lingua franca

My French and Spanish were great when I had lovers in the languages. But without love, my languages languished.

As for Indonesian, for some reason I was in the Bird’s Head of Irian Jaya a few years back trying to find the last unreached tribes and… [old dude starts counting how many years. Works through fingers, starts in on toes. Says “screw it.” Uses higher math to continue. The answer is 45. Wait, what? Did you say forty-five? Is that years or moons?]…and I got some little coiled jungle creature living in my ankle so I holed up in a village for six weeks of recovery and instead of learning the language of the people, like a true imperialist I started learning the trade language from them. I wrote it out on scraps of paper. This proved to be Indonesian.

Plural in Indonesian is you just repeat the word. This language practically talks itself!

I only had six-hundred words but as an extrovert I wasn’t afraid to use them. When I got out to the lowlands, I found myself in a big house and the man was clapping his hands and showing me his daughters one at a time for marriage, is how good I was in Indonesian. At least, that’s how I understood the meeting. Maybe they were only offering me tamu with a chaser of mango and wondering how long I was going to sit there on the couch jibber-jabbering about how slender the daughters were.

The way I understand time is I was in Indonesia and I’ll be coming back to finish up after a couple of years away. How was I supposed to know it was forty-five? No one tells me anything. The last unreached tribes are probably reached by now.