April 2, 2021 • 13 mins
Tracy and Holly discuss their relationships with language learning, and then discuss the ways that historical sites and museums have offered information for the public that would normally only be seen on-site.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class A production
of I Heart Radio Happy Friday. I'm Tracy Wilson and
I'm Holly Frying. This week on the show, we talked
about Esperanto. And one of the things that I mentioned
in the episode that I didn't go into great detail
(00:22):
on is that over and over while I was working
on this episode, I kept finding people being like, yeah,
Esperanto is really neat, but English has really become the
shared second language of and I was like, it's not
really though. A whole lot of people don't speak English.
And part of the reason that Zamon Hoff wanted to
create a language from scratch was he didn't he didn't
(00:47):
want this international language to be like associated with a
major colonial power. That kind of went against the whole
thing he was trying to accomplish. I mean, I recognize that,
you know, thankfully when you travel to other places, and
I say this thankfully for my own lazy self, Like
often in foreign countries they are fluent in English, but
(01:09):
really that's not because English is necessarily universal. They're trying
to accommodate things like tourist trade, um, and again it's
associated with you know, a whole lot of problems. It's
it made me laugh as it did in the episode
that you know, this is the same thing France was
doing years and years and years ago, going no French
(01:31):
the language of course again like, well, is that because
you have a bunch of colonies or because you honestly
think everybody could just pick up French, right, which is
sort of I mean, you know, I love French. I
don't think that's any secret. Um. But like I was
reading a funny thread on Twitter. I don't even remember
(01:51):
who posted it where they were like, I've studied French,
and I still when I meet a French speaker, I
don't know what the heck you're saying, um, which is
one of the tricks with any language. French can be
a tricky that way. But it just made me laugh,
especially hard having just come off of reading that over
the weekend within the last couple of days. To everyone
speaks French, I can just use that, yeah, I UM.
(02:12):
I kept thinking about how being the son of a
language teacher and being immersed in the society where the
people around him were speaking so many different languages really
set Samon Hoff up to become really multi lingual and
how uh how different that is from my own upbringing,
(02:34):
because I grew up speaking English and all my neighbors
spoke English, and my school system did not teach any
other language until middle school. I think middle school. I
got a tiny bit in third and fourth grade because
I was in the gifted program, and I got a
teeny teeny bit of Spanish, which was only for gifted students.
(02:57):
This makes no sense. It's not a great way, uh
to to raise people with any kind of familiarity with languages.
And then when I did switched to taking French, I
went through a series. Every year I had a different
French teacher, and only one of those French teachers would
I say was actually good at teaching French. And so
(03:18):
after having I think three years of high school French,
six hours of college French, like my French is still terrible.
It was terrible. When I finished that um, I took
a break from studying French because I had I had
taken the six hours that I needed to take to graduate.
And then I had this idea that I was going
(03:39):
to go to graduate school, and I learned that I
was going to need to take more French for graduate school,
and I attempted to take six more hours of French
in a semester that I also really overloaded myself with
courses and immediately was absolutely in over my head and
was like, I can't, I can't do all this. Um.
So anyway, that's that's why, like the one other language
(04:02):
I've really tried to study, I am still very bad
at um. I had a marginal level of fluency in
French when I was little, but it ran away, it
went other places. I don't know where that lives now,
hopefully someone inherited it. Um. Did you also tell me
that since you had learned you had learned from your grandmother, right,
(04:23):
that you had learned kind of like a country French. Yeah, yeah, uh.
And I didn't now until I had like a really
good French teacher who was like, your vocab is pretty
good and your pronunciation is not bad, but the things
you say sound really like you are a hic. And
I was like, what this surminds me of how my
(04:44):
my spouse has studied a lot of Japanese. He he'd
lived in Japan for a while when he was in
I can't remember if it was college or graduate school.
I think graduate school. Um. And so he has been
a person that I have gotten help with on Japanese
pronunciation sometimes, and I remember getting a note from somebody
that said we had pronounced something that sounded like we
(05:04):
were from the country, and then he was like, oh, yeah,
actually where I was we had to take trains to
get into the like a major city, and I was like, okay, sure,
uh yeah, I mean I I do think there is
a little bit. I hope it's changing, but certainly when
we were in school, I feel like in most schools
(05:25):
in the US there was a bit of failing in
terms of really trying to give kids the opportunity to
learn a lot of languages when they're young. And I
know from friends now that have elementary age children there
is a lot more language learning than I certainly ever
had at that age. So I'm hopeful. Um, but yeah,
I feel like every time I learned a new language,
(05:46):
there's or any like tiny bit of a new language.
I don't really learn any new languages. Um, there's like
this huge initial hurdle to get over of just like okay,
what my mouth doesn't do those? Um right, I gotta
wait what uh? And it's tricky. And the funny thing
(06:07):
is I'm suddenly remembering a discussion that I had with
a friend of mine whose parents were German and we're
learning English for the first time, and he was like,
you have no idea how hard English is compared to
other languages, like train wreck complete He's and it was
stuff that I mean, this was years and years ago,
(06:27):
like years ago that we had this conversation. But he
was like, you know, think about like even something as
simple as what is the plural for mouse? It's mice? Okay, well,
what is the plural for house? People learning for the
first time might very well guess heis, because none of
these rules are consistent or makes sense. And I was like, oh,
(06:47):
that is true, Like when you grow up speaking at
you don't think about it well. And a lot of
the things that little kids say when they're learning English
that sound hilarious to people is like because they've intuited
that hattern and applied it to other words that they
haven't learned the irregularity for yet, which I think is
pretty cool and fascinating. Yeah, you don't know, maybe we
(07:11):
should start doing the show in esperanto um. I have
been trying to keep up with with a couple of
duo lingo courses, and I did have a good time
blinking away at a little bit of esperanto um, but
I don't know if it's feasible for me to keep
up with it. My brain feels full, Yeah, we know that,
(07:33):
feeling full brains. Yeah. So this week we talked about
Bodium Castle. Huh uh. This is the castle I have
not been to, but it's on my list when is
getting very big. My list is so big, and I'm
so ready to start traveling again, So look out, Bodium Castle.
(07:55):
I wanted to do this one in part because it
is kind of a fun, little bit more lighthearted thing,
but also because it contextualizes a lot of things. Right
when you realize that Edward Dallingridge was connected to the
hundred years Ward, then he was also one of the
people who put down the peasants revolts um, which isn't
(08:16):
often talked when when you discuss things like hey, this
person built a castle, and it's like yes, but why
I love that. A lot of castle historians and medieval
historians have really kind of turned to this one is
something to kind of pick apart and look at the
cause and effect of like why would someone want this
to be built why why exactly and put that in
(08:39):
the context of history. UM. I do want to give
a shout out to UM the National Trust website on
Bodium Castle. We mentioned at the end of the episode
that right now the interiors are not open to visitors
because of COVID, But one of the cool things they've
done is, uh, they have put some of the material
(08:59):
that you would normally see inside the castle online, So
like there's a video that you would normally see about
the history of the castle, and they're like, no one
can see this right now, so we're just making it
available publicly, which is just a really cool, nice gesture
in a way for people to learn. I imagine this
is one of those places that school children sometimes have
to go to and report on and that's now available
(09:21):
to them. So yeah, I just thought that was marvelously cool.
I feel like earlier on in the Pandemic, First Side
did something similar where there was like a virtual tour
of Versailles, UM, which was really cool because you and I,
you and we went to Versailla on our our trip
(09:42):
to France back in what was that it's all blurred together, UM,
and it's so really shoulder to shoulder packed in there.
Um that it's it's really hard to see things. So
having this virtual tour on line, even having been there,
meant seeing things I had not noticed before. Yeah, you
(10:06):
don't get a lot of time to like linger and
hang definitely like move through the hall of mirrors. There
are a lot of people behind you and they all
need to see it too. Um. So it is. I'm
very happy that a lot of of historically and culturally
significant sites that have had to close have done similar
programs where they're they're making their content available. It's a
(10:28):
huge help. And like I said, I'm sure there are
a lot of students who are benefiting from that. So
it's a big thing. I will tell you this, And
this may sound strange, Um, are you one of those people?
Because I know you have a fondness for medieval history
at a level that is beyond mine. Are you a
castle person? I know that sounds weird, not as not
(10:49):
not as much. I've been playing a lot of a
game called Balheim lately, um, and there's a weird a
weird gender dichotomy and the people that I play at
Alheim with Whereas I have made these little wooden homey
kind of structures and the men are all building these
(11:13):
gigantic stone castles with turrets and moats and just all
kinds of gigantic things. And I've been like, but I
like this little hut where I have all of my
crafting tables. UM. What I am incredibly into though, is
all the witch marks. I love the witch marks. I
(11:35):
love the witch bottles. I love the walling shoes up
in the wall to try to try spirits. I am
weigh into all of those things. Yeah, yeah, that was
I found that information on that study and again it's
they talked about it on the National Trust site. UM.
I came into that information kind of late in the
game and I was like, WHOA hold on, Yeah, there's
(11:58):
a whole other thing going on a podium castle, which
makes perfect sense because of course, I bet a lot
of castles have these same things, but they don't always have,
you know, the um an actual study done of them
to really identify. And it's one of those things. Again
we say witch marks and it sounds really like UM.
And we even mentioned that there's like a compass sometimes
(12:20):
in a pentagram, just as a reminder in case anybody
doesn't remember, medieval Airy era pentagram sometimes used in Christianity,
not necessarily having anything to do with you know, devilishness
or or witchcraft in that sense, um, but really part
of a prayer. So I also love that. I love
the use of symbols as prayers as well, Like just
(12:41):
the value we place on the visual medium is always
going to be fascinating to me. So now I want
to put witch marks all over my house. Thank you
so much for spending time with us this week, and
we hope as you head into the weekend that it
is as enjoyable as possible, and that if you are
obliged to do things like work, that you have as
easy a time as possible and everyone is super nice
(13:02):
to you. And we will see you back here tomorrow
for classics and next week with new stuff. Stuff you
missed in history. Class is a production of I heart Radio.
For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class A production
of I Heart Radio Happy Friday. I'm Tracy Wilson and
I'm Holly Frying. This week on the show, we talked
about Esperanto. And one of the things that I mentioned
in the episode that I didn't go into great detail
(00:22):
on is that over and over while I was working
on this episode, I kept finding people being like, yeah,
Esperanto is really neat, but English has really become the
shared second language of and I was like, it's not
really though. A whole lot of people don't speak English.
And part of the reason that Zamon Hoff wanted to
create a language from scratch was he didn't he didn't
(00:47):
want this international language to be like associated with a
major colonial power. That kind of went against the whole
thing he was trying to accomplish. I mean, I recognize that,
you know, thankfully when you travel to other places, and
I say this thankfully for my own lazy self, Like
often in foreign countries they are fluent in English, but
(01:09):
really that's not because English is necessarily universal. They're trying
to accommodate things like tourist trade, um, and again it's
associated with you know, a whole lot of problems. It's
it made me laugh as it did in the episode
that you know, this is the same thing France was
doing years and years and years ago, going no French
(01:31):
the language of course again like, well, is that because
you have a bunch of colonies or because you honestly
think everybody could just pick up French, right, which is
sort of I mean, you know, I love French. I
don't think that's any secret. Um. But like I was
reading a funny thread on Twitter. I don't even remember
(01:51):
who posted it where they were like, I've studied French,
and I still when I meet a French speaker, I
don't know what the heck you're saying, um, which is
one of the tricks with any language. French can be
a tricky that way. But it just made me laugh,
especially hard having just come off of reading that over
the weekend within the last couple of days. To everyone
speaks French, I can just use that, yeah, I UM.
(02:12):
I kept thinking about how being the son of a
language teacher and being immersed in the society where the
people around him were speaking so many different languages really
set Samon Hoff up to become really multi lingual and
how uh how different that is from my own upbringing,
(02:34):
because I grew up speaking English and all my neighbors
spoke English, and my school system did not teach any
other language until middle school. I think middle school. I
got a tiny bit in third and fourth grade because
I was in the gifted program, and I got a
teeny teeny bit of Spanish, which was only for gifted students.
(02:57):
This makes no sense. It's not a great way, uh
to to raise people with any kind of familiarity with languages.
And then when I did switched to taking French, I
went through a series. Every year I had a different
French teacher, and only one of those French teachers would
I say was actually good at teaching French. And so
(03:18):
after having I think three years of high school French,
six hours of college French, like my French is still terrible.
It was terrible. When I finished that um, I took
a break from studying French because I had I had
taken the six hours that I needed to take to graduate.
And then I had this idea that I was going
(03:39):
to go to graduate school, and I learned that I
was going to need to take more French for graduate school,
and I attempted to take six more hours of French
in a semester that I also really overloaded myself with
courses and immediately was absolutely in over my head and
was like, I can't, I can't do all this. Um.
So anyway, that's that's why, like the one other language
(04:02):
I've really tried to study, I am still very bad
at um. I had a marginal level of fluency in
French when I was little, but it ran away, it
went other places. I don't know where that lives now,
hopefully someone inherited it. Um. Did you also tell me
that since you had learned you had learned from your grandmother, right,
(04:23):
that you had learned kind of like a country French. Yeah, yeah, uh.
And I didn't now until I had like a really
good French teacher who was like, your vocab is pretty
good and your pronunciation is not bad, but the things
you say sound really like you are a hic. And
I was like, what this surminds me of how my
(04:44):
my spouse has studied a lot of Japanese. He he'd
lived in Japan for a while when he was in
I can't remember if it was college or graduate school.
I think graduate school. Um. And so he has been
a person that I have gotten help with on Japanese
pronunciation sometimes, and I remember getting a note from somebody
that said we had pronounced something that sounded like we
(05:04):
were from the country, and then he was like, oh, yeah,
actually where I was we had to take trains to
get into the like a major city, and I was like, okay, sure,
uh yeah, I mean I I do think there is
a little bit. I hope it's changing, but certainly when
we were in school, I feel like in most schools
(05:25):
in the US there was a bit of failing in
terms of really trying to give kids the opportunity to
learn a lot of languages when they're young. And I
know from friends now that have elementary age children there
is a lot more language learning than I certainly ever
had at that age. So I'm hopeful. Um, but yeah,
I feel like every time I learned a new language,
(05:46):
there's or any like tiny bit of a new language.
I don't really learn any new languages. Um, there's like
this huge initial hurdle to get over of just like okay,
what my mouth doesn't do those? Um right, I gotta
wait what uh? And it's tricky. And the funny thing
(06:07):
is I'm suddenly remembering a discussion that I had with
a friend of mine whose parents were German and we're
learning English for the first time, and he was like,
you have no idea how hard English is compared to
other languages, like train wreck complete He's and it was
stuff that I mean, this was years and years ago,
(06:27):
like years ago that we had this conversation. But he
was like, you know, think about like even something as
simple as what is the plural for mouse? It's mice? Okay, well,
what is the plural for house? People learning for the
first time might very well guess heis, because none of
these rules are consistent or makes sense. And I was like, oh,
(06:47):
that is true, Like when you grow up speaking at
you don't think about it well. And a lot of
the things that little kids say when they're learning English
that sound hilarious to people is like because they've intuited
that hattern and applied it to other words that they
haven't learned the irregularity for yet, which I think is
pretty cool and fascinating. Yeah, you don't know, maybe we
(07:11):
should start doing the show in esperanto um. I have
been trying to keep up with with a couple of
duo lingo courses, and I did have a good time
blinking away at a little bit of esperanto um, but
I don't know if it's feasible for me to keep
up with it. My brain feels full, Yeah, we know that,
(07:33):
feeling full brains. Yeah. So this week we talked about
Bodium Castle. Huh uh. This is the castle I have
not been to, but it's on my list when is
getting very big. My list is so big, and I'm
so ready to start traveling again, So look out, Bodium Castle.
(07:55):
I wanted to do this one in part because it
is kind of a fun, little bit more lighthearted thing,
but also because it contextualizes a lot of things. Right
when you realize that Edward Dallingridge was connected to the
hundred years Ward, then he was also one of the
people who put down the peasants revolts um, which isn't
(08:16):
often talked when when you discuss things like hey, this
person built a castle, and it's like yes, but why
I love that. A lot of castle historians and medieval
historians have really kind of turned to this one is
something to kind of pick apart and look at the
cause and effect of like why would someone want this
to be built why why exactly and put that in
(08:39):
the context of history. UM. I do want to give
a shout out to UM the National Trust website on
Bodium Castle. We mentioned at the end of the episode
that right now the interiors are not open to visitors
because of COVID, But one of the cool things they've
done is, uh, they have put some of the material
(08:59):
that you would normally see inside the castle online, So
like there's a video that you would normally see about
the history of the castle, and they're like, no one
can see this right now, so we're just making it
available publicly, which is just a really cool, nice gesture
in a way for people to learn. I imagine this
is one of those places that school children sometimes have
to go to and report on and that's now available
(09:21):
to them. So yeah, I just thought that was marvelously cool.
I feel like earlier on in the Pandemic, First Side
did something similar where there was like a virtual tour
of Versailles, UM, which was really cool because you and I,
you and we went to Versailla on our our trip
(09:42):
to France back in what was that it's all blurred together, UM,
and it's so really shoulder to shoulder packed in there.
Um that it's it's really hard to see things. So
having this virtual tour on line, even having been there,
meant seeing things I had not noticed before. Yeah, you
(10:06):
don't get a lot of time to like linger and
hang definitely like move through the hall of mirrors. There
are a lot of people behind you and they all
need to see it too. Um. So it is. I'm
very happy that a lot of of historically and culturally
significant sites that have had to close have done similar
programs where they're they're making their content available. It's a
(10:28):
huge help. And like I said, I'm sure there are
a lot of students who are benefiting from that. So
it's a big thing. I will tell you this, And
this may sound strange, Um, are you one of those people?
Because I know you have a fondness for medieval history
at a level that is beyond mine. Are you a
castle person? I know that sounds weird, not as not
(10:49):
not as much. I've been playing a lot of a
game called Balheim lately, um, and there's a weird a
weird gender dichotomy and the people that I play at
Alheim with Whereas I have made these little wooden homey
kind of structures and the men are all building these
(11:13):
gigantic stone castles with turrets and moats and just all
kinds of gigantic things. And I've been like, but I
like this little hut where I have all of my
crafting tables. UM. What I am incredibly into though, is
all the witch marks. I love the witch marks. I
(11:35):
love the witch bottles. I love the walling shoes up
in the wall to try to try spirits. I am
weigh into all of those things. Yeah, yeah, that was
I found that information on that study and again it's
they talked about it on the National Trust site. UM.
I came into that information kind of late in the
game and I was like, WHOA hold on, Yeah, there's
(11:58):
a whole other thing going on a podium castle, which
makes perfect sense because of course, I bet a lot
of castles have these same things, but they don't always have,
you know, the um an actual study done of them
to really identify. And it's one of those things. Again
we say witch marks and it sounds really like UM.
And we even mentioned that there's like a compass sometimes
(12:20):
in a pentagram, just as a reminder in case anybody
doesn't remember, medieval Airy era pentagram sometimes used in Christianity,
not necessarily having anything to do with you know, devilishness
or or witchcraft in that sense, um, but really part
of a prayer. So I also love that. I love
the use of symbols as prayers as well, Like just
(12:41):
the value we place on the visual medium is always
going to be fascinating to me. So now I want
to put witch marks all over my house. Thank you
so much for spending time with us this week, and
we hope as you head into the weekend that it
is as enjoyable as possible, and that if you are
obliged to do things like work, that you have as
easy a time as possible and everyone is super nice
(13:02):
to you. And we will see you back here tomorrow
for classics and next week with new stuff. Stuff you
missed in history. Class is a production of I heart Radio.
For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
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Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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