7 Bullet Points About Languages - Week 80
Metaphors, Vacation learning, Tattoos, and the Basque Language
Hey language lovers,
I hope you all had a magnificent week!
Updates
Mine was “meh” when it comes to actual progress in my languages but a good ol’ “awesome” for the rest.
I didn’t make much progress in my languages overall but I did get back into being a bit more conscientious when I see my target languages around me.
You see, I felt a bit dull for the past few weeks when it comes to my progress and I just realized last week it may have been because I interacted with my languages on most days but only rarely looked anything up, leaving most to, well, chance.
Basically, I relied on exposure alone when learning a language is both a passive and an active task. Both need to be done. In easier terms:
As a reminder, the first post of my series about lesser-known languages is out. In it, I did an (extremely) deep dive into the Ainu’s history and culture, and gave enough information for you to create your first sentences in Ainu!
The next piece will be coming out in a bit under two weeks and it’s about a language spoken most people don’t know, unless they spent a lot of time on the How To Learn Any Language forum 10 years ago, where I first heard of it too.
Alright, let’s dive into what you came for!
7 Bullet Points
Each week, I share 7 things about languages.
I hope they can help you improve your journey, tickle your curiosity, and inspire you to keep exploring.
🎥 One video
Language Learning vs Acquiring a Language - How to Learn a Language Science (Science Says ep. 4) - Kyle Brandon
Language acquisition has been discussed countless times online, most often in reference to Stephen Krashen’s “comprehensible input” theory so it was refreshing to find one about another theory: the monitoring hypothesis.
That theory states language acquisition initiates our ability in the language and is what fuels our ability to speak. Then, language learning serves to monitor, to edit ourselves.
According to that hypothesis, learning only has a limited role in our fluency performance because we need to have enough time to sort through everything. That’s why we mumble and fumble over words.
For conversations indeed, stopping to go through a verb’s conjugation table in our table is a waste of time. For reading, however, knowing our conjugation table or grammar patterns well can make recognizing them more quickly.
This is why we need varied activities!
📚 One article I read
Other ways of improving speaking skills apart from…speaking? — Discussion on A Language Learners’ Forum
This conversation was an insightful one. One tip truly resonated with me: Kraut’s idea of “partial theme-related fluency.”
I found their idea of working through a short text very intensively to master its vocabulary very interesting so I’m planning on doing that for Korean too. I’ve been interested in productivity for a long time so this could help me become able to talk about it in Korean too!
If this idea doesn’t resonate with you, read the conversation! There were many other ideas so I’m sure you’ll find one that does.
✍🏽 One article I wrote
5 Metaphors About the Truth of Language Learning
I love comparing languages and language learning to other, completely non-language-learning-related, topics. It helps reframe the perspective we have and can change a low-energy day into a very productive one.
This is the power of a mindset change.
And in this piece, I tried to share this with you. Hopefully, you’ll enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it!
🎧 One podcast episode
Episode 15: Language Learning on Vacation — By Love, Joy, and Languages
This episode was a good breather to remind myself it’s fine to not study languages every single day.
A few weeks ago, I felt pretty bad for not studying my languages much as I prepared to write my piece about Ainu but hearing Heidi saying it’s fine made me get over it. After all, I did study again afterward!
In this episode, she shares five activities she does while on vacation to stay connected to her languages. Still, as she insists, she doesn’t put too much pressure to do them every day!
Apart from the language apps (most of which I’m not a big fan of), I loved every single tip she gave so I’m sure you will too 😉
🌎 One cultural aspect to discover
Tattoos around the world
I don’t have any tattoos but I’ve always found tattoos incredible. Some are pure pieces of art. The idea of putting on me something I could never completely erase, however, scares me so this is why I’ve never had one.
Well, that’s not exactly true. Another reason is my love for the Japanese onsen (natural baths). In Japan, tattoos, called irezumi (入れ墨), are seen as connected to crime and the yakuza so most onsens refuse people with tattoos.
I find this quite ironic considering it was the Japanese government in the 1600s that started putting tattoos on prisoners in the first place but that’s a topic for another day.
As I’ve mentioned in my post about Ainu, however, the Ainu women used to have a tattoo around their mouths because it was said to repel evil spirits from entering the body through the mouth. You can read a lot more about this practice and other tattoos they had on their body here.
People with tattoos are a common sight in the western world nowadays but most hold no cultural meaning but rather a personal meaning or none at all even sometimes.
Today, let’s look at a few cultures for which tattoos are an integral part of the culture.
It would be wrong not to start with the famous Maori tattoos, also called Tā moko. Facial Maori tattoos are especially important because of the Maori’s belief that the head is sacred. This piece goes into intricate details about this practice and where it comes from.
In Thailand, the Sak Yant (การสักยันต์) is a traditional tattoo of geometric shapes that can only be done by special monks, called Ajahns (อาจารย์). This practice formed as ancient Shamanistic traditions mixed with Buddhism. The Sak Yant tattoos were considered magical, supposedly providing warriors with good luck, protection from evil, and such.
Taiwan is said to be the homeland of the Austronesian people, cultures that have a strong tattoo tradition.
The Atayal are Taiwan’s second-largest indigenous group. In their culture, facial tattoo, called ptasan, are an important rite of passage. For boys to be accepted as a man, they needed to prove themselves in hunting between 5 and 15 years old. As for girls, they needed to be able to weave. Tattoos were so important in their culture that a woman without facial tattoos was not allowed to marry.
On the other side of the world, the Inuit also value tattoos, called Kakiniit (ᑲᑭᓐᓃᑦ). Kakiniit are commonly made by women for women although men can have some less-elaborated ones too. Facial tattoos, called tunniit (ᑐᓃᑦ) serve specifically to indicate the transition into womanhood.
Many other ethnicities around the world hold tattoos dear for cultural reasons. If you want to know more, read about the tattoos to make girls unappealing to rival tribes and other Indian tattoo styles here, or the Filipino tattoo art of Batok here.
Next time you see an intricate tattoo, why not ask its bearer which meaning it holds for them?
Side note: Don’t get a Chinese character tattoo unless you know the language well. A friend once saw a woman with a strange tattoo. When she asked her what it meant, she said it meant “free (of spirit/mind)” (自由). Well, she was kinda right. The tattoo meant it in the sense “free of charge” (免费). And looking at this piece, it seems it wasn’t the first time this happened.
📜 One quote to ponder
“A plant needs roots in order to grow. With man it is the other way around: only when he grows does he have roots and feels at home in the world.” — Eric Hoffer
🌐 One Lesser-Known Language
Euskara/Basque - The Warrior That Held Against Invaders
Despite being French and having known of this language for most of my life, I never researched this gem of a language. Basque, said Euskara in the language, might be the language that’s puzzled linguists most around the world.
Euskara is not related to any of its neighbors, French, Spanish, or Portuguese. It’s a language isolate, the only left of the Pre-Indo-European languages.
The Basque history is a complicated one but it seems they may be the last ethnic group in Europe, present in this area since some 35,000 years ago. Contrary to many ethnic groups that have suffered oppression from invaders, the Basque culture and language have been very well preserved and are still very much in use today.
It’s estimated that 1 million Basque speakers live in the Basque area (divided between France and Spain), with some 200,000 more around the world. Compare this with other ethnicities that were oppressed and you quickly realize how impressive a feat this is.
Alright, let’s get to the language.
First, Euskara doesn’t have a specific word order, it’s called “free word order.”
This means that some types of phrases will follow an SOV model—like in Japanese—while some others will follow an OSV or even OVS.
Euskara is also an ergative language, which means the subject of a transitive verb acts like an object. Let’s look at an example: Martinek Diego ikusi du. (Martin has seen Diego.)
In this situation, Martin has the suffix -ek which represents the ergative case, while Diego is in the absolutive case. If it were an intransitive verb, Martin would be in the absolutive case: Martin etorri da. (Martin has arrived.)
It doesn’t stop here though!
Verbs are conjugated based on the person and number of subject, direct object, and indirect object. Here’s the full conjugation table for the verb izan (to be).
For more about this, Julie dissects this part well in her video about the Basque language.
Euskara also uses cases to indicate the relationship between the noun and its clause. These cases appear as suffixes added at the end of the noun.
For example, the word mountain, mendi, would be changed as follows depending on its case:
mendia: if it’s the subject of an intransitive verb or the direct object
mendiak: if it’s the subject of a transitive verb
mendiari: if it’s the indirect object
mendian: if it indicates the place/time in the singular form (“on the mountain”)
mendietan: if it indicates the place/time in the plural form (“on the mountains”)
mendira: if it indicates a direction in the singular form (“to the mountain”)
mendietara: if it indicates a direction in the plural form (“to the mountains”)
etc.
The are 18 more possible endings just for this word!
And I thought German’s case system was a mess.
Finally, let’s try to learn a few simple sentences (although “simple” doesn’t seem to fit this language! 😉)
Zein da zure izena? → What’s your name? (lit.: Which - is - your - name)
Nire izena (Mathias) da → My name is (Mathias).
Zure falta nabaritu dut → I missed you.
Euskara ikasten saiatzen ari naiz → I'm trying to learn Basque.
emakumea etorri da? or etorri da emakumea? → Has the woman arrived?
Just to make it “clear,” let’s analyze how the first sentence was made:
Zein is the interrogative pronoun “which”
da is the verb “izan” (to be) conjugated
zure is the possessive/genitive form of “zu” (you)
izena is the absolutive form of izen which means “name”
To learn more about Euskara’s grammar, head here or here. On YouTube, this beginner lesson might help you get started. Hella Basque also did a lot of detailed videos of her journey learning the language, which can be useful to work along.
Finally, the Basque Language Institute teaches everything about Euskara and even has a 117-page free Basque grammar PDF.
(Phew! Researching and summing this language up was intense! Hope you liked it! 😅)
As always, thanks for reading!
Mathias Barra