Babel

Today, I had the most linguistically bizarre conversation of my life—and it was wonderful. On one side sat Wilson Garzon, the publisher of the Brazilian jazz website Clube de Jazz, who speaks only Portuguese. I sat on the other side, speaking my still-in-development Spanish. Wilson and I spoke for an hour and a half about jazz in Brazil, jazz in Buenos Aires, and quite a few other things that I didn't quite understand—at one point, I think he explained the organization of the municipal government in Belo Horizonte, but I'm not really sure about that.

Regular readers of Type and Tonic will remember my dour post of a few weeks ago, "The Language Issue, Revisted." This conversation was the carnivalesque satire of everything I wrote. Suddenly, I was the Spanish expert, and I was competent enough to understand at least the gist of what was being said in a language that is similar to, but decidedly not, Spanish. Suffice it to say, I've never felt more confident in my Spanish ability than I during that hour and a half and the glow that followed. I'd never realized before that as a side benefit of learning one language, I was gaining at least a base-level comprehension of another.