die a critic

When travelling, borders are often less obvious than language changes. Borders, sometimes barred, often unguarded, unnoticed and irrelevant without the threat of hostilities can be blithely crossed, occasionally tolled but brought to the unwary traveller's attention with signs heralding a different script. When spoken jangling, guttural grunts and plosives distract the mind and ears for a while and forms and shops then lead onto other shapes and strange letter combinations. It is very disconcerting to be faced with new frustrations of communication. Wouldn't it be easier if everyone spoke the same language? But then we have been there before and look what happened. So a new language is a assaulting - a puzzle - and puzzles can fun but it helps to see the form before being thrown the challenge of having to catch a bus or meet a ferry and no idea of what the squiggles on the page mean.

The alphabetic scripts for the countries we will be seeing for the most part use our letters. The combination of sounds a little different and then there are all those strange little marks - the diacritics - the accents, graves, umlauts and cedillas. The squiggly tilde, macron, caron and superdot sound more like cartoon cult heroes rather than the clues to saying sounds. Russian has the Cyrillic letters - boxy and capitalised and much less approachable to guess at or decode. The others maybe look a bit less daunting. French and German are more familiar and most of us can have a go at those - albeit clumsy strine-y affectations. To hear the language lessens the abrasiveness and after listening to the foreign news on SBS, looking at the text and trying to pick out the words, the ear becomes accustomed to the sounds. Borrowed words add import and pictures help a lot. Pass over first hostility and rebuff the jaded judgements and practise passive listening. Embrace the polyglot of past endeavours to trade and fight and overtake and see the trends and similarities. Romantic Irish-Gaelic script with Tolkien overtones, to say is more like Scandinavia and Old German, a great surprise and not at all like faerie tongue. So many tongues make many consonants and sharper shushy sounds and slidy back of throat projections meld as if they're one. I have not got to sort them yet but they're more familiar now - a little warmer, a little more like friends.

The richness of the flavours dips toes into a past and opens tiny cracks to peer into and maybe even glimpse a bit of other lives and minds like ours and hearts that grieve and joy and laugh. The foreign tongues speak sadly now of great big waves and horrors near and far, of Fukushima and moving earth, of Queensland's loss and Christchurch's pain. The ear attunes to what's behind the different sounds and the critic dies to reach the heart and mind and soul of brothers far and wide.