TL;DR — Talk. Learn. Discover. Repeat. #22
Hey yall, I hope you’ve been well!
I’ve been having a blast practicing my Japanese these days but I’m also missing Korean so I started reading a Korean book this past weekend. I’m missing quite a bit of details but it’s great to do some extensive reading instead of trying to understand every detail and remember every new word I find.
I’ve also been thinking of reforming once again this newsletter. I’m not sure of the details yet but I’ll get that figured out within this month and will let you know before the new version starts in September.
I hope you’ll love it as much as I will!
Anyway, let’s dive right in!
🗣️Talk languages
This week, let me turn to research that blew my mind. I discovered all about it from a Japanese podcast about linguistics: ゆる言語学ラジオ.
The bird known as Japanese tit1 (Parus Minor, シジュウカラ) not only speak to each other with sounds that have specific meanings (so far, not so surprising), but they also have some form of grammar as well!
According to the researcher who discovered this, Toshitaka Suzuki, if the sound for “be careful!” (something like pii-tsu-pi) is followed by the sound for “gather around” (something like dji-dji-dji), Japanese tits will follow the directive but if these two are inverted, then they wouldn’t, proving the existence of some syntax.
This was the first proof ever of syntax in nonhuman languages. 🤯
Suzuki is still researching these birds and finding more exciting discoveries, such as the fact that these birds can somehow understand the Willow tit’s (コガラ) call even though it’s slightly different. It could mean there’s some kind of familiarity between some languages used by birds. Maybe there’s such a thing as language families for birds too?? 😲
Just wow.
✍️Learn from my experiences
I spent so much time on textbooks during my preparation for the TOPIK that I remembered how useful textbooks can be. It also reminded me of how much hate they receive online despite being extremely useful tools if well used.
So I set out to write about 3 Simple Reasons to Use a Textbook on Your Language Learning Journey.
It wasn’t hard. After all, it’s all about understanding we used textbooks the wrong way when we were in school. They shouldn’t be the main tool we have. They should have a supporting role to work on specific aspects we choose to turn to.
Aaah, I miss my collection of textbooks I left back in France.
🌎Discover new cultures
Keeping cool during summer in Korea and Japan
It’s so hot in Korea nowadays I’ve been looking into how to stay cool, or at least refresh myself when I’m way too warm.
And so, this month, we’re talking about habits people use to keep themselves cool. As you’ll discover each week, there’s a lot more than just drinking water and staying in the shadow.
And so, we’re starting with two countries in Asia where, because of the high humidity, hiding in the shadows isn’t so useful.
In Korea and Japan, most places rely on air conditioning so it’s not uncommon to actually catch a cold in the summer2 as people go from scorching heat outside to extreme cold in cafés and the subway.
But when summer comes around, Korean people also turn to specific types of food. One of them is Bingsu (빙수), a tasty milk-based shaved ice dessert with sweet toppings. This shot of cold is incredibly pleasant but it’s also filled with sugar.
So what else is there? Well, the Koreans have a saying known as yi yeol chi yeol (이열치열) which means “fight fire with fire.”
As a result, summer in Korea also rhymes with Samgyetang, a Korean ginseng chicken soup in which the chicken is stuffed with garlic, sweet rice, and much more to replenish stamina.
For the same reason, Koreans also turn to Jjimjilbang (찜질방), the traditional Korean sauna, to fight off heat by exposing their bodies to high temperatures.
In Japan, summer rhymes with Kakigōri (かき氷), the Japanese version of bingsu, and cold barley tea (mugicha 麦茶). I’m willing to be I’ve drunk hundreds of liters of mugicha during summer while I was in Japan.
Hell, I’ve kept the habit and do it daily in Korea too!
I also didn’t know this, but it seems eating eel (unagi, 鰻) is quite common to fight off heat.3
But there’s another habit I loved in Japan: uchimizu (打ち水). This is a practice where people sprinkle water in the gardens and streets in the evening to cool down the ground and keep dust down. While clearly not eco-friendly, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it.
I’ve also never seen this done anywhere. Let me know if you do know other countries doing this!
Well, to be honest, I’ve seen the front of my apartment drenched quite a few times these past few weeks so maybe someone was doing uchimizu but I haven’t seen it with my own eyes so far!
🗺️Repeat with me
Lepcha / Róng ríng - The only language in the Himalayas with its own script
This week we’re turning to a language I chose to write about only thanks to its script. When I saw the word ᰛᰩᰵᰛᰧᰵᰶ —which is Róng ríng
, the word for this language—, I knew I had to see more of this beautiful script.
But first, where’s Lepcha from?
Lepcha is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken by less than 50,000 people across India, Nepal, and Bhutan. It’s also the only language in the Himalayas to have its own script, inspired by the Tibetan script.
This writing system is an abugida, like Tibetan, Burmese, and Thai. This means each character stands for a syllable with the inherent vowel /a/ and diacritics (small characters fixing to main ones) change the vowel for that syllable.
For example, the word ᰛᰩᰵ is composed of ᰛ which is the syllable ra
. Adding ᰩ on its left changes the vowel to an ó
and the particle ᰨ even further left is the ng.
As for ᰛᰧᰵᰶ, we find the same the syllable ra
, ᰛ , surrounded by ᰧᰲ which changes the syllable to rí
and then ríng
with the extra diacritic ᰨ.
While I used to find this crazy in 2012 when I first discovered abugidas through Thai, I now find this a very interesting way to write. It’s like each syllable is a puzzle in and of its own.
Of course, this becomes a whole challenge when you see full sentences like:
ᰣᰦᰛᰬ ᰉᰪᰮᰀᰦ ᰠᰛᰬ ᰛᰤᰫᰢᰪᰵ ᰃᰩ which means “Which of these two is better?”
Still the language’s script, while difficult to on a computer due to its lack of online presence, does exist and is beautiful. Look at the same sentence when it’s not butchered by the font this newsletter uses:
Now, let’s turn to the language structure and so on.
Róng ríng
follows a Subject-Object-Verb word order. It is an agglutinative language, which means it uses suffixes and prefixes to give more sense to its parts.
This is quite similar to how Burmese or Korean work. For example, the postpositions -ᰠᰴ or -ᰎᰴ (-sang/-pong) serve to indicate the plural while -ᰛᰬ (-re) indicates the word/expression to which it’s attached is the topic of the sentence.
Verbs aren’t conjugated at all depending on the subject but they are marked for the tense with suffixes like:
ᰢᰦᰮ (–wám) → present progressive
ᰃᰨ ᰛᰩᰵᰛᰧᰵᰶ ᰚᰶᰢᰦᰮ (go róng–ríng yâ–wám) = I know Lepcha.4
ᰕ-…-ᰍᰬ (ma-…-ne) → negation (often for the past tense)
ᰃᰨ ᰕᰙᰨᰍᰬ (go mazone) = I didn’t eat.
ᰡᰨ (-sho) → non-past (ie. present of future). It is often replaced by another particle when a clear distinction needs to be made with the present.
ᰣᰩᰵᰠᰴ ᰇᰨ ᰛᰨᰭᰡᰨ (ʔóng–sang cho rok–sho) = The boys will go to school.5
Interestingly enough, it seems the intonation of Lepcha from northern Sikkim is quite different from the intonation found in other regions, in that it is much slower and much less monotonous. This type of intonation is believed to represent an older and more “elegant” style of speaking, less influenced by neighboring languages such as Nepali or Dränjoke.
If you want to learn the language, the only place I found with verified and clear information is this 240-page research paper. Unfortunately, even looking for the language by typing ᰛᰩᰵᰛᰧᰵᰶ only came back with results in English… A shame if you ask me.
Thanks for reading!
Mathias,
An average polyglot
If you want to look into this research, which I highly recommend, be careful to add keywords like “bird” or “language” to avoid Google bringing another kind of results..!
As I did just a few weeks back
I guess it’s no surprise I didn’t know. I don’t like eels 😅
As in “to know of it”, not knowing as “to understand.” This is a continuous action since it’s still a fact now.
Notice the use of the suffix -sang we saw earlier!