English and I
Lately, I’ve been wondering what English means to me — how it defines my identity and why I care for it. It’s not an easy question for me to answer. I didn’t have to learn English, in the same way that I didn’t have to learn Portuguese, which I didn’t. But I was born in Los Angeles, a place that inherited the English language, and now the English language defines me.
To try and figure it out, I look for an origin story. First, I think, there are the Celtic Britons on their island, Britain. And then the Romans come with their language. Long after the Romans establish their rule, the Angles and the Saxons arrive from the European continent and develop the first thing we call the English language. There are invasions by Vikings and other North Sea people. Then the Normans arrive, transforming Old English with French words. A few hundred years more and the English colonize North America. Eventually, they sweep violently westward and take Los Angeles, an old Spanish town established on Tongva land, from Mexico. A few hundred years more and my parents, traveling alone from their two countries, meet at a Hollywood disco. And here I am.
So me speaking English is a sort of accident, after all. The English in me doesn’t go very far down. But I feel close to it. In a way, English is my identity more than anything else.
I speak my mother’s tongue fluently, but not my father’s. I have not been a diligent learner. These days, instead of learning his language, I’ve been learning more about English. I’ve been trying to read Chaucer. Chaucer’s Middle English, I learned, is called the London Dialect, and is a direct precursor of Modern English. When I read him, I can see the origins of words, and the way ideas mix and separate to make a language. Corage, for example, means heart in Chaucer’s English. Does this example illuminate something about the English language for you? When I learned this, I felt like I was walking on the soil covering the thick and convoluted roots of an ancient tree.
And the sound of Chaucer’s verse is satisfying. For example, read:
And palmers for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, couthe in sondry londes.
This means: and pilgrims seek strange shores and distant shrines known in various lands. I love the word sondry, here translated as various. I’ve never really paid attention to the word sundry, the form of the word in today’s North American English. But now that I see where it comes from, it means something special to me. The Oxford English Dictionary says sundry shares the same Germanic base as sunder and asunder. Sundry things are things torn asunder. Things are always tearing asunder.
When I read Chaucer, I read in my bed. When I’m done, I turn off my lamp and lay my head on the pillow. One night, when I closed my eyes, I saw the image of a deer. It was a buck, with a heavy and branching crown of antlers. My eyes followed from its thick base through its multitudinous branchings, like paths splitting into two smaller paths, each continuing before splitting again. When I reached the tip of one antler, I would start again at the base and follow a different path, repeating this dozens of times, trying to exhaust all the possibilities. There were thousands of terminal points, and so thousands of paths to follow, none of them ending in the same place, each of them reaching up into the sky like the branches of a tree, massive and quivering in the night.
