immersed in languages, as i have been...
...finding new pools in which to swim is normative, and thoroughly expected — even as the experience of discovery remains fresh, surprising, novel.
Seriatim:
- Ilokano [ birth ]
- English [ toddler ]
- Cebuano/Visayan [ preschool ]
- Tagalog [ elementary sch. ]
- Spanish [ high sch./college ]
- Hebrew [ high sch./college ]
- German [ U.P. Diliman ]
- Japanese [ Area 1, U.P. ]
- Hawaiian [ O'ahu/Maui ]
- Russian [ U.C. Berkeley ]
- HTML/CSS/XML [ ATDP/TIC ]
- Sanskrit [ San Francisco ]
- Mutsun Ohlone [ last light ]
That last one was both accidental, yet not. Sometime last year I took BART over to Walnut Creek, then the bus down to Danville, where I hung out at the Museum of the San Ramon Valley, then at the Danville Library learning about the indigenous people who had populated the area centuries ago.
In the process, learning the Mutsun Ohlone word for "thank you," — sanutāx. And from there, it was just my natural curiosity going with the linguistic and historical flow of the environment. As well as my imagination of what life there must have been like for the Mutsun, Tatcan, Miwok and other Ohlone people, who called that watershed home.
It is surely a manifestation of the universe's sense of humor that I now find myself living quite literally a stone's throw away from where the American Indian Cultural District in Fort Mason is working on a project involving Ramaytush Ohlone partners "to document, interpret, and install signage for ancestral cultural sites at SF Aquatic Park."
As an hermit monk in Japan's Echigo Province once wrote:
Who is it that remains?
I, for one, intend to find out; because of this simple fact — the brightness of the original languages of this land remain alive in subtle scintillae, in the minds and voices of their precious few descendants... and in the hearts of fellow travelers hailing from distant places on the planet who have somehow found their footsteps on the very same ground which heard these tongues, once upon a time.
[ Reading the Hinton at dinner, at Goodfellas... ]
