Back in my callow youth, a number of months ago, when I set out seven basic pointers for writers, the sixth one was this:
“Learn other languages, preferably languages that are upstream from ours. This would include Greek, Latin, and Anglo-Saxon. The brain is not a shoebox that ‘gets full,’ but is rather a muscle that expands its capacity with increased use. The more you know the more you can know. The more you can do with words, the more you can do. As it turns out.”
And so here are some additional thoughts on that.
1. God approves of translation, and by this I am referring to the process of translation. Obviously, some translations are better than others, and some are atrocious. But God approves of the attempt. The work itself is a good work. Good things come out of the process of moving house, from one set of linguistic thought forms to another. Jesus taught His disciples in Aramaic, but God wanted the “original” that we have received to be a Greek translation of that teaching. The canonical text of the Lord’s teaching is a translation, and not what originally came from the Lord’s mouth. This means that God approves of translations. We ought not to accept therefore the idea that “something is always lost in translation.” Sometimes, sure. But there are also many times when something is gained in translation.
For you as a writer, translating something you have written into another language can be a great way of sharpening your writing. This applies even if the translations you undertake are, like mine have been, pretty rudimentary. This need not be an occasion for putting on airs — I am just saying that it might benefit you to take one of your the cat sat on the mat sentences and put it into Hebrew.
2. Learning languages is a very good way to learn language, even if you don’t go on to speak fluently whatever language it was you thought you were learning. Languages that you learned and forgot are still good for you. I speak here as the experienced one — during the course of my life, I have been subjected to a year of French, two years of Spanish, two plus years of Greek, two plus years of Latin, a year of Anglo Saxon, and now Hebrew. This has not turned me into a cosmopolition, but it has made my English more colorful, which is a trez beans kind of thing.
3. Learning different languages helps a writer get a firm grasp of grammar in the abstract. All languages need to do certain things — which means they need verbs. All languages are describing what’s out there in the world, which gives us the nouns, and so on. And then the nouns do things. Either John is hitting the ball, or the ball is hitting John, and we need various devices to determine what kind of incident it is. My own government school education was pretty inadequate when it came to English grammar, and it wasn’t until I learned about case endings in other languages that certain practices in English started to make sense to me.
4. At the same time, be judicious and thoughtful in what you transfer from one language to another. All languages require some means for identifying the direct object. But not all languages have the same skeletal structure in every respect. In the 18th century, during the ascendancy of the English dictionary makers and grammarians, it was foolishly thought that Latin was superior to English, and that things that couldn’t be done in Latin, like ending sentences with prepositions, shouldn’t be done in English. This is where we get the absurd rule that one must never, ever end a sentence with a preposition. As Winston Churchill put it, “that’s the sort of nonsense up with which we shall not put.” There are times, even in English, when to do so is not euphonic — “where you at?” — but English has the kind of skeletal structure that allows for a judicious little preposition right there at the end of the sentence.
Another dumb thing was that it was thought that because Latin infinitives, being one word, could not be divided with an adverb, this meant English infinitives should not be so divided. But that followeth no way. Laudare cannot be a split infinitive, but to praise most certainly can be, and if your sentence scans better with to loudly praise, then let ‘er rip. All this said, fussy grammarians need friends too, and so you may seek them out and encourage them. Drop them a little note, telling them that they are your very favorite fussy grammarian, out with whom you like to hang. And if anybody winced there at my use of a plural pronoun for an indefinite singular, then may I suggest counseling?
5. All this is being recommended as an aid to English. But keep in mind that if you have an opportunity to become fully fluent in another language, take it. But in the pursuit of that, don’t confuse good grades in a college language class with fluency. At the very best, a couple years of study will get you fluidity within a very limited range. Two years of Latin study, with good grades and everything, does not mean that you “know Latin.” The average English speaker has a working vocabulary of about 12,000 words. The average honors graduate of two years of Latin study knows about 2,000 words. So do not confuse fluidity in a very limited classroom environment with fluency in the street. You are not the ultimate urbane sophisticate for having attained to the levels of ancient Roman toddlers.
6. One key to good writing is to have a wide-ranging vocabulary. I do recommend collecting dictionaries of unusual words, but this is on the artificial side. An organic way to grow your vocabulary is by means of learning the languages that dumped a lot of our vocabulary into our current usage. This means Latin, which accounts for about fifty percent of our current vocabulary, Greek which is responsible for about thirty percent, and Anglo Saxon, which feeds the rest. Dico means I speak or say in Latin, and we get dictate, dictator, benediction, diction, and so on. Eikon is Greek for image, and we get the icons on your desktop, icons in front of churches, which we shouldn’t, and iconoclasts, which is more like it. And when you study Anglo Saxon, you discover that attercop is their word for spider, and this makes your reading of The Hobbit come alive. So there you go.
7. This certainly involves extra work, but it doesn’t take up any extra room. The brain is more like a muscle, and less like a storage area. If you really want to be a writer, you should want to write a lot. If you want to write a lot then you need to be in training. You are preparing to run marathons, not emptying a suitcase. Learning new languages, acquiring new vocabulary, keeping yourself in various forms of constant logocentric discipline is one of the best things you can do. And language acquisition is nothing if not logocentric discipline.