27.1538, Featured Linguist: Hana Filip

[The LINGUIST List via LINGUIST]

LINGUIST List: Vol-27-1538. Fri Apr 01 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.1538, Featured Linguist: Hana Filip

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Date: Fri, 01 Apr 2016 16:22:25
From: LINGUIST List [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Featured Linguist: Hana Filip

 
Dear LINGUIST List Readers,

We are pleased to present you our next featured linguist, Hana Filip, for Fund
Drive 2016.

Please support the LINGUIST List editors and activities with a donation:

http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/

----------------------------------------------

My first memories are tied to the awareness that beyond our small Czech
speaking world there was an exciting multiplicity of languages out there, and
along with it an exciting variety of very different attitudes and life styles.
My mother spoke fluently Czech, Russian, Ukrainian and Polish due to her
heritage and childhood in West Volhynia (West Ukraine today). And then there
were mail deliveries of paperbacks from another exotic place called “West
Germany”. They came each wrapped up in a transparent shrink wrap, a whole
bunch of them stacked in a brown cardboard box, which, once opened, wafted the
enticing fragrance of freshly printed books and a foreign world. They were
printed by the DTV Press (German Paperback Press) in Munich, where one of my
dad’s friends worked and regularly supplied him with its most recent
publications. I did not know any German, but I heard it on an Austrian radio
station (“Autofahrer Unterwegs”) that my dad listened to, and I must have been
impressed by the pop songs in German it played. As soon as I learned how to
read, one of my favorite childhood pastimes, when I was home alone, was to
stand in front of the book shelves with the German DTV paperbacks, imagining
being a pop singer singing songs with the lyrics like “Heinrich Böll, Irisches
Tagebuch, Christian Morgenstern, Palmström Palma Kunkel, Siegfried Lenz, Der
Mann im Strom ...”, making up the tunes on the spot. I had no idea what the
correct pronunciation was, but I was just mesmerized by the idea that the
letters, each of which I knew individually, collectively had a meaning, which
I did not understand, but there were people to whom it meant something and I
wondered just what it might be. No less fascinating was the idea that these
books came from “capitalist imperialism”, as I learned already in
kindergarten, a world to be worried about and even afraid of, but something
that seemed to me inconsistent with their pretty, inviting book covers
(designed by Celestino Piatti). When I was about six years old, I decided to
learn German. So I pored over a German grammar book that I found in my
parents’ library, but did not get much further than learning the conjugation
of the German verb ‘to be’.

(...)

Read more: 

http://blog.linguistlist.org/fund-drive/featured-linguist-hana-filip/






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LINGUIST List: Vol-27-1538	
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