Trouble in Transylvania by Barbara Wilson

Something terrible must have happened to her,” said Eva.
    “How old was she when they got her? Nine months?” asked Jack. “She must have been adopted right at the age when she would have started speaking. Maybe the change from Romanian to English was too confusing.”
    “If you believe Chomsky, that all languages are fundamentally alike, then it shouldn’t matter that Emma was born into a Romanian-speaking family and only heard Romanian in her very formative months. She should have been able to switch into English without any problem. What I wonder is if no one talked to Emma at all. Another school of thought from Chomsky says you have to learn your language from an adult with whom you have a strong relationship.”
    “That sounds like you and your Spanish teacher, Cassandra,” said Jack. “What was her name?”
    “Dede,” I sighed. “Miss Paulsen.”
    “How old were you?”
    “Seventeen. She was twenty-five. She was from northern Michigan and had majored in Spanish and Education. She’d only been to Spain once, for a month. Her apartment was full of things like posters of bullfights and those leather wine bags. She left me with a very bad Spanish accent.”
    “I think your parents are very important,” Eva interrupted. It seemed to make her nervous when Jack and I talked so familiarly about old lovers. “My father was a teacher and he always read to me and talked to me. I pronounce many words just as he did.”
    “My mother talked to me,” said Jack. “Endlessly. But I managed to tune her out except for a few ladylike phrases that pop out from time to time in the most unexpected situations. I go for Chomsky. I know it’s why I never worry about speaking a foreign language. To me they’re all exactly the same.”
    “Chomsky,” I told them, “theorizes that language is innate; ‘an organ of the mind,’ he calls it. It’s in our genes, we don’t invent it. He says that children don’t learn language, they bring it with them when they’re born.”
    “If you bring language with you when you’re born,” asked Jack, “what language is it?”
    “It’s more of a template,” I said.
    “How do you know that the little girl wasn’t born to Hungarian-speaking people?” Eva wanted to know. “She comes from Transylvania, which used to belong to Hungary.”
    “No wonder then,” said Jack. “If she has a Hungarian language template on her brain, no wonder she’s confused. Probably she’s got a paprika deficiency, causing the root words to agglutinate in her poor little mind.”
    “The trouble is,” I went on, “all theories about language are quite difficult to test. Almost no children grow up without language, so it’s hard to have a pure research subject. To really test out Chomsky’s theories, you’d have to let a child grow up on an isolated island and see if the child developed a language or not, and whether it was like the languages we know. But of course, morally, you can’t do an experiment like that.”
    “Of course you can,” countered Jack. “We call it speaking Strine. That’s Australian English to you, Eva.”
    Señor Martínez was a rotund man of fifty, with a damp enthusiastic handshake and what the Japanese have taken to calling a “bar-code head”—in which long strands of what hair remains on a man’s head are pasted in straight lines across a pale round expanse of skull. The face under the black and white design was eager and even lusty. As he told us, he was from Bilbao but he’d had an Andalucían mother and this had given him a great zest for life, a zest that became more apparent as the glasses of red “Bull’s Blood” wine disappeared.
    Señor Martínez fell into my Spanish as passionately as into a beloved’s arms. Not that he’d previously been parsimonious (according to Jack) with his ungrammatical English, but his Spanish was a force of nature that now gushed out of his mouth like water from a blocked pipe.
    In this case the metaphor was