TL;DR — Talk. Learn. Discover. Repeat. #24

Aug 22, 2023

Hey yall, I hope you’ve been well!

I’ve been on a roll these past few weeks. I’m now done writing and editing most of my e-book about learning languages through playing RPGs. I should be able to complete the finishing touches by the end of the month.

On a somewhat related note, this will be the last edition of the TL;DR. Next week, you’ll receive a newsletter diving more about the changes but, in short, the new version will be less about “sections” and more about language learning itself. Long deep dives about Lesser-Known Languages will remain though.

I hope you’ll be as excited as I am about this change!

Anyway, let’s dive right in!

🗣️Talk languages

As you probably already know, I took the Test Of Proficiency In Korean (TOPIK) a month and a half ago. The results finally came out last Friday. I thought I had absolutely tanked the exam and would only get Level 4 even though I aimed for 5.

Well, I got 219 points out of 300, which not only got me Level 5 but also meant I wasn’t far off Level 6 (230 points onwards), the highest possible level.

You couldn’t imagine how pumped I was when I got my grade.

And this acted as a good reminder language learners often underestimate their level. Most people think they are still beginner or intermediate learners when they’re actually often far above.

It makes sense after all. There’s always so much more left to learn! But we don’t need to know everything to be good.

So here’s my 5 cents for you.

You’re better than you think you are. Have some confidence in your skills.

✍️Learn from my experiences

For the past 2 months, I’ve been joining language exchanges pretty much every Saturday. This is the first time in 10 years that I’m a regular of such meetups and I’m absolutely loving it.

Joining these exchanges has been a great experience and taught me many things so this week, I decided to share a few in 4 Curious Lessons I Learned From Language Exchanges.

Hopefully, this will inspire a few of you to try one in your city!

🌎Discover new cultures

Keeping cool outside of Asia

This week, we’ll fly from country to country without sticking to a region.

And we’ll start with the US, one of the countries I didn’t think I’d discover something about. This may seem obvious to the American readers from the West among you, but I had never heard of “swamp coolers.”

These coolers, also known as evaporative coolers, apparently recirculate the air through a cool, wet pad before expelling it into the room. While this works well for arid environments, this is close to making things worse in damp environments.

In my home country of France, summer rhymes with Pastis. This anise-based spirit is often drunk diluted with water and served with ice. My family thrives on this during our summer aperitifs. In fact, my parents had some just this past weekend.

In Greece (and especially on islands), houses are often built partially underground as a way to take advantage of the earth’s natural cooling.

In many Muslim countries, such as Egypt or Tunisia, many buildings have a mashrabiya (مشربية). This oriel window (meaning that it overflows from the building’s wall) is usually made of wood and catches the wind to cool it as it flows inside.

It’s a simple yet efficient way to keep cool in warm weather. Quite impressive when you realize it’s existed for over 800 years!

🗺️Repeat with me

Eastern Cham - One of the first descendants of the Brahmi Script

This week we’re turning to Eastern Cham. Yes, I actually have to specify “Eastern” because there’s a Western Cham (spoken by about 220,000 people) too and it doesn’t use the Cham script anymore and instead relies more on the Arabic script (because most Western Chams are Muslims) and Latin letters.

Cham, written as ꨌꩌ in its own script, is spoken in the former Kingdom of Champa ranging from Cambodia to South Vietnam. Western Cham is also spoken primarily in Cambodia while Eastern Cham is mostly spoken in Vietnam, by about 73,000 people.

The Cham Script is an abugida, just like Lepcha or Thai.

Explained in a few words, each character represents a syllable with an inherent vowel (the /a/ one). Diacritics, small signs linked to the main character, are then added to turn the vowel into another one. Some languages—and that’s the case for Cham—can have yet another diacritic added to add a final consonant.

For example, the word /siam/ which means “good” is ꨧ which means /sa/, Then ◌ꨳ is added to create ꨧꨳ /sia/. And then ◌ꩌ is added to make ꨧꨳꩌ. Isn’t that beautiful?

Cham goes even further with a few final consonant letters that are added after a syllable while still counting as part of it. For example, the final -k sound needs ꩀ. So the sound /kak/ would be ꨆꩀ.

Interestingly enough, Cham words can have a final consonant only for the final syllable of a word. A word like /kakgiw/ could not exist in the language, even though it could potentially be written as ꨆꩀꨈꨪꨥ.

Now here’s a full sentence: ꨓꨳꩆ ꨨꨭ ꨀꨦꩊ ꨄꨟ ꨟꩃ ꨨꨤꨬ ? (“Where are you from?”)

And, luckily for me, it’s possible to type the language like Mandarin’s pinyin with the use of this website’s convert function.

But let me stop fangirling over this beautifully curved script.

Let’s quickly go over some of the grammar basics. 🤓

The Cham language is a Malayo-Polynesian language, a sub-branch of the Austronesian family. It’s an SVO language that uses prefixes and infixes. I couldn’t find any use of suffixes, which surprised me as most of the languages I’ve seen using prefixes also used suffixes. I wonder if it was only coincidental.

Anyway.

Cham also uses reduplication to indicate a stronger state. For example, /katəy/ means “slowly” while /katə-katəʔ/ means “very slowly”.

Cham also uses classifiers. I think that’s the first time in a long time that I found a language using those. Then again, there are many languages in the area using them (Vietnamese, Thai, Mandarin, Burmese, Khmer, etc.) so this makes sense.

Alright, here are a few sentences just so we can enjoy this beautiful script one last time:

ꨕꨨꨵꩀ ꨀꨊꩆ ꨟꨓꨳꩋ. (Dahlak angan Matias) → My name is Mathias.
(ꨢꨭꩅ) ꨧꨳꩌ ꨟꨪꩆ ? ꨧꨳꩌ ꨟꨪꩆ. ((yut) siam min? siam min.) → How are you? I’m fine.
ꨐꨭ ꨀꨤꩍ ꨝꩄ ꨣꨤꨯ (Nyu alah bac ralo) → He/She is too lazy to learn.
ꨨꨤꨭꩆ ꨊꩇ ꨈꨴꨭꩀ ꨧꨯꨱꩃ ꨛꨯꨮ. (Halun ngap gruk saong Po) → I worked for you.

If you want to learn Eastern Cham. I only found this PDF with simple yet clear explanations but it’s clearly lacking the script itself, and this website with a few lessons. Maybe there are more resources for those who speak Khmer or Vietnamese? If you know, please share in the comments for other learners!

The Average Polyglot

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