Full Circle

I had a revelation today. Not a great one; nothing momentous, least ways not to anyone but me. In French class, we were reviewing how to form a question. There are two forms a question can take. The first is a question word (such as Quand, Que, Qui, Où, and so on), followed by "est-ce que" followed by the subject, and then the verb. For example: Qui est-ce que vous êtes? Who are you? (Literally: who is it that you are?) The other form of asking questions is much simpler: question word, verb, hyphen, subject. The first question would become: Qui êtes-vous? Who are you? The inverted order of verb followed by subject is indicative of a question in Spanish, English, and French. As I wrote out several questions for my notes, I remembered that I had encountered this form of questioning, verb-subject, in French, many years ago. In elementary school, before I had any real concept of the English language, I had already learned some of the French. I'm sure you did too. Maybe this will jog your memory:

Frère Jacques, frère Jacques,
Dormez-vous? Dormez-vous?

Dormez-vous? Dormez, the formal second-person conjugation of the verb dormer, to sleep, and vous, the formal-second person pronoun: you. Dormez-vous: Are you sleeping? I had known what it meant over ten years ago when I learned the song, but today I realized that I could dissect it grammatically and really understand it. I have never studied French formally, between the time I learned that song and the time I began this semester. I have dallied in French to be sure, watched French films, read a book written completely in French, even created a blog and gave it a French title, but ever since it was introduced into the pattern by a simple song, that particular strand has been an aimless, meandering thread, cast aside to watch while other, perhaps more important threads continued my life's story. But now, that single strand has finally been re-woven into the pattern of my life. I don't know how to describe it: the connection is so amazing to me. It represents a circle of knowledge, how something I learned ten, eleven, twelve years ago finally makes sense. The circle is complete, yet not finished, for a circle has neither end nor beginning. And now I'm getting philosophical. I have known that everything I learn builds on something I learned before, but never has it stood out so boldly as it did today.

My professor (of French) asked me to stay behind and speak with her after class today. I didn't know why, but I hoped she didn't think my good performance in her class owed any aide whatsoever to cheating. She didn't. What she did say was that I was doing excellently in her class and had I been a bit younger, she would have had me be a French major. She really seemed put-out that I was graduating in May and wouldn't be able to major in French, because she said her department needed students like me. That really made my day. Really really. It's not the first time that I've been told this - I was actually pulled out of class by my tenth-grade Spanish teacher so he could tell me that I could go very very far in Spanish, and that I should major in it in college, speak it, even teach it if I wanted. That too made my day. The funny thing: I've never ever been challenged by either Spanish or French. I hope that doesn't make me seem proud and haughty; language seems to come easily to me, and I've never had the need to apply much effort to any foreign language class to succeed. I wonder what would happen if I did.