7 Bullet Points About Languages - Week 90
A cross-newsletter language challenge?! | Also, reaching the intermediate level, drinking in 4 countries, and Occitan!
Hey language lovers,
I hope you all had a magnificent week!
Updates
Mine was intense but fun.
Once again it flew by almost in a blur but I remember feeling happy for discovering new Korean grammar patterns and understanding more webtoons without even looking up words in the dictionary.
German is also starting to feel less “foreign,” although I still don’t understand much out in the wild or in the Webtoon I read in German.
A fun challenge or some challenging fun?
On another note, here’s something that was delightful and is now scary: my friend Joel of Learned and I challenged each other to find which of the 100 most spoken languages (by number of native speakers) we were describing1.
In this Part 1, Joel gives me loads of good indications with some well-prepared sentences and I still end up looking stupid by not shutting my mouth while thinking2 😅
Hope you enjoy it as much as we did recording it!
And if you’re not subscribed to Joel’s newsletter yet3, now's the time because he'll have Part 2, in which I'm overly vague for my own sake, in his next newsletter on Monday 17th!
Also, in case you missed it, my deep-dive into the history and language structure of Taiwanese Hokkien (Taigi) is out now here. Become a paid subscriber to access it along with bi-weekly reflections and a good ol’ thanks from me!
Phew, quite the update!
Alright, let’s dive into what you came for now!
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.
A quick reminder first: I’m not affiliated with any resource so far. Every recommendation you find below comes from my own research and experiences.
🎥 One video
Language exchange tips and tricks — By Zoe.languages
I don’t rely much on language exchanges to learn my languages but I also know I could improve much faster if I did. I am planning on doing some language exchange early next year though so this video was great at pointing me toward a good system.
If you’re struggling to find someone, choose what to talk about, or even how to take notes, this video is for you.
📚 One article I read
On Living Between Languages — By Notes from Aground
Nowadays, I find myself looking for people’s writings in which I can truly feel a love for the language(s) they learned. This one was a beautiful one that got me to follow the writer on his journey and recognize parts of my own journey.
This is the kind of story I love. The kind of story that could inspire anybody.
✍🏽 One article I wrote
4 Reasons to Reach the Intermediate Level in a New Language
I’ve spent so much time discovering new languages this year that I’ve gotten used to enjoying the beginner stage. Now that my German is starting to get better, however, I’m finding myself procrastinating some study sessions.
Finding this piece I wrote a while back, gave me a good kick in the butt to start seeing the positive in keeping on learning and getting to that intermediate stage. I’m looking forward to all it’ll open to me.
If you often want to give up or go on a break, I hope this piece will be just the right push!
🎧 One podcast episode
"Mastery".....not always your friend — By The HypoPolyglot
I knew everything said in this video and yet it felt like a good reminder. You see, I’ve been reading more and more German these past few weeks and a lot makes sense to me. Despite this, I’ve been pushing away every potential opportunity to practice with native speakers because I felt I needed to “master” the language more.
After hearing this episode, I went ahead and booked an italki trial lesson for German, as a way to force me to practice the language. It’s coming up in a few days so let’s see how it goes!
Have you waited longer than you should to practice the language or a specific pattern? Share with us in the comments!
🌎 One cultural aspect
Alcohol drinking in Norway, Sweden, Spain, and IndiaLast week, we discussed drinking cultures in a few countries I know quite well (France, Japan, Korea, and Belgium). This week, let’s turn to a few others I had to research quite a bit.
First let’s turn to the north, with Norway’s drinking culture where alcohol is so expensive—due to a very high tax imposed—most people (60%) only drink during weekends. In fact, those who want to drink more regularly tend to go to Denmark to buy and smuggle back.
Norway’s neighbor, Sweden, on the contrary, also has its alcohol sold at a steep price but it has a pretty developed leisure drinking culture. While they used to drink a lot of Brännvin—liquor distilled from potatoes or grain—the most common drink today is the Bag-in-Box (BiB) wine. In fact, it seems Swedes are the biggest BiB drinkers in the world.
Further south, in Spain, there are 280,000 bars, which means there’s one bar for every 165 people. This is the highest ratio in the European Union. I was not surprised to hear Spaniards drink wine regularly—after all, their staple, sangria, is based off wine—but I was quite shocked to read in this El Pais piece that gin used to be given to young girls to help with period pain!
In the north of Spain, Kalimotxo is also a regional drink particularly popular in Madrid. Often drunk at home, it’s a combination of red wine and coke. (As a French person, discovering this gave me chills.)
On the other side of the world, it’s easy to perceive India as a country without an alcohol-drinking culture. And yet, the pandemic showed how important alcohol sales were important for the economy.
In fact, India used to rely only on its own varieties of alcohol for a long time. Here are just a few examples: Feni, Apong, Zutho, Toddy, Thaati Kallu…
Next week, we’ll look at alcohol-drinking habits on the other side of the Atlantic, over in the South America!
📜 One quote to ponder
“Changes that seem small and unimportant at first will compound into remarkable results if you're willing to stick with them for years.” — James Clear, Atomic Habits
🌐 One Lesser-Known Language (LKL)
Occitan - A mysterious well-known forgotten languageIt’s impossible to live in France and have never heard of Occitan. As one of the most famous French dialects, everybody knows of it. When it comes to knowing about it, however, silence arises.
You see, what most French people know about Occitan is pretty much only that it comes from Occitania. Where’s that? Well, we just know it’s the south of France. The truth is a tad more complex as the Occitania area actually encompasses a small part of northern Italy and another of northern Spain, where it even is one of the three official (along with Catalan and Spanish).
Summarizing Occitan in just a few words is quite the challenge.
Part of it comes from the fact it’s actually not just one language but more a family of numerous dialects, such as Auvergnat, Gascon (which itself includes Aranese spoken in Northern Spain and Béarnese), Languedocien, Limousin, or Provençal. Each dialect has its own variations but they are often intelligible.4
Occitan is a Romance language with a writing system that stuck more closely to Latin, and especially Vulgar Latin—the colloquial version of Latin—, than the other languages in the area.
Apart from Latin itself, French and Catalan have deeply impacted Occitan. Most words in Occitan today hold a close relation to either French, Catalan, or both.
For example, the verb “to sing” is either cantar or chantar depending on the dialect, both of which are close to the Catalan cantar or the French chanter.
Occitan uses letters only present in Catalan, such as á, ó, or ú, others only present in French (such as è), but also others not present in either, like à or ò. Accents always indicate where the stressed syllable is in Occitan.
Occitan is a Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) language but sentences are also often changed to VSO without impact on the meaning.
The indefinite articles are un (m.) and una (f.). Nouns that need to be modified to be made feminine change the last vowel to an a or add one: avocat (lawyer male) → avocata (lawyer female).
Careful! Genders in Occitan aren’t always the same as in French or Catalan.
When it comes to verbs, the negation is done by adding pas after the verb5.
Occitan, like French and Catalan, conjugates its verbs but it has its own conjugation endings. Here is a table with a few verbs’ conjugations in the present tense:
Here are a few sentences to get you started:
Bonjorn/Adieu/Adieussiatz = Hello
I a tres dròllas que nos agachan. = There are three girls looking at us.
Es pas per morir. = He is not going to die.
Fau de còcas. = I am cooking cakes.
Escriu-me-lo, se te plai (informal)/Escrivètz-me-lo, se vos plai (formal) = Please write it down.
Aimatz vòstra maire ? = Do you love your mother? (formal)
Occitan education was restricted in 1900 by the French government. While the policies changed in 1993 and allowed for the creation of bilingual schools, the damage was already done. Most of its 750,000 speakers today are elderly and the Occitan-speaking population fell from 39% in 1860 to 7% in 1993.
If you want to learn more about the Occitan languages, this website covers all its grammar. If you speak French, there’s also this grammar memento available for free. If you speak Catalan, this “orthographic cheatsheet” could be useful too. Beware of which resource you use, however, so you always stick to the same version of Occitan!
Bon astre! E bona jornada!6
As always, thanks for reading!
Mathias Barra
If you wonder why I keep looking to the right, it’s because I had the list next to me to refer to!
Or is it me being way to self-conscious again? That wouldn’t be the first time.
You for sure know you should. Go on, take a moment to do it.
Check the table on this Wikipedia page for a comparison of a few of them. As you’ll notice, while written differently, it’s easy to recognize the connection.
This seems close to the French “ne…pas”, and very close to how spoken French is evolving as time passes.
“Good luck! And have a nice day!”
I learned so much from the Occitan section! It’s really interesting to compare it to French (or in my case Spanish because I know it better hahah). I’m also going to share the Medium article with my students. Thanks for sharing it!