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Benvenuti, Bienvenue, Bienvenidos, Croeso and Welcome.
Hi, I’m Juliet. Join me on my language learning journey and discover my thoughts on different aspects of language learning with the A Language Learning Tale Podcast. Today I’m talking about…
L’histoire des langues parlées
Yes, that was in French and today I’m discussing a short French audiobook on Spotify which is about languages and seeing how much I’ve understood. L’histoire des langues parlées is by Anne-Marie Deraspe.
It’s only an hour and nine minutes long and I set it to read at 0.8x speed. This is a book aimed at teens and I believe is a teaching text. If you´re learning French, and you have access to this book in a subscription service, you might want to give it a go. A link to the book on Spotify will be in the description.
So, I’m expecting this will be mainly headline facts rather than a deep dive on the history of languages, given the length of the book. Hopefully, we´ll all learn a little in the process.
The author states that 23 languages, out of the estimated 7,000 in total - we’ve seen that figure before - account for half of the world’s population and that no one can truly know how languages developed and there’s some controversy on the subject. In other words, there are different camps. That tallies with previous books. But that children tend to learn their mother language at the same rate, no matter what it is.
Many words are borrowed by other languages, where there is no term already and these are -ismes in French, just like in English. These imports are classed as idioms - and this was fun - Idiotisme is the French term. This is the same word as for idocy, implying that they aren’t really a good fit - at least, I think that’s what it said. This intrigued me enough to go and look up the etymology of idiom and idiotism in English and, yes, they come from the French. Things that don’t fit, that aren’t quite right, that don’t make sense.
We get some examples of these.
Boire comme un trou, the equivalent of to drink like a fish.
Avoir un chat dans la gorge, the equivalent of to have a frog in one’s throat
There were also some examples of how French in Africa has developed some different words for things than might be said in, I suppose you’d call it standard French.
In 2020 French was the 14th most spoken language in the world. I would’ve thought it would’ve been a bit higher than that.
Several languages are spoken about separately. I’m just going to pull out a few facts from this that are interesting.
Such as, the first known written text in Spanish is a list of cheeses. That may seem weird, but one of the other books I read, Languages are Good for Us by Sophie Hardach, detailed a lot of first written language, what still exists, starting with Cuneiform, and a lot of this was very mundane things, such as lists of things, probably for trading and stock keeping. So this is not a surprise to me. The second, third and fourth things are probably similar.
Apparently, English and French are official or main languages in more than 50 countries. That doesn’t surprise me, especially with English. There are lots of smaller countries, that most of us wouldn’t even know the names of that speak French and, probably, English. As a side note, did you know that English is not the official language of England, or the UK. No one ever felt the need to make it so. Weird, huh?
Now, onto English itself. The thing they did here, splitting the influences for both British and American English did surprise me, but when you think about it, American English has a lot of influences that British English doesn’t, coming from those who were living there way before the English speakers and South America and all those who’ve emigrated there from the rest of Europe, for example.
Now, I think they said that English was the only language, but it may just have been one of the languages, where there is no official organisation in charge of its development - in other words, saying what’s acceptable. When I was first learning French, all those years ago, I know we were taught that French was very strictly controlled as to what was acceptable - resisting the adoption of English words, for example. I’m not sure how strict, or successful, that is now. I do see anglicisms in French from time to time, but not nearly as much as Italian, and with the Internet that would be very difficult to control. Maybe we’ll hear about that later.
Anyway, back to those Americanisms. Yes, as they say, a lot of them have come across to the UK. In the past, I remember there was some resistance to this, I mean, we still, as a rule, don’t like American spellings! I think that feeling’s mutual. But individual words definitely are infiltrating British English, although I think they’re mainly alternatives and we might use both, like we have rubbish, but also trash - most likely from the trash on the computer, initially. Although, I don’t think anyone would say trash can here. Bin is definitely our go to.
And what is the oldest word still in use in English? The very ordinary and necessary word, town. I wonder what other oldest words still used are? Probably things like names for familial relationships and livestock and, well, roads must’ve been around for a long time, but they may have been called something else. Okay, I just looked both town and road up on Google and they both came from Germanic/Old English roots, so, who knows. Well, somebody, obviously, but not me. Let’s move on.
French. I said something earlier about remembering French being more strictly controlled. Under this section we learn that L’Academie Francaise was founded in 1634 to set the rules of the language, but, as expected, over the years words have infiltrated from other countries. In 21st century dictionaries there are appartently 2,500 adopted English words and it’s not just English. There are words from many European countries, Arab words and others that have made their way through other languages first. I think what I’m about to say is right, because I believe the verb was emprunter which is to borrow from, and I believe this is the percentage of borrowed words out of all borrowed words. Anyway, the top three are 25% are borrowed from English, 17% from Italian and 11% from German. I’m actually surprised that more words are borrowed from English than Italian, given the similarities between the two languages, but I guess similarities in grammar and word roots is different from borrowed words, where they’re generally taken as is.
When we get to German, I believe they said that this is the most spoken language in Europe. Honestly, if someone had asked, I would’ve guessed French, but that comes after German. I did look this up, though and the Internet tells me that Russian is the most spoken language in Europe, so I don’t know if I misheard, or they got it wrong. I mean, most people do forget that parts of Russia are technically in Europe. I did know this, but it still didn’t occur to me that Russian might be top. Anyway, they also said that the Gutenberg bible was the first printed book in the world, in the 1450s, and it was in German. Again, I might have slightly misunderstood this, because although that was the first mass produced book, there were books printed before that.
Other languages were covered, with scant details, but I was surprised by how much time was dedicated to Esperanto. I mean, okay, it is a language, and people speak it, and it is unusual, because it was deliberately created, but in an audiobook that is only just over an hour long, it had a disproportionate amount of time, in my opinion.
Then, the book then goes on to talk about a wide variety of types of words that exist in French (as in other languages), such as aptonyms, palindromes and the like. I’m just going to pick one word from these, oiseaux - the plural version. This is the longest word in French where you don’t pronounce any of the letters ‘réellement’.
There are also discussions about new words. Things like there has been some disagreement about whether Covid should be La covid or le covid, because in French maladie is feminine and virus is masculine.
It also gives brief descriptions of other alphabets, like Morse code, the IPA and Braille.
So, first off, if you’re learning French and you want an audiobook that isn’t too difficult to understand, this could be a good choice. Because it’s clearly a teaching audiobook, it is pronounced pretty clearly all the way through. In terms of information, there are some interesting facts here and there, but if you’re well into learning languages, there probably isn’t a lot here that’s going to be unexpected, but, of course, listening to it in French could give you some more vocabularly in your arsenal.
If you’re interested in listening to it, the link for the book on Spotify is in the description.
That’s all for today’s episode. Don’t forget to join me again next time, for more language learning tips, tricks and tales and in the meantime, check out the A Language Learning Tale YouTube channel for additional, non-podcast content.
Ciao, salut, adiós, hwyl and bye for now.