On collectors - Irina Dumitrescu in TLS:

‘One of the calculations I am forever running in my head is how many languages I can still learn in this lifetime. I don’t mean to imply that any age is too old to begin learning a new tongue. But I recognize that the vision of my life I sometimes nourish, in which I translate an epigram from Martial each morning, memorize a handful of Chinese characters over lunch and review the noun classes of Swahili before drifting off to sleep, is a fantasy. Even if I make my peace with partial fluency and an imperfect accent, there are other limitations: time, discipline, the ability to travel.
A teacher I once knew in New York told me that language learning is like a muscle, nothing fancier. I was living in New Haven at the time, in my mid-twenties, and the soulless Barnes and Noble that served as Yale’s university bookstore hid a treasure in its basement: the World Language Center.’

(…)

‘That was the year I read Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Mutterzunge (1990; Mother Tongue, 1994), the title of which still interferes with my spoken German. (The German for “mother tongue” is Muttersprache, “mother speech”, but when I’m careless I use Özdamar’s calque.) The nameless heroine of the collection’s first two stories emigrated to Germany from Turkey, fleeing political persecution. Alienated from her first language, she decides to learn the Arabic script formerly used for Turkish. She finds a teacher in West Berlin who is a master of Arabic letters: Ibni Abdullah.’

(…)

‘The inevitable passion between teacher and pupil does not last. In the end the narrator wanders West Berlin, seemingly homeless. But when someone asks her what she’s doing in Germany, she has her answer: “I’m a collector of words”.’

Read the article here.

On of the better arguments to defend, if necessary, migration and migrants.

They are just collecting words.