Languages and Civilizations

Strangely enough, of all the places where my French could get put to practice, it is right here in Erbil. When I have a free night, I go outside into the warm summer night and chat with the shuttle driver in French, our only common language. He also speaks Arabic and Kurdish, and the conversations get really interesting when we are joined by the security guys who speak Kurdish only and the Lebanese guys who converse in Arabic. Something gets said in Arabic and it gets translated into Kurdish, and then the driver translates it into French for me, and some English gets tossed in there as well. I try to pick up words from every language, and it makes my head spin sometimes, but it's fun because being immersed in the babble of 4 different languages is like paradise for a language nerd like me.

While my Arabic got a late start, I can now string together whole sentences in Kurdish on top of greetings and other choice phrases- but only in the past tense. The interesting thing about Kurdish is that the infinitive form of the verb is used to form the past tense, while the other tenses (present, future, and subjunctive) are formed using the imperative. Kurdish is truly a useless language because not only is it spoken only in Kurdistan, but within this small region, there are several different dialects that are mutually incomprehensible. Imagine driving from Tacoma to Seattle and finding out they spoke German, not English. Or going from Tacoma to a French-speaking Olympia. That's how useless Kurdish is! But the uselessness of a language has never prevented me from wanting to learn it. Recall my stint with Akkadian, the 5000 year-old language (that died off with the dinosaurs a few millennia ago) of ancient Mesopotamia- which coincidentally, is exactly where I am right now! I'm in the cradle of civilization, yo...sad to see what it's become eh? After centuries of conquest and being conquered.

What's going to happen to us, I wonder???