When I was a baby, my parents spoon-fed me many things as I slowly grew. They fed me applesauce. They fed me rice. Foods I loved from the beginning because they looked appealing and novel to me. Then they tried introducing brussel sprouts and broccoli — foods I readily spit out in disgust. They were yucky vegetables — inedible. Often though, I wasn’t allowed to leave the dinner table unless I ate them, so I begrudgingly ate with tears dripping from my eyes, yearning for my vegetable-induced suffering to end. Soon enough, however, I became used to what was once disgusting and just learned to deal with it.
Except for one thing.
All along, my parents secretly spoon-fed me words knowing I was going to spit them back out eventually. But when we as babies first heard words, we didn’t say them back. We consumed them, digested them, and pondered their existence. We didn’t spit them back out because we didn’t know how to. They were sounds that seemed amusing, kept for safekeeping later. Eventually, I learned to spit out words. Many of us don’t remember our first words in our mother tongues because we were so young. Usually, it’s “mama” or “dada,” or something similar to what you’ve heard since time immemorial. Those words are pretty easy to say. Put repetitive sounds next to each other and you’ve got some semblance of a word. Add the fact that those two words relate for what you’ve known since your birth, and words start streaming from your mouth because it’s what you’ve known your whole life.
As we grow, we consume knowledge, and we spit words out to use that knowledge. Speaking our mother tongue becomes second nature. We don’t think about how we need to conjugate verbs. We rely less on our parents, and more on what is around us. Language becomes natural; it becomes our identity. We begin to shape the language of how we think and feel. Our words that we spit out are a tool to express our identity, feelings, dreams, failures, and victories.
Then we realize that not everyone speaks the same or lives the same way, and there are countless other ways to express things than the toolbox we’ve garnered over the years. There’s a limit to what we can express in our own language, and we are then forced to look elsewhere to express ourselves to others who may not initially understand us in our mother tongue. To form bonds. To understand.
But where do we begin? How do we relate to something we’ve never known? There is no longer a mother nor father to coddle and spoon-feed us. Now there are teachers, professors, friends, or occasionally a pestering despotic owl (whose name I dare not say) to teach us. It becomes impersonal. We are no longer clean slates to be easily taught to. We’ve accumulated lived experiences that guide us. We now enter a domain foreign to us, hoping to digest their every detail.
This year I’m taking first-year Latin. Tell my seventh-grade self that I would be learning Latin as a first-year college student and I would have laughed at you. That would probably be a valid response. What would the language be useful for? Most Latin speakers are either six feet underground or Catholic priests.
Yet I stuck with it. Somehow, something lured me into it, and I don’t know what. I was a blind man being held by the hand into an unknown, foreign land. But one question remained: what word was spoon-fed to me as my first?
Amō.
I love.
Usually, when you’re taking a language class, the teacher gives you a random noun, and that’s how you start. With Spanish in elementary school, I started out with libro and biblioteca. Symbols of my adventure into a new world.
But now I start with a verb — an action. Not just a sign, but something of substance. Something I can hold on to. An act to carry out. A few days ago a professor asked me why I took Latin. I gave what I feel like now is an insufficient answer:
“Because it sounded cool. Because it looked appealing to me.”
Not exactly. I do it because, funnily enough, amō. Despite my initial child-like rebellious hatred of macrons (those lines over long vowels), nonexistent word order, and irregular verbs as if they were yucky vegetables, I’ve come to love those little quirks and connect them to my own lived life. I am connecting myself physically and virtually with elements of expression that are incomprehensible in my mother tongue. Learning something in another form of expression is an act to develop understanding and create something new and unique. For example, the concept of a definite article is nonexistent in Latin: “the” does not exist. Instead, cases of words and context create meaning. There is greater emphasis on words relying on each other to create a coherent thought. Just like how it is true in Latin, it is true in life as well. We cannot merely survive alone as an island and must coalesce to exchange thoughts and ideas and refine them to make change.
Just like how we take from what’s around us to develop new understandings of the world around us personally.
Just like how we take and learn from others, we give back and share what we’ve learned to develop mutual understanding.
And just like I was spoon-fed once by my parents to build a tolerance to new foods, and eventually, connecting with others.
Because that’s what matters. We consume and digest what others have left for us, and we give back for the next person to come learn on the journey — just like our parents once did for us years ago.
