When I was 8 years old I nurtured an illusion. I had read about the Rosetta Stone with its parallel texts in hieroglyphs, demotic Egyptian and ancient Greek. I dreamed of being the first person to decipher its hieroglyphs, unaware that 19th-century scholars had long since beaten me to it. Later, I whiled away scripture lessons by poring over philological footnotes in my Bible about competing readings of Aramaic and Greek manuscripts. I learned French, Latin, Greek and Russian. By the age of 18 I wanted to study linguistics. But there was a problem: my school was pushing me towards Oxford where the subject did not yet exist at undergraduate level.
I arrived in Oxford in 1972 to read French, and made a lucky discovery. A new joint School of Classics and Modern Languages was going to admit its first students in the Trinity Term. A delightful laxness in the syllabus allowed candidates to replace compulsory papers from the two original Schools with choices from a long list of “special subjects”. I jettisoned all of French and classical Latin literature and cobbled together a degree in modern linguistic theory under the false flag of a study of Silver Latin and Old French. My idiosyncrasies meant that for most of my degree I had no tutorial partners and was taught outside my college by people who had incautiously added their own hobby horses to the list of special subjects. Like me, they were disinclined to bother about vacation reading lists or “collection” exams. I had a lovely time.
I joined the British Diplomatic Service in 1977 and looked forward to going abroad and using languages in earnest. The Foreign Office took this seriously and had its own language school. English had not yet become the world’s undisputed lingua franca. Everyone was expected to get by in French, and we were also taught the language of the country in which we were going to work before we arrived there. Over the following decades I was taught German, Italian and Norwegian and learned some Mandarin, as well as inaugurating a bilateral exchange programme by spending two years as a French diplomat at the Foreign Ministry in Paris.
In all my overseas jobs speaking the language of the host country was transformative. You are much more relaxed if you know you can swap banter with your neighbourhood barista, ask for help if your car breaks down miles from anywhere, or find out where to get a new battery fitted in your watch. Your sense of being comfortable conveys itself to others. The other benefits of foreign languages for any international work are well documented: ice-breaking, signalling cultural respect, building trust, picking up nuances and avoiding misunderstandings. For diplomacy foreign languages are quite simply a fundamental tool of the trade, as necessary as being able to send e-mails or read a spreadsheet.
The uses go well beyond doing government business with foreign officials. I remember, for instance, pulling off a scoop in the early 1980s when I happened across Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia in a hotel lobby in Singapore announcing in French to baffled anglophone reporters that he was forming a coalition in exile to oppose the Vietnamese invasion of his country. I also have vivid memories of a snowy Sunday afternoon in the Rheinland trying to defend Margaret Thatcher’s European policy to a boisterous meeting of trade unionists, in German which I had started to learn from scratch only six months previously. Other random challenges over the years included drafting and negotiating the first bilateral treaty between France and Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union; helping out the Italian police and the Indian Embassy at a terrorism conference in Messina by giving an impromptu simultaneous interpretation of the Indian ambassador’s speech when the interpreter was unavailable; and an evening in a bar well north of the Arctic Circle keeping the conversation going between a game British fisheries minister and some very dialectal, tobacco-chewing Norwegian fishermen.
I tried to avoid the trap of letting anyone practise their fluent English on me, and instead appealed to the chivalry of my hosts to let me try out their language from my first day onwards. Having a native grasp of English is of course a great asset. In multilateral negotiations with draft texts in English (as most of them are these days) British diplomats are nimble at running linguistic rings around their opponents, which is handy on occasions where the modest ambition is to survive to fight another day with an outcome which does not cross any red lines. However I found that when we really wanted a difficult agreement to be implemented by another country it paid dividends to invest effort in negotiating in my interlocutors’ language whenever I could. Tilting the linguistic table in their favour encouraged them to take a step in our direction, freed up thinking space for them to devise creative solutions to obstacles, and made it much easier for them to consult and persuade their monolingual partners back home on whom the follow-up depended.
I discovered that learning a language for work needed a different approach from academic study: less etymology or grammatical orthodoxy, more speed of reaction, oral fluency, paralinguistic clues and props, and extracting relevant content despite poor phone lines, noises off or inconsequential digressions. Trial and error taught me how I personally learn fastest, sometimes to the chagrin of my teachers: memorise morphology and grammar by rote from a written page rather than doing repetitive exercises; read an academic account of the phonology accompanied by IPA examples, then assume that my pronunciation will improve unconsciously as I listen to native speakers; concentrate from the start on acquiring the generalised vocabulary of argument (concepts such as increase, prefer, avoid, urge, approach, predict, address, deliver, associate, support, warn, assume), and leave until it proves necessary in real life the vocabulary for specific topics (the holidays, shopping and body parts beloved of teach-yourself language books or the technical and political terms which diplomatic language teachers are keen to impart).
So were all those school and university exercises any use in the outside world? Unexpectedly, yes. I suspect that years of translating in and out of Greek helpfully primed my brain for finding different ways of putting things when I could not immediately think of the words I needed in other foreign languages. The weekly slog at Oxford of having to mould dissertations in French into thèse-antithèse-synthèse proved indispensable to commanding respect at the Quai d’Orsay for the structure of my written work. I know I picked up some clever tips for public speaking from the classical rhetoricians. And years ago when the Iron Curtain still divided Europeans I even once spent an evening speaking Latin with the Romanian diplomat sitting next to me at a dinner in Brussels, since it turned out to be our only common language. (I could not do that now.)
The main purpose of diplomacy is of course not linguistic prowess but persuasion and dissuasion of foreigners, and (like the law and journalism, perhaps) its subject matter embraces every aspect of human life, from trade deals to fishing quotas and from the rights of indigenous peoples to peaceful uses of outer space. Languages are only one of its many ancillary disciplines, and I relished the variety of the issues which landed on my desk. If I had read something else at Oxford I could have said something about my work for almost any other Faculty magazine! But now that I have retired I can indulge again in my first love. So I have been reading up on the recent insights from neurology and microbiology for the understanding of language acquisition and loss. I have at last learned some Gaelic (my grandfather’s mother tongue). And the high spot of my week is a voluble conversation class at the French Institute in Edinburgh. Plus ça change…