Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
served the accentuated use of hands and arms by Italians deep in conversation, and mis-
takenly thought that they were arguing rather than simply communicating normally. For the
traveler, then, even a rudimentary understanding of a foreign language can give clues to a
country's culture. In many languages, forms of address delineate the barriers among social
classes and between genders. In similar fashion, the use of obscenities and other expres-
sions that defame marks the speaker's social class along with what is traditionally called
“good breeding.”
But the wise traveler also knows that a country's language is part of a larger family
of languages. He or she has observed natives of one European country, for example, con-
versing with those of another, with each speaking bits and pieces of each other's language
learned from previous interactions or from years in the classroom. For example, French,
Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese are offshoots of Latin, each a local variant established and
evolved during the centuries in which the countries that became France, Spain, and other
western European nations were part of the Roman Empire. During those centuries, Latin
was the language of Rome's administrators and of the Roman legions that had conquered
the country and, after their term of enlistment, married local women and settled in their
province.
With these ideas in mind, imaginative and wise travelers can construct mental maps
that place language families across the globe. The Germanic languages, for example, in-
clude English, Dutch, German, Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish. Each group of related
languages shares somewhere in its history a conquest and settlement by a group of warriors,
who were also language carriers. So it is not surprising that many European languages have
much in common and sound so much alike. The history of Europe is one of conquest and
occupation.
Language families also share patterns known as morphology and syntax: how, for ex-
ample, plural words are formed, how verbs are conjugated, and where adjectives are placed
in a sentence. These families also share many closely related words. For example, the word
pater
(father) in Latin moved to German as
vater
and to English as
father
. When the Vik-
ings, who spoke Old Norse, conquered large parts of the British Isles, they left linguistic
traces of their invasions:
jarl
as an English title of nobility (now
earl
) and
thrall
for slave
(which still commands our attention as the word
enthrall
).
Berserk
reminds us that Vik-
ing warriors wore a short shirt, a
sark
, overlaid by a bearskin. The four days of the week
entered the English language from the Latin of the Roman legions. Sunday, the first day
of the week and the Christian Sabbath, is from the Latin
dies solis
, the day of the sun.
Monday honors the moon; Tuesday salutes Mars, the god of war; and Saturday is dedicated
to Saturn, the Roman god of agriculture. The remaining three days of the week commemor-
ate Viking gods: Thursday is Thor's day, the god of thunder; Wednesday salutes Wodin, the
father god; and Friday honors Freya, his wife and mother goddess. And so, in the round-
about ways of language, those who exclaim, “Thank God it's Friday!” are returning to the
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