The power of Babel

Clara is Italian, but having met in Brussels we tend to speak French. Ada is Spanish and speaks excellent English, so she and I speak that. But Ada was keen to practise her Italian, I my Spanish and Clara her English. So when the original plan of going together to Portugal fell through, at one level I was relieved – it seemed to me that we had quite enough potential for linguistic confusion between us as it was!

But even being in Italy together we struggled at first to have genuinely three-way conversations. Either one of the three of us was simply listening in to a dialogue, or else the rate of platitudes per minute went through the roof as we took turns to prove the unyielding law whereby your capacity for thought becomes rapidly constrained by the words you have to express it.

Then Clara had the brainwave of the holiday. The Breakfast Pact, solemnly entered into over cappuccinos and croissants on the morning we left for Piemonte, stated that each of us would speak her own language and her own language only. A series of rapid beeps and sirens would meet any attempt to converse in one of the others’ languages.

Sheer genius! Not only did we each recover an adult capacity for thought and speech which enabled us to enjoy one another’s company vastly more, but we got to increase our knowledge of ‘real’ Italian, Spanish and English, rather than the clunky, simplified version spoken between non-natives. I have for instance added to my infinitesimal Italian vocabulary such words as dimenticare (to forget), rompicoglioni (pain in the bum), roba (stuff) and di cazzo (bloody, as in ‘another bloody church’) – all eminently useful things to know, it has to be said.

And if it was sometimes tiring having to listen so hard and being unable to multitask while concentrating on what Clara or Ada was saying, it was more than made up for by the fun of confusing the hell out of everyone we met…