Music
There is no music to Jake's ear as fascinating as foreign languages.
He does love a good country album, mostly because it reminds him of his and Eliot's jam sessions so long ago, and Eliot's beautiful singing voice. He likes listening to the radio on long drives as much as the next person, or putting some quiet classical piece in the background when he's working on a lengthy article. But he likes none of that as much as stopping in the street to listen to a group of strangers are debating over a map.
Back in Oklahoma, he rarely heard anything other than English. So he took to books and movies, and taught himself French, Spanish, German, Latin and Ancient Greek. He found pen pals, long before he had access to the Internet, and wrote back and forth with people from all over. He found music in other languages too, just to let himself be lulled to sleep by the foreign sounds.
His passion for history and art fit well with his thirst for languages. He learned to read more old, long lost languages like Ancient Egyptian, but he missed the sounds.
So he turned to the languages of his own country. Navajo, Apache, Comanche. And then, the rest of the world. He never truly learned to speak them, but he listened for the incredible sounds his tongue couldn't reproduce, the grammar structure his brain could barely make sense of, the words whose meanings escaped him.
The cracking and breathy voice of Chinanteco. The strange tongue clicks of Xhosa. The unending word-sentences of Inuktitut. The beautiful rounded script of Georgian, and its impossible verb structure. The eighteen grammatical genders of Swahili. The vowel harmonies of Walpiri and Finnish. He'll pick words and phrases and repeat them again and again, in his head, or aloud when he's alone, just to hear the sound of them.
But the language Jake is most at ease with, on the days when everything feels like it's upside down and there's the weight of an elephant on his chest, is sign language. He's learned half a dozen of them, and he's barely ever met someone else who uses them, but signs are so much easier than words.
Because Jake loves listening to the music of languages, but his own tongue is heavy and clumsy and his first language is images and sounds and ideas, not English. Speaking always take a lot of effort, except if it's about art history. He prefers to just sit and open his ears.
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