Is it the meaning behind your particular choice of words? Chasing the boundless in their ever growing precision, stopping short each time you sneeze, or yawn, or choke… Grasping at the veiled outline of a word, that perfect word that feels just of reach, tucked deep under some layer of neuron dust. Fast as lighting! ..and yet it seems that lightning doesn’t strike here.

Ineffable

Until it does! Eureka!

You’ve managed to wrap up chaos into a lofty packaging of obscure sounds, those ones that you make with your mouth. Is this your voice? A missed beat in the punchline of an elaborate joke: the conversation. Thrown deep into a dizzying spin dating back to “our” Latin forefathers who apparently meant:

Com “with, together” + versare “to turn, to bend, to spill”

‘To spill’… How visceral this feels. How true it rings when we imagine the physical manifestation of this act; like all good metaphors that are born of and always and through life itself. We splash and spill unto one another like crashing waves fill the crevices of the rugged sea-side cliffs. Sometimes gently and other times, all at once.

So your voice is what you say. But, also how you say it. Is it garàge or gàrage? How do you pronounce the word ‘vague’, how about ‘woven?’

When I was six I was enrolled with a speech therapist to improve the strength of my ш and щ sounds but most importantly to teach me how to roll my Rs, a lack of which signaled my deficiency as a functioning member of Russian society, even earning me a label of my own: картавик. Roughly translated to ‘one who can’t pronounce Rs’ but lacking the ironic cruelty of its Russian counterpart which contains the cursed letter in its very name. Your weakness is your name.

So off we went:

Шшшш-уба

Щщщщщ-ука

Шшшш-околад

I was getting the hang of it! I had the SH sounds down packed. But now the cursed ‘Rrrr’ just wouldn’t give… I followed the instructions with all the energy and enthusiasm that a six year old can muster: rounding out my tongue, pushing it to the top of my teeth and then trying to blow an even, continuous gust of air to make the tip of my tongue sing:

РРРР — ЫБА!

л-ыба!

- ЫБА?

“You did it with your throat again Sasha…” the instructor would say. I had a way of faking it by making a gargling Rrr noise with my throat, but that didn’t fool her. “Try again, don’t rush” she would say . She was a gentle and patient woman who had registered in my young mind as the ‘phonetic voice of reason’ That voice lingered with me for a long time. She had a lovely voice.

“Карл у Клары украл кораллы, а Клара у Карла украла кларнет.”

How do you convey the meaning of this sentence? At first glance it’s just another Russian скороговорка (tongue twister) an étude if you may, focusing on the mastery of rolling your Rs in every single word, with gusto. But to a картавик this might as well be the Dementor, an embodiment of linguistic soul-sucking. A little novel called Black Swan Green by David Mitchell portrays this specific feeling beautifully. It is a thinly-veiled autobiography of the author who suffered from a stammer as a kid, one which he hid masterfully by expanding his vocabulary to avoid, replace and dance around words that would get him into traps like “Карл у Клары украл кораллы.” Of course one can only be so masterful. In public, his worst class was mathematics. Being unable to give the factually correct answer of “ninety-nine” a cursed double stammer word, he would answer:

“A hundred and one, sir?”

A voice will always find a way. Carved out of flesh it will ring out:

“I am here!”

One could propose that a voice is the weighted average of all your past actions. “Weighted how?” you ask. “By whom?”

The IELTS is an English proficiency test that is mandated by the Canadian government as part of Express Entry under the Federal Skilled Worker immigration program. Scoring at least a 7.0 overall meant that you and your family could start anew in these cold, vast and beautiful lands.

Now repeat after me: “Hi, my name is Olga :) How do you do?”

My mom went through English tutors like a formerly seasoned smoker goes through a pack on the rebound: jittery and with fake confidence. “Gotta hit that 7.0 baby!” In the meantime, I got pretty good at faking my Rs, and my Shhs weren’t giving me any trouble at all. In fact I grew into somewhat of a blabber-mouth: talking too much, too often and to everyone I encountered. Little did I know, all that Rrr and Shh finesse would be of little to no use and that my incessant talking would come to an abrupt stop. My mom scored a 7.0 and Toronto was going to be my new home.

The Georgian word for pregnant is ორსული (or-souli) translated literally as “two-souled”

I really like that.

They say that each language that you speak is like another soul. Well then in that case learning a new language is akin to giving birth, to forging life and meaning out of what only recently appeared as white noise. An alchemy of its own brew, it requires a sacrifice far more often than not: a strand of hair, a frog’s leg and a pinch of pine wood ash into the witches cauldron of assimilation.

“Do you understand what I am saying? Do you speak English?”

These words cut deep into the fabric of my very being. I stand only a few feet behind my mom and see her still face, aged and weathered by the cold and rigid winters of Canadian immigration. Where did her voice go?

“Oh sorry sir, I wasn’t sure that’s what she wanted, of course no problem :) Have a good day!”

I make the appropriate Tim Hortons order: Medium double-double with a side of diabetes. The world resumes its ghastly dance.

So how does one come to learn more than one language? It’s simple: be born into a satellite of a satellite of a regional power, and then move to a completely different part of the world. Usually that gives you about 2–3 languages + English, of course, the inescapable lingua franca of our time.
“But what about fun?” you say.

“What about French lessons on Sunday mornings?”

I began studying le français, la langue de l’amour! around the same time as my visits to the speech therapist. What a relief to find a language that completely ignores that wicked letter R and encourages a throaty pronunciation! My primary school in the suburbs of Moscow happened to fall in the “french district” meaning that I would get to write dictées and practice mon vocabulaire from a really young age. Géniale!

Fast forward about ten years and I’m in the back of a blabla car (an EU ride-share service) with a sous-chef from Côte d’Ivoire who is passionately sharing a story about his terrible experience in Greece just a few months prior. Two police officers approached him in the street in broad daylight and asked for documentation. After addressing him in broken English, they began to make unsavoury jokes at his expense in Greek. He immediately called them out; knowing a little Greek himself he recognized a few of the swear words that they were using. But one swear word is always followed by another, and the next one stuck out like a sore thumb: Gamozo-o! A fight ensued. He spent four long nights in jail and the judge quickly swept the whole incident under the rug.

“J’suis parti, c’était ça, je n’y reviendrai jamais!” he passionately concludes. The driver, a clarinetist from Avignon nods affirmingly while he adjusts the GPS headed for Arles: “Bah ouais les Grecs, c’est fou, quel cauchemard!” I nod in agreement with a little hesitation.

Coche? Mare? Ahhh — Кошмар!

Another small victory at the hands of Napoleon. Back in the 18th century the Russian language absorbed a large quantity of french words through it’s newly pampered and clean-shaved bourgeoisie. I guess Napoleon should’ve just left it a cultural war, that seems to be the only way to beat the Slavs. Bubblegum and jeans. Champagne et foie gras.

And so a voice can have a lot of power. It can condemn you, or it can set you free: “Please tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help you God!” A voice can help create a bond, or it can bind you to your solitude.

When I was five years old my mother asked if I would like to join a children’s choir on Sundays. I gave a firm and convincing answer: “No.”

Why? Where did that conviction come from? Did I choose to be bad singer for the rest of my life? How much of your voice is really in your control?

Chopin’s Prelude Op. 28 №8 in F sharp minor: the right hand is playing eight thirty-second notes with an underlying dotted-eighth note melody and left is playing tri-pa-let one, tri-pa-let-two. At full speed the objective is to voice this underlying melody that you’re playing every 7–8th note with the tip of your thumb while the remaining ‘filler’ notes colour and uphold up the overarching prelude structure. The result is a beautiful glistening piano piece lasting a whole…two minutes!