Excerpt from Linguaphile by Julie Sedivy, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

But this way of learning makes you cautious. It is the opposite of reckless, ignorant, infantile language love. You size up each incoming syllable to see what piece of the world it is hitched to, and when you speak, you plot the shape of the sounds that will trail after your verb stem, you consult the grammatical building codes, and when you blunder, instead of plunging on with abandon, you walk yourself back and try to cover your tracks.

What I wonder is this: Having learned Spanish in this way, would I have ever followed a Spanish-speaking stranger into a dark barn, thinking I was going to see very large rabbits, or something else I thought they had promised to show me, without really being at all sure of what it was I was being promised?

* * *

No one, not even an infant, can fall in love with utter chaos.

A newborn's vocation is to find order in a world that advertises itself as a random assault on the senses. There is no curriculum. No prefabricated bricks of structure. But the baby is equipped with a dogged faith that language, indeed reality itself, does have order and structure, that it wants to settle and arrange itself into patterns and motifs. This faith is amply rewarded.

In the child's mind, what separates the beloved language from foreign burble is the order stitching it together. The infant intuits structure from beneath every surface of language. Under the very noses of adults who have no idea of the scholarship taking place in their presence, their child begins a secret, analytical love affair with the patterns discerned in language's sounds.

Order begins at the pulsing center of language, as if a fetus were somehow conditioned, by nearness to its mother's heart, to seek out the regularity of rhythm that propels speech forward. Each language has something that sounds like a heartbeat, but its fundamental principles can vary. In some languages, like French and Italian, units of timing are syllables, each allotted an egalitarian space in perceptual time. In other languages, like English and German, the meter of speech is heard as tapped out not by syllables themselves but by the stress laid over syllables at intervals, with multiple syllables sometimes mashed into a single beat. Yet others, like Japanese, seem to organize their time signatures around particles of speech finer than the syllable, so that more complex syllables, composed of long vowels or ending in a consonant, occupy two beats instead of the one apportioned to a simple syllable. Even newborns can hear the rhythmic differences between these languages, whether or not they have heard them before, and they group together languages that operate on similar principles: an infant carried within a Japanese womb registers a shift from an unfamiliar stress-timed language (German) to a foreign syllable-timed one (French)—here is something different!—but does not seem to notice that French and Italian diverge from each other.

Patterns build upon patterns. In the first half year of her born life, a Czech infant may grasp—without knowing that she has grasped—that stress falls on the first syllable of every word, but that the loudness of stress is not twinned with the length of a vowel. This permits words like the name of the Czech composer Janáček, in which stress bears down on the first vowel even though it's the second vowel that sprawls. An English child of the same age may intuit that most (but not all) words of English begin with a stressed syllable, and both babies will prefer to listen to invented words that mark stress on the first syllable. But unlike the Czech child, an English baby (and perhaps you yourself) can't conceive of a long vowel that does not also bear stress. In English, vowels that lack the privilege of stress are never long; they tend to shrivel into barely pronounced slips of sound, as happens to the robust, round shape of the stressed first vowel in "photograph" when that word is absorbed into "photographer" and the stress hops over onto the next vowel. If that English child grows up to be a radio announcer, she may be fated to mispronounce the name of the Czech composer Janáček, placing stress on the long second syllable.

Excerpted from Linguaphile by Julie Sedivy. Copyright © 2024 by Julie Sedivy. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.