Symptoms of Age, II
A peculiar symptom of age—at least
that’s what I think it is—is my sporadic thinking in German. This takes place mostly
at night during fairly frequent period of lying awake. While I make up little
speeches in my first language, I mostly recite—mentally, not out loud—the
beginnings of a number of children’s songs. (The beginnings only because I
don’t remember more lines than that, if I ever knew them.)
I have
not much used German in recent years and while it is completely fluent and
unsullied by an English accent, it has the shrunken vocabulary of a teenager.
Mind you, that’s not where my German got stuck. I wrote a doctoral
dissertation—and my first book—based entirely on German sources; but that “learned”
vocabulary did not enter into my daily (so to speak) use of German.
By way
of comment about the above, I think I may correctly call myself bilingual. But
that does not mean—and probably seldom if ever does—that that “bi-“ means sameness
of the two languages referred to.
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