Shaganakagyun and Other Linguistic Joys
A friend of mine who primarily speaks English is on her way to Guatemala to study Spanish. I spent one of the worst summers of my life studying Spanish in Guatemala, so I naturally I gave her some recommendations. (DO study at the Christian Spanish Academy in Antigua. DON’T forget mosquito repellant because dengue fever will take you WAY DOWN.)
The summer I spent studying Spanish paled in comparison to the summer I spent studying Armenian in Armenia. Peace Corps assigned us in groups of about ten or so to villages in a valley outside of a town called Charentsavan. I lived with a family in a village called Teghenik, and each day our group of volunteers studied with Zhasmina and Aghavni, our teachers. You’ll hear more about that summer in my upcoming book.
Photo: Villages, like this one outside of Stepanavan in Armenia, have hosted summer training for Peace Corps volunteers for decades. Peace Corps works with different villages, choosing new places to host summer training every few years.
From the Christian Spanish Academy I learned how to break down a language into bite size pieces, mastering small bites until you could take on the whole thing at once. From Zhasmina and Aghavni I learned more about how to learn a language, of course. There were new letters to learn, new sounds to make. Twisting and manipulating air in new ways in my mouth reminded me of learning to whistle, if whistling could be a letter in a word. I learned about noun declensions. I learned that every language has rules and that every language eventually breaks all its own rules.
Zhasmina and Aghavni are two people you are unlikely to meet in my memoir (Oh, how I wish I could tell you every single story! Follow this blog long enough, and I probably will!). But Zhasmina and Aghavni were the first language teachers that taught me how to love a language. Because they loved it. Zhasmina delighted in hearing us master names of fruits and vegetables. Tandz! Khndzor! Tsiran! She brightened when we returned her, “Vonc es?” (How are you?) with a “Lav em. Du vonc es?” (I’m good. How are you?)
With Aghavni we wrote stories at night in Armenian letters and read them to our class. She listened as we told her the most simple stories of our lives. I could tell her I’m from Texas. I could tell her in Armenian that my mom is a teacher (usutsich) and my dad is a computer programer (hamakargch’ayin tsragravorogh). From her seat on top of the desk at the front of the room, afternoon light shining through her curly hair, her eyes lit up and she clapped after I tripped over the vowels and constants but eventually stuck the landing.
I learned to love the rhythms of vowels and consonants, to delight in a language that our teachers gifted to us with pride. I mean, try this word out, for instance:
շագանակագույնOk. Most folks reading this are like me and wouldn’t be able to read those Armenian letters without someone like Zhasmina and Aghavni patiently wading through the learning process with them. BUT… I’ll make it easier… here are the English-lettered phonetics:
sha-ga-nak-a-gween
Say it. Go ahead and say it right now out loud. Say it again. Say it enough times that it rolls off the tongue. Say it enough times that you can sing it. Can you feel the bounce? Can you feel the music in that word? The satisfying ‘g’ and ‘k’ sounds. The satisfying lift with that ‘gween’ at the end. It’s satisfying in the way that taking a bite of perfect food is satisfying. You can describe it all day, but when you feel it in your body it’s a whole other thing.
Shaganakagyun.
And that’s just the Armenian word for ‘brown’!
I loved mastering the word for “thank you” (shnorhakalutsyun) and then being able to throw it out like a yo-yo whenever I wanted to both thank someone in my Teghenik host family and impress them.
I loved the word for “hello” - Barev - and the way the ‘b’ popped when you said it, like popping the solitary bubble around a friend and inviting them into communion with you. Barev! And then suddenly you went from alone to together. The word lifts you up. The word helps you rise. Indeed, it includes ‘arev’, the Armenian word for ‘sun’.
As I’m editing my book and recalling conversations, I’m grateful for the conversations I can remember and even more so for the Armenian words, phrases and conversations I can still remember so many years later. And more than that, I remember the invitation from Armenians around me to talk, to ease into their language, to speak it with them around dinner tables and khorovats fires, at office coffee breaks, and eventually in the giving of my own toasts at community celebrations.
Editing my book has brought so many words back, and it’s brought back to me the thrill of relationship that unlocks when you learn a few words that are so important to someone else, when you learn their language, their heart.
