I found out only the other day that
2013 marks the first centenary of crossword puzzles. I was rather
surprised, actually, because I realised I had been under the
impression that such marvellous entertainment must have been invented
as soon as words themselves were. For some reason, my mind had dated
crosswords all the way back to the invention of playing cards, which we (apparently) owe to Imperial
China. In any case, I wouldn’t forgive myself for missing out on
the celebration before the year is out.
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| Image © MCF |
Quite a long time ago, I woke up in one
of those multilingual moods
which, as inexplicably, came associated with crosswords and with my
children. The children were familiar with crosswords because of my
addiction to them, and they also knew that crossword puzzling comes
in many variants, like any
other culture-bound entertainment. Swedish-style crosswords, for example, feature a picture, a mix of
quick and cryptic clues which are included in the grid itself where
other variants may have blocked cells, and strings of light-shaded
cells for answers which have no explicit clue except some
relationship to the given picture. Whatever their style, however,
crossword puzzles all have one thing in common: they stimulate
thinking about words in different ways, thereby engaging our
linguistic little grey cells in different ways. Since I’ve spent
most of my life enjoying linguistic fun and thinking about it, my odd
mood on that day gave me the perfect excuse to try to spread the
crossword virus to my little ones.
Swedish and English were the languages
in which the children were literate at
the time, so I created a grid containing Swedish-English orthographic
twins with possible different meanings in each language (e.g. the
word pass) and two sets of clues, one in each language. My
clues were of the quick kind (I’m a coward, yes...), asking for
names of people/characters, things, places, activities, synonyms,
fill-in-the-blank and anything else I could think of which related to
the children’s everyday interests. It was up to the children to
decide whether they wanted to solve the crossword twice, separately
in each language, or once, using both sets of clues at the same time.
Needless to say, the grid had quite a lot of blocked cells, nothing
in the way of symmetry, and was otherwise not very appealing to the
eye. I used a typical Portuguese grid design, by the way, where rows
and columns are numbered sequentially at the side/top of the grid,
and individual clues for each of the answers in the same row or column are separated by punctuation marks. This was the least I could do to
have some Portugueseness included in the puzzle.
Physical and mental activities spawned
by this crossword puzzle had an unexpected side effect among the
children. They all suffered a brief but all the more intense relapse
of their (very) aggravating child humour bouts of years before, when
they used to point at, say, dogs, then call them cats, then giggle
their socks off at their joke,
and then repeat the whole routine with (very) minor variations over
and over again while prodding us parents to join in. They now spent
time and energy inserting, say, Swedish crossword words in English
utterances or vice versa, and likewise ROFLing at the results. Given
that nurturing their awareness of words and word play in their
languages was one of the purposes I had in mind when I set the
puzzle, I suppose I shouldn’t complain about having kindled the
associated silliness, too.
On the whole, then, I rate the effects
of this word-venture quite positively. Crosswords develop our skills
in thinking about a language in that language. They teach us new
words and help us sort out old and new word spellings. In addition,
many of us aren’t necessarily aware of lexical or other
relationships among our different languages. Our languages are there
to serve different purposes, so their everyday use seldom affords us
opportunities to track any similarities they may share. But knowing
about them can come in handy: two of my children had to study Latin
in school (I know. Don’t ask: just have a look here),
which they did in English, their school language. They had serious
trouble memorising (ditto: here)
all those “funny” words and their meanings until I pointed out to
them that thinking about Latin words in Latin’s daughter Portuguese
might assist otherwise puzzling homework tasks. This was a true
epiphany for the children. Multilinguals do not develop this
kind of cross-linguistic awareness spontaneously, by simply being
multilingual, despite common assumptions to the contrary – an issue
I’ll come back to some other day.
Not least, the multilingual crossword
was sheer fun to set and solve. If you’re into language
brain-teasers and language play, and would like to see how we can
solve and appreciate them even in languages that we’ve never seen
or heard before, you may enjoy my Lang101 Workbook. It includes puzzles in
languages which use non-Roman scripts, though I have no idea whether
or how multilingual print-based puzzles combining different scripts
might work. I would be delighted to hear about this.
My next post has a couple of thoughts
about what else we can do with our languages.
© MCF 2013
Next post:
Expats and immigrants. Saturday 11th
January 2014.
