{"id":539,"date":"2024-03-01T18:09:07","date_gmt":"2024-03-01T17:09:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.susandiab.com\/?p=539"},"modified":"2024-09-10T17:43:05","modified_gmt":"2024-09-10T16:43:05","slug":"sunday-18-february-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.susandiab.com\/?p=539","title":{"rendered":"French and other languages"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sunday 18 February 2024<\/p>\n

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I began learning French at the age of seven at Whitings Hill Junior School in Barnet, North London. French already featured in my life before then because my paternal Grandparents lived in Paris. My Grandmother was born in Iraq and French was her language along with Arabic. I don\u2019t know which was more natural or \u2018native\u2019 to her. She would come and visit and speak a mixture of English, French and Arabic along with elements of Hindi and Urdu. I didn\u2019t know that what she spoke was a mixture until I was older and had started learning French myself and could begin to distinguish some aspects of the different languages. Arabic and Indian languages would just have been those words I couldn\u2019t identify and which didn\u2019t sound French.<\/p>\n

My heritage was not explained to me at any point by my parents. I just grew up accepting things the way they were because that is what children do. You are born into your world and that is it: your world. It\u2019s just how things are. My parents had lived in India for seventeen years after they married. My siblings, all older than me, were all born in India. I was born in England because my Mum had come back home, to the Northeast, where she was from, to have me. So I was born in a nursing home in Gosforth, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, my maternal Grandparents being Geordie, from Gateshead. So I am a Geordie-Arab, or an Arab-Geordie.<\/p>\n

Vocabulary from Indian languages and dialects featured in our household as well: words which my Dad would use or my Mum had picked up from their time in India. Dad was born and raised in India, educated by Jesuits from age seven, at St Joseph\u2019s College, a boarding school in Nani-Tal, in the Himalayas, some several hundred miles away from his home in Mumbai, then Bombay as we grew up calling it. Dad knew English but also Arabic, Hindi, Urdu and other Indian languages. My Grandfather, his Dad spoke seven languages fluently, being an international business man in textiles, woven cotton. My Grandfather\u2019s origins are complicated, to be told in another story. \u2018Kachra\u2019 was a word I would often hear my Dad use, meaning rubbish, a Hindi word. I heard \u2018cuttchera\u2019. It was used to describe anything that was shoddy, dirty or unworthy. I am very ignorant about Indian languages, never having researched them, which I guess reflects, up to this time previously rather unconscious, biases towards the European in both my upbringing and in the person I have become.<\/p>\n

After I was born my Mum and I returned to India by ship where I lived until I was three and a half. At that point the whole family left India to return to England for good and it is here where I was raised. My most formative moments and years, the start of my life were spent in India, surrounded by all manner of languages, vocabulary and sounds. I had an Ayah, a nurse or nanny, a young Indian woman with the English name \u2018Caroline\u2019. I\u2019ve got photographs of her carrying me. When we left India I was severed from her and never saw her again. The story told by Jane Gardham about the early life of \u2018Raj orphan\u2019 Edward Feathers in her \u2018Old Filth\u2019 trilogy is the closest I have come to beginning to understand what it is to be raised \u2018English\u2019 outside the context of England itself.<\/p>\n

I spent most of my time in India in the garden. We had a country house in Pune, with a garden with plants in handmade terracotta pots and a snake charmer who made the garden safe. Tigers lurked in the bushes, or so I was told. A silver hairbrush belonging to my Mother, part of her marriage trousseau had a dent in its handle. Mum told me it was where a tiger had got hold of it and carried it off. To this day I remain wary of large animals; cows and horses on country walks do not have my trust.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Made at the start of \u2018Autoethnos\u2019 in 2018. Rough model of a snake charmer and a cobra-type snake dancing in a basket in a large piece of quartz crystal<\/p>\n

When Paris-Gran, as she was known, came to stay, French was heard in our home. She was a bit of a Mrs Malaprop, often confusing words. It\u2019s no wonder, I think to myself now, given the variety of influences upon her. I remember her mixing up \u2018escalier\u2019 (\u2018staircase\u2019) with \u2018escargot\u2019 (\u2018snail\u2019). Once I could understand a bit of French, her speech started to make a bit more sense to me. \u2018Awaafi\u2019 she would say, slapping her hands together. \u2018good health\u2019 or \u2018bon appetit\u2019 in Iraqi Arabic.<\/p>\n

I always remember enjoying learning languages. I didn\u2019t know when I was a beginner language learner as a small child that languages were the key to unravelling who I was and that the enjoyment of learning languages was connected to the dream of being set free. I have continued to enjoy learning languages all my life. The pleasure of beginning to understand words on a page or in the air which had previously been indecipherable is deeply entangled in the pleasure of learning to read English. Mum taught us all to read before we started school. She was a natural teacher and worked professionally as a school-teacher all her life, later taking further qualifications in children\u2019s acquisition of reading and writing skills and becoming a specialist literacy teacher across several schools in the Borough of Barnet. Making the transition from looking at words on a page as shapes and wondering what they were to their meaning being opened up as if by magic to me as I followed Mum\u2019s finger travelling beneath the words, learning to read with her patient physical presence at my side is a source of deep pleasure which has carried over into the learning of languages throughout my life. I feel accompanied by her in this pursuit, a deep and enduring comfort and companionship and awareness of her belief in my ability to learn.<\/p>\n

Of beginning to learn French I remember being in a classroom. I can recall my position in the room, at a table. I could draw you a map of the school buildings, the position of the classroom within that and the location of the table at which I sat. The teacher announces \u2018Today, we are starting French\u2019. My excitement. Coming home, repeating some words, delighting my parents.<\/p>\n

Dad would notice people\u2019s names on the telly. He could say where they were from, or their family\u2019s origins from their name. \u2018Pereira\u2019, that\u2019s Portuguese, they\u2019re most likely from Goa in Southern India where there is a large Portuguese population\u2019 would be typical of the kind of commentary he would give. He could hear accents and identify where someone was from in the world. He was acutely sensitive to the sounds of words and the origins of names. Yet no one in my family explained my surname, Diab, to me. It was never mentioned.<\/p>\n

When I was twenty and working as an English Language Assistant in a Grammar School in Germany on my year abroad as part of my Modern Languages degree a teacher called Herr V\u00f6lker, who was near retirement and ever such a lovely, warm, kindly man, one day revealed the origins of my name to me. One day, in the staff room, he said: \u201cDiab, that\u2019s an Arabic name. It means \u2018wolves\u2019. \u2018Th\u2019ib\u2019 is \u2018wolf\u2019 and \u2018th\u2019ab\u2019 is the plural \u2018wolves\u2019. He told me that he had spent some time living and working in Saudi Arabia and had learnt Arabic and this is how he recognised and understood my name. I was amazed and a little embarrassed that I hadn\u2019t known anything of this but found myself very ready to claim my new lupine identity.<\/p>\n

(to be continued as and when)<\/p>\n

__________________________________________________________________________<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sunday 18 February 2024   I began learning French at the age of seven at Whitings Hill Junior School in Barnet, North London. French already featured in my life before then because my paternal Grandparents lived in Paris. My Grandmother was born in Iraq and French was her language along with Arabic. I don\u2019t know […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.susandiab.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.susandiab.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.susandiab.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.susandiab.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.susandiab.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=539"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.susandiab.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":891,"href":"https:\/\/www.susandiab.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539\/revisions\/891"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.susandiab.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.susandiab.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.susandiab.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}