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My Father’s Languages
- University of Wisconsin Press
- Chapter
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31 My Father’s Lan guages When it came time at school for me to choose a foreign lan guage, I asked my father, then deeply en grossed in a book, whether I should study French, En glish, Rus sian, or Ger man, just one, or two si mul ta ne ously, and, if so, which ones? My father set his glasses down right at the pas sage where he had stopped in his read ing, his ten der glance ca ressed the depths of my soul, and he quietly said, “My dear son, there’s no big se cret. Study any lan guage at all, but study one rather than sev eral, just learn it as it needs to be learned. Enter into the depths of any lan guage, and even tu ally you will learn that at heart, all lan guages touch one an other, they stem from the same human root . . .” That’s what my father said to me, and that was enough for me to set tle on French alone, set ting other lan guages aside. After say ing this, my father once again im mersed him self in his old texts, the ju di cial records from Bi tola, writ ten in the old of fi cial lan guage of the six teenth cen tury. I thought then about what lan guages were my father’s, how he had ac quired that knowl edge that, in the end, he be queathed to me, like some thing found after long search ing through lin guis tic lab y rinths. In what lan guage does one write, cry, dream, suf fer? There were still count less such ques tions I could have asked my father, but their an swers were im pressed upon me through the slow rev e la tion of his books’ se crets. My father had a strange, un cer tain, com plex, and elu sive lin guis tic his tory, one that was not ex cep tional in the Bal kans for in di vid u als or groups of peo ple. My father’s na tive lan guage was Turk ish. His mother in stilled it in him with all its mel low ness and so nor ity. It was a dif fer ent Turk ish from that used in every day of fi cial com mu ni ca tion by the Turk ish 32 govern men tal lead ers in our Al ba nian lake side town. The local peo ple were op posed to my father’s type of Turk ish, and they kept their dis tance. The rea sons for this could be sensed with ease but under stood only with dif fi culty. My father’s mother, with her nat u ral gen tle ness and un ob tru sive ness, less ened this dis tance. Al though the Ot to man Em pire was set ting and one could sense its de mise, while the Al ba nian lan guage was on the rise, seek ing its de fin i tive form, my father, stud y ing in Con stan tin o ple, be came en grossed and ab sorbed in his Turk ish mother tongue, while re main ing at the same time, due to a dif fer ent fam ily tra di tion, faith ful to the Al ba nian lan guage. And so in Con stan tin o ple, as he fol lowed his mother’s dream, he be came im bued with both Ot to man and mod ern Turk ish, but he could not free his des tiny from the par a doxes that fol lowed him at every turn of his life. Just when my father had mas tered Ot to man Turk ish and the old Ar a bic script and had per fected his cal lig ra phy, Atatürk abol ished the old script and intro duced a Latin or thog ra phy, to which my father now had to be come ac cus tomed. Up till then he had writ ten from right to left; now he had to write from left to right. He had beau ti ful cal lig ra phy in Ar a bic script; it was not quite so beau ti ful in Latin let ters, and, fi nally, this same hand writ ing ended up in de ci pher able in the Cy ril lic alpha bet. In his old age, he...