English was my first love...

...but will it be my last?  English of the future, or English of the past?

I've noticed, lately, that I've been dismissive of English.  I've been having such an interesting time exploring other languages that I've fallen into the trap of seeing the baggage of English rather than the magic of it.

There was a time when I was spell-bound by the linguistic possibilities that English could offer - and the intricacies of the language throughout time.  I studied Old English, Middle English and Jacobean English at university and loved every minute of it.  I loved the poetry of the language itself, but also the joy of the literature.  Plays, poetry, novels...  I revelled in the written word of my native language.  I used to write sonnets just for the pleasure of playing with the rhythms and structures of the language.

I seem to have left that somewhere.

When I started learning German I was excited by what it could teach me about English - English is a Germanic language, after all.  Then I started to get enough of a grip on German and Estonian that I began to see the poetry in those languages, and I'm so hungry for these shiny new words that I've forgotten the joy I used to find in my own.

Also, I'm so caught up in the global language debate that I tend to see English as something holding people back, rather than a source of wonder and poetry.  I feel so strongly that everyone should try to learn another language, that I've almost begun to hate the English language purely for its hegemony.  It's such a shame that people who speak English don't feel the need or desire to learn anything else - and such a shame that most speakers of other languages see learning English as the best use of their time.

Granted, anything is better than having French as the international language (that has to be the worst spelling system known to man), but I don't think English should be the ultimate lingua franca of the world.  I don't think it's good for native English speakers - it makes us lazy and gives us a sense of cultural superiority that we don't deserve.

But...

But I used to love English.  I used to love exploring the nooks and crannies of the language - the ebb and flow of the grammar, the endless possibilities and nuances of the vocabulary.  I used to cherish the way a word like "cherish" could add a completely different colour to a sentence than, say, "adore".  I used to love seeing how we gathered together words from all over the world and piled them up in an almost reckless order, like a bowerbird gathering shiny things for his bower.

I loved the way you can say "a gaggle of school girls" to evoke a mental comparison between school girls and geese.

Evoke.  Such a beautiful word.

I guess I still love English, but I've stopped appreciating it.

I have finally decided to take the TESOL subjects for my Master of Applied Linguistics next year.  It took me a while to make up my mind.  I knew that, with my background as an English teacher and my recent acquisition of a Graduate Certificate in Tertiary Teaching, the TESOL subjects would be useful, logical and relevant.  I could probably get a job anywhere in the world teaching English...

But I wanted to play with different toys.  For some reason, even though all of the projects I want to do for a PhD could easily be done from a TESOL perspective (and the TESOL subjects would be useful grounding for that), I wanted to look at them from different angles.  Two years ago I would have jumped at the chance to learn about TESOL, but right now the idea of teaching English almost bores me.

Language is such a big, big pie, and English is just one slice of it.  A rather large slice, but only one slice none-the-less.  Yet I will never know another language as well as I know English.  And at the end of my days, when all my knowledge bleeds away, I will have Shakespeare and Yeats long after Liiv and Goethe have gone to dust.

And that's okay.