The Man Without a Language

           Winston Reina calls himself a man without a language. That's really ironic from a man who speaks five languages, but that's Winston - quiet, modest and very intelligent. Born in Cuba of well-to-do parents in the early 1950s, he fled with them to Spain after Castro's revolution. There, he spoke Spanish with a Cuban accent as he grew up and graduated from high school.

            Winston was accepted at university in Germany, where he studied civil engineering – after learning German, which he spoke, of course, with a heavy Spanish accent.    He managed to get his engineering degree after five years, but was not able to find a job in Germany. Germans welcome students, but workers find it a bit more challenging.

            So Winston found a job with a British engineering firm and learned English. Which he spoke with a strange foreign accent, but well enough to stay with the firm until it went out of business a few years later. He was lucky enough to find a job with a large American oil company, which sent him to Indonesia. He loved it there, and learned to speak Indonesian – but with a foreign accent, naturally.

Winston worked in the jungles of Sumatra for a while, then was transferred to country headquarters in Jakarta on the island of Java. Indonesia is a huge nation, made up of thousands of islands (some say 10,000, some say 14,000 – who knows) covering a geographic area the size of the United States and containing 290 million people. Although Bahasa Indonesia is the national language, there are a number of individual Indonesian languages, spoken by natives of various islands. Balinese, Acehnese, Javanese, Sundanese, there are at least eleven major languages each spoken by a large number of Indonesian people.

            In Jakarta, Winston met a lovely Javanese Indonesian lady, who began to teach him Javanese, the language of the ancient people who inhabited Java for at least 15 centuries. In the Seventh or Eighth Century, Javanese Buddhists built the Borobodur temple in central Java near the ancient capitol of Jogjakarta. One of the most revered temples in Buddhism, Borobodur is a stone pyramid, rising 900 feet tall out of the surrounding jungle. Its sides are covered in intricate relief carvings, and at the top, large stone statues of Buddha are enclosed in stone stupas that look like inverted baskets or cages woven from palm fronds. Natives say that if a supplicant touches the Buddha's nose, his prayer will be answered.

            Javanese is a very difficult language, almost like two separate languages. Depending upon the relative social status of the speakers, different grammar is used in conversation. A middle class housewife speaks to her maid in one form, while she speaks to her friends in another. Spanish has its polite and familiar verb forms, but Javanese take it several steps further.

          Winston married his Javanese language teacher, and telephoned the news to his grandmother, who still lived in Cuba. Granmama had a little trouble understanding him because he spoke with such a foreign accent.