TL;DR — Talk. Learn. Discover. Repeat. #15
Hey yall,
I hope you’ve had a great week! I sure did 😊
I succeeded in completing my self-imposed challenge of finishing to read 매일매일좋은날 in Korean so I can now reward myself by buying a Korean dialect version of The Little Prince as I wanted!
Reading so much in such a short amount of time allowed me to realize I’m not as slow to read Korean as I used to be. This is a great confidence builder and has allowed me to read a few pages here and there more often, without expecting I’d need 30 minutes for 5 pages. It’s liberating.
I had a busy weekend divided between spending time with people and finding a bit of time to play the new Zelda. I’m playing it in English for now but will most likely switch sometime in the future.
Now, the next big thing on my agenda is to travel back to France in early June. I’m looking forward to it but there’s a lot to do before then!
Alright, let’s dive in!
🗣️Talk languages
As mentioned above, I succeeded in completing my self-imposed challenge to read the remaining 119 pages left in the book I was reading in 9 days. To be honest, I completely expected myself to fail, while knowing it was a reachable goal at the same time.
Finishing it with ease 2 days earlier in the morning was an incredible confidence booster.
It reminded me of how important it is to set goals right outside of our comfort zone so we can accomplish them but still have to make an effort.
Hopefully, reading this will make you think of a similar challenge you could set to push yourself and enjoy the positive results!
If not, I’ll be writing a bit more about self-imposed challenges and the underlying power of reaching goals in this week’s edition of Thursday’s Thousandth Thought for paid subscribers.
✍️ Learn from my experiences
I’ve been learning Korean for 15 years now. I can’t imagine a life without it, especially since I’m currently living in Korea right now.
I love the journey I’ve had with it. Filled with amazement and frustration, it has all the ups and downs of a good story. Which is why I wrote it all to share in:
Frustrations and Triumphs: My Journey to Learning Korean
Whether you’re learning Korean or some other language, I’m willing to bet you’ll either have gone or will go through similar experiences.
I’ll be honest. This is probably my favorite piece of this year. I hope you enjoy it too!
🌎Discover new cultures
For some reason, I can’t help but associate Latin America with celebrations filled with flowers and people dancing. I don’t know where that image came from but I have it either way.
And, lucky me, it turns out Latin America does indeed have tons of flower-related festivals. It doesn’t look like there are many associated to one particular flower though.
The largest flower festival is aptly called the Feria de Las Flores and happens in Colombia, the world’s second-largest producer of cut flowers (after The Netherlands).
This is a week-long celebration with flower competitions, car parades, horse parades, live music, dancing, and tons more in Medellin in August.
Mexico also has quite a few flower festivals. In fact, the flower market of Cuemanco, Xochimilco, is the largest flower market of Latin America and the third in the world. Everything related to flowers can be bought there, from ground to pots, and even food.
One celebration in Mexico also associates a flower originating from Taxco, Guerrero: Christmas.
Indeed, the flower known as Poinsettia is also called the Flor de la Noche Buena (Flower of Christmas Eve). When Christmas Eve comes, this flower can be found everywhere, and in Taxco in particular.
In 2022, one million 656 thousand Poinsettia were produced and many of those were set in Taxco to represent the flower itself.
Do you know some festivals celebrating a particular flower in Latin America? Let me know in the comments!
🗺️Repeat with me (Lesser-Known Languages)
Mapudungun - A magnificent highly polysynthetic language isolate
To close off these four weeks about languages in Latin America, we’re turning to Mapudungun, the language of the Mapuche people in Chile and Argentina.
The Mapuche people are one of the largest indigenous groups in Chile and Argentina, and their history dates back to around the 14th century.
The Mapuche people were able to resist the Inca Empire and later the Spanish conquest of South America for centuries, which contributed to their reputation as fiercely independent people.
The first encounter between the Mapuche and the Spanish occurred in 1550, with the arrival of the Spanish explorer Pedro de Valdivia. The Mapuche resisted the Spanish attempts to conquer their land. They captured and killed Valdivia in 1553 and continued to resist Spanish attempts to conquer them for over three centuries, despite being greatly outnumbered and outgunned.
The Mapuche people were forcibly incorporated into Chile in 1883. The Chilean and Argentinean governments seized their lands and tried to assimilate them into the national culture, often with violent means. The Mapuche people were also subjected to discrimination and marginalization, which led to a decline in their population and culture.
Since the early 1990s, the Mapuche people have sought to reclaim their ancestral lands and cultural heritage. In October 2021, the Chilean President announced a state of emergency due to an uprise in clashes. This is still unresolved as of 2023, with tensions still ongoing in Chile and Argentina.
Unfortunately, it seems Mapudungun isn’t spoken by most Mapuche people anymore.
Mapudungun is part of the Araucanian language family1 which currently only includes Mapudungun and Huilliche. Interestingly enough, these are sometimes considered variations of the same language isolate, meaning it’s not related to any other language on the planet (yet, at least).
It doesn’t have a widely agreed-upon alphabet. Currently, there are 3 types used concurrently. In fact, the Mapuche community threatened to sue Windows in 2006 for localizing their operating system in Mapudungun. This may have been mostly concerning the alphabet system chosen by Windows back then.
One aspect I found quite interesting was how Mapudungun retained its original R pronunciation as it was.
Indeed, most Rs in the region have either been before or turned into similar versions of the Spanish R but not Mapudungun, it retains a pronunciation of r that is, to my ear at least, the exact same one as in English. Listen in to check!
As most language isolates do, Mapudungun has one thing that makes it stand apart. In its case, I reckon it’s its highly polysynthetic nature—which means words are formed by combining multiple morphemes. Here’s an example from Wikipedia:
Mapudungun doesn’t have a fixed word order. It does make a distinction between animate and inanimate nouns and therefore used different indicators for each.
It also distinguishes between “we (two people)” iñchiw and “we (more than two)” iñchiñ. The same system exists for “you” and “they.”
The conjugation in Mapudungun depends on whether the verb root ends with a consonant or a vowel that i or that isn’t i. For each tense, the verb ending will stay the same but the particle indicating the tense will come right before.
For example, with the verb amun which has the root amu and means “to go”:
Amun → I go.
Amutuan → I am going to go.
Amufun → I had gone.
Amuan → I will go.
Amuafun → I would go.
Before we finish, here are a few simple sentences to give you a feel for the language:
Mari mari. → Hello.
Kürasia. → Thank you.
¿Iney pigeymi? → What’s your name?
Mathias pigen iñche. → My name is Mathias.
Küme anthügey. / Rume küme anthügey. → The weather’s good. / The weather’s very good.
¿Chew püle amuaymi? → Where are you going?
Ayüafun ñi kim mapuzuguael. → I’d like to learn to speak Mapudungun.
¿Mapuzugulelafen? → Can you speak to me in Mapudungun?
If you want to learn Mapudungun and speak Spanish, you’re in luck. You can check the two Reddit pages linked below to get them all but I particularly like the following one:
Someone rewrote the entire Manual de Aprendizaje del Idioma Mapuche in a Word document and put it on Google Drive. An absolute treasure trove.
There’s also this short YouTube series and this more relaxed and detailed one to get you started with some good basics. Those are what I used to ease myself into the language structure too!
To go further in videos, you can turn to Wentru Mañke’s channel which is still active to this day!
If you don’t speak Spanish, however, I only found this tiny Wikiveristy page and this overpriced Grammar book (potentially accessible through your library).
Finally, if you have some questions, the Mapudungun Reddit page and Indigenous language Reddit page have you covered!
Pewkayall! (See you later!)
The language itself was originally called Araucanian by the Spanish but the Mapuche avoid it so it feels a bit wrong to leave the language family name as is but well…