If you’re a philologist or a nerd, it’s not the language of love. It’s the language of an unreasonable variety of articles and prepositions that you know you’ll never get quite right all of the time. It’s the language in which you hear the phrase “I’m going to visit my friend” reverberating from your mouth and only then remember that the verb visitare is used exclusively for going to the doctor’s office and what you are going to do is andare a trovare your friend. It’s the language whose numbers are just enough different from Spanish to give you trouble and you only remember cinquecento because Jeremy Clarkson makes fun of Fiat all the time on old Top Gear reruns on TV. It is the language that you insist, indignantly, to its native speakers that no, of course it’s not a difficult language — you speak Spanish anyway and have put in the time on Latin and Arabic — but silently admit to yourself that it’s not easy, either, and what did you need to go learn another diglossic language for, anyway? Dio là, as they say in Venetian, and definitely not in Standard Italian.
A Brief Thought on Engaging Globally
I was sort of rolling my eyes in boredom as I write, for the zillionth time, the “this is what the Cairo Genizah is and why it is both relevant and important for the literature of Spain” paragraph for a lecture I am giving at UCLA next week. And then I was reminded of a talk I gave a few years ago at a conference at Notre Dame, after which a Regius Professor of English approached me and thanked me for taking the time to explain what the genizah was. She had been, prior to her appointment at one of the other universities with Regius chairs, appointed at Cambridge, whose university library houses the vast majority of the Cairene disjecta membra. She told me that she had been to all kinds of medieval talks in which people threw around the word “genizah” but never explained it; the best conclusion she could draw was that “genizah” was some kind of booksellers’ district in Cairo that had been well preserved since the Middle Ages. I was tickled that someone so senior was so gracious and intellectually humble. And ultimately, the memory was maybe not a bad reminder of our responsibilities, especially as we move toward a field of Medieval Studies that is increasingly globalized, of the twin responsibilities to explain our own field knowledge and to really listen, with humility and an openness to learning, as others do the same.
