Not that kind of Romance

Some of you may know that my college degree is a BA in Romance Languages and History.

I added History because I still had a lot of history classes that I wanted to take, and adding the major meant that I could keep taking them instead of taking all of these other classes for the Social Sciences requirement.

Romance Languages should have been a completely natural fit. I loved learning languages, I already had some college credits in both French and Spanish, and I wanted to take Italian. However, I initially declared for Linguistics.

I thought if I studied the science of language, that would open me up to a lot more. That could be true, but it wasn't how I worked out.

Apparently Linguistics fell under the school of Telecommunications and Film. That doesn't seem like the best fit, which makes me wonder if I remembered it wrong, but at that time budget cuts were causing TCF to be absorbed into the School of Journalism anyway, and things may have been a little disorganized as that was all being sorted out.

I did take one TCF class, which was about how technology affected communication. Unfortunately it was right after another class that I had with a friend, and I ended up skipping a lot. I read all of the material and did all of the labs, and my grade wasn't horrible, but most of the things I remember from the class weren't really part of it. I remember a Star Trek joke the professor made (since people couldn't beam in and it bothered her when they came in late, which was one of the things that made it easier to skip). I remember her accidentally stumbling upon the book The Postman, which was apparently more cerebral than the Kevin Costner film it inspired. And I remember strongly a Russell Means essay that wasn't even assigned to us but was in the book our readings came from.

I totally wish I had taken more film classes now, and I know there would have been interesting information in Linguistics. There were some things about how people use language, but I found that I mainly just wanted to learn languages. That's when I switched to Romance Languages (languages descended from the Romans, i.e. Latin), with French as my primary language and Spanish as my secondary.

My Italian classes never counted for that, because they were lower division credits. That didn't really matter, as I took them to communicate with family, but knowing elements of three different related languages did give me an idea of how they developed.

I would think about it sometimes, like when there were things written in Portuguese and I could get the general drift, or when I learned the lyrics to Romanian disco hit, "Dragostea din tei".

Romanian is an Eastern Romance Language, so it is more different. At first I didn't even think about the connection, but then some words stuck out, and I realized how the words fit together. It made sense that this was a language that diverted earlier, but there was still a logic to it.

I was thinking about it more because of the fortunate confluence of two unconnected things: I happened to be reading a novel set in Haiti near the time that I saw a movie set in Romania.

The movie was Aferim! and it wasn't quite the rollicking good time that the reviews suggested, but it was interesting and beautifully shot. I was focusing on the subtitles for understanding, but then there was a reference to bandits: haiduk. That is a word in the disco song, and it was the last name of an actress in an interview once. I knew that word. Then I could start putting other words together.

The book was Claire of the Sea Light, and there was a lot of Jamaican patois used, but usually with a translation. Then, the character name, Claire Limyè Lanmè, suddenly made sense.

Light = La Lumière

Sea = La mer

It was already clear that was what her name meant, but then it was clear how, and then everything else that was said could be traced back and put together.

This is not necessarily an important or necessary thing. I would have been able to understand the book and the movie without it. It was just something that made me happy then, and putting it together makes me feel like I was right to pick the major that I did.

I still wouldn't mind knowing more about linguistics, but Romance Languages taught me more about Linguistics than Linguistics could have taught me about speaking and understanding languages. That was what I wanted all along.