English, only with at least two German words in each sentence. My only problem with this, is that I do not notice… it makes perfect sense to me, which simply confirms my language soup hypothesis.

I write my shopping list and I catch myself using four different languages. No sane person does this. In the end I will find myself using English words in German syntax with Italian verb endings and French accent: My own Esperanto that nobody shares.

I remind myself of this old pensioner, who lonely and bored with his life, he created a language game. Calling the bed a “table”, the table a “chair”, the chair a “window” and so on… he isolated himself completely from society, not being able to communicate. Nobody understood why he wanted to sleep on the table, eat at the chair while sitting on the window.

Okay, my case is not quite that bad. I still call the table a table, but communicating anything beyond that takes quite a bit of effort. Moving yet to another country might though have fatal consequencies on my ability to use this simple tool: language. Back to the time of the apes.

Ich will von einem alten Mann erzählen, von einem Mann, der kein Wort mehr sagt, ein müdes Gesicht hat, zu müd zum Lächeln und zu müd, um böse zu sein.

For the brave among you, children’s (of all things!) story by the Swiss Peter Bichsel.
Ein Tisch ist ein Tisch

(Ask google to translate if your German does not help you)