0:01

Hub and. Spoke Audio

0:03

collective. Hi

0:08

It's Patrick Cox here and I

0:10

have a question: Do you pronounce

0:12

your name differently depending on where

0:15

you are or who you're talking

0:17

to? Or maybe which language you

0:19

may be speaking? I think I

0:21

do that, but only a little

0:23

bit and only really in response

0:25

to help other people may pronounce

0:28

my name. My last name and

0:30

particular comes out in all kinds

0:32

of ways. Some.

0:34

Of my friends find this very amusing.

0:38

I'll leave you to fill in the blanks. But

0:44

I don't live in the

0:46

multi lingual world that Gaston

0:48

Darren inhabits. Personally, I say

0:50

gusto.on Gaston is Dutch. When

0:52

I introduce myself an English,

0:54

I would say guest Honduran.

0:56

Many Dutch speakers would say

0:59

custom.and is punished it was

1:01

a guest on Darling. I

1:05

used to have a German grand mother

1:07

in law who would say gushed on

1:09

Lauren. I

1:23

don't think I've ever come across anybody got a

1:25

name that could be pronounced as was when you

1:28

said it at first the way that you pronounce

1:30

it you drop the and at the and riots

1:32

and it almost french. I

1:34

made it nasal gusto on that. had a French

1:36

pronounce it and it isn't french name so that's

1:39

why I sort of keep it that way. From

1:46

Quiet Juice and the Linguistic

1:48

Society of America This is

1:50

subtitled Stories About Languages and

1:52

the people who speak them

1:54

Today A conversation with Gaston,

1:57

Darren, speaker of Six Languages

1:59

Learner. many more. Okay,

2:10

I'm calling him Gaston, English style.

2:12

It's like he's already graciously given

2:14

me permission to use the English

2:17

pronunciation. Gaston himself feels

2:19

completely at home, switching languages back

2:21

and forth, which fascinates me. I

2:24

mean, I live in pretty much

2:26

a monolingual world. I think that

2:28

most of us native English speakers

2:31

do. Well, Gaston, he

2:33

grew up speaking one language at

2:35

home, another at school, and

2:38

the third, fourth, fifth and sixth, they

2:40

just followed, seemingly naturally.

2:43

So, to the home language, that's

2:45

perhaps the most obscure one. Limburgish.

2:49

Time for another name check. Gosto, dore.

2:52

When I say that way, I can hear

2:54

my mother speak, so I suppose yes, that

2:56

would be the Limburgish pronunciation. Gosto, dore. And

2:59

what is Limburgish and who speaks

3:01

it? Limburgish is the regional language

3:03

spoken in much of the

3:05

Dutch province of Limburg and also the

3:07

Belgian province of Limburg. It's

3:10

spoken by, I guess, about a million

3:12

or so people. A million

3:14

people! And I'd barely heard of it.

3:17

The thing is, Limburgish isn't regulated

3:19

like other languages are. No one's

3:21

gone on the record and said,

3:24

this is Limburgish and this isn't.

3:26

It's just a floating collection of

3:28

dialects, which makes it fun. No

3:31

one's gonna correct you. I spoke it every

3:33

day when I, up to my 18th birthday,

3:36

I mean, until I left the region.

3:38

I would speak it not in class, because

3:40

there you would speak proper Dutch, but it's

3:42

a cool yard and with friends, with

3:44

most friends, anyway, in shops and it was

3:47

the language of daily communication. Yep,

3:58

This is Limburgish. Gas

4:01

Them Easy! Singing it performing for me in

4:03

his living room in the Dutch city of

4:05

Amis was. Gonna

4:08

tell him. To

4:11

be on a an event. At

4:14

school. Because

4:16

advantage of have access

4:18

their mornings devote more.

4:29

Geographically Limburg is is hemmed in

4:31

other languages of all around as.of

4:33

course us everywhere and as Germans

4:36

lesson Twenty miles away from where

4:38

gas and grew up and French

4:40

not much farther a school Love

4:42

Gaston learned in Tops which is

4:45

why for a while.had a kind

4:47

of formality to it and Gaston's

4:49

mind Limburg is was closer to

4:51

his heart. But. Over time

4:54

that changed. I've never even had.

4:56

A relationship with a number of his

4:59

wound so or my it intimate life

5:01

has been are either German actually. Or.

5:03

Dutch but neverland burgers and I suppose that makes

5:05

a difference to. Limbo Guess is

5:08

somewhere in between Dutch and German. Not

5:10

just the pronunciation and the vocab, but

5:12

the grammar. It's a mix. In.

5:14

That part of Europe there's a lot of

5:17

mixing. When I was nearly sixteen I a

5:19

sudden love with a German girl and since

5:21

I had some German noted school and she

5:24

had no Dutch we use we spoke. German,

5:27

and well as we all know relationship

5:29

or love, it is the best way

5:31

to learn a language. Sept. German,

5:33

Dutch Limburg as Gaston was effortlessly

5:35

trilingual. It was just the linguistic

5:37

facts on the grounds Spanish follows

5:39

that was time spent in Latin

5:41

America. An English was always in

5:43

the background when I have my

5:45

first job wherein notice that having

5:47

Spanish is useful but having English

5:50

is more useful. I set out

5:52

to improve my English and at

5:54

the I became very friendly with

5:56

with a native English speakers. the

5:58

idea was that I would. teach

6:00

her Dutch and she would teach me English

6:02

but the first bit never worked out. So

6:05

often the way non-native English speakers

6:07

learn English because it's almost a

6:09

necessity. Like it gives them the

6:11

keys to the house. The

6:13

other way round for us English speakers to

6:15

learn another language it's not the same.

6:18

We already have the keys to the house. Learning

6:21

Dutch or any other language, that's

6:23

our basement conversion or garden shed. If

6:25

it doesn't work out we'll still

6:28

have the house. Gassen though, he

6:30

made sure he had the key to the

6:32

front door. Living in Holland I need a

6:34

lot of English. I mean reading books, internet.

6:36

Nowadays I listen to podcasts and audiobooks and

6:39

all that is in English and since my

6:41

book was translated into English I have more

6:43

direct contact with the English-speaking world. Gassen's

6:46

book is called Lingo around

6:48

Europe in 60 languages. It's

6:51

a great read that makes you

6:53

realize how a language's grammar can

6:55

be caught up in the culture

6:57

of its speakers. He's written a

6:59

second book since called Babel around

7:01

the world in 20 languages. Back

7:06

to the episode in a few

7:09

moments after I tell you about

7:11

the subtitle newsletter. Yes we have

7:13

a fun little missive that'll pop

7:15

up in your inbox every two

7:17

or three weeks. It's a breezy

7:19

five minute read, some language themed

7:22

news, some previews of future episodes

7:24

and of course some goofy lingo

7:26

stuff. How do you

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and amusing and free newsletter?

7:34

Just sign up at subtitlepod.com

7:36

slash newsletter. That's

7:39

subtitlepod.com slash

7:41

newsletter. Gassen's

7:46

first book on the languages of

7:48

Europe mentions 60 languages. Now if

7:50

you're wondering about that number, well

7:53

it's nothing official. It's just

7:55

the number of languages he chose to write about. But

7:57

if you're interested and you're still... listening

8:00

to this episode, so you may well

8:02

be interested. The number

8:04

of European languages still spoken

8:06

today that originated in Europe,

8:08

in other words, indigenous European

8:11

languages, that number is somewhere between

8:13

225 and 275. That sounds like a huge amount to

8:15

me, but the

8:20

majority of these languages are spoken by

8:22

very few people, fewer and fewer each

8:25

year. But the

8:27

other end of the scale is the

8:29

number of official languages in the European

8:31

Union, which covers most but not all

8:33

of Europe. That number

8:35

is 24. Then there

8:38

are all the languages spoken by

8:40

immigrants to Europe and their

8:42

families, the top three being Arabic,

8:45

Chinese and Hindi. I

8:47

don't know if there are any Europe-wide

8:49

estimates of exactly what this number is,

8:51

the number of immigrant languages. If you

8:53

know, please let me know. But I'm

8:56

guessing it probably runs into at

8:58

least the hundreds. Okay,

9:01

so these 60 languages that Gasson's

9:03

first book focused on, some

9:05

are homegrown, some are imported.

9:07

And his interest in the

9:09

imported languages began when

9:12

he lived in cosmopolitan Amsterdam.

9:14

I mean, I would go to this Ethiopian

9:16

restaurant like once a month. I had a

9:19

Moroccan neighbour who spoke Arabic and

9:21

also Berber, if I remember correctly.

9:24

So yes, I was aware that there was

9:26

this linguistic diversity, these linguistic riches right at

9:28

my doorstep. And I didn't know the first

9:30

thing about them. Well, I knew what they

9:33

looked like. I mean, you would see the

9:35

Arabic script and there was this Turkish travel

9:37

agent which would offer trips to Izmir and

9:39

Istanbul. And to my surprise, he would put

9:41

a dot on top of the capital I.

9:44

And I wondered, why is that? And

9:46

the Ethiopian guy would write in their

9:48

script, Happy New Year and Merry Christmas,

9:50

what the fives versa. And

9:52

it looked amazing. So yeah, I wanted to know more

9:55

about that. That's how it started. And

9:57

how, what does it teach you? Not just

9:59

about the languages but about the people. About

10:02

the people. Frankly, and

10:04

this is a bit of an embarrassing

10:06

statement, not all that much. But

10:09

that is not saying anything about the languages,

10:11

it's more saying something about myself. I'm

10:13

really interested in the languages and obviously

10:15

I'm interested in people generally. But

10:18

unlike much of the linguistic journalism that

10:20

you do, which is very much about society and

10:22

individuals and their history, which I admire and like

10:25

listening to, I'm not very good at that. I'm

10:27

more into the mechanics of language

10:29

and the sounds and the grammars and

10:31

the history and it's really a

10:33

different flavour of language writing. So

10:36

Gaston gets all obsessed about

10:38

scripts and alphabets and diacritical

10:40

signs like those dots over

10:42

some Turkish vowels and he

10:44

studied eight of these Amsterdam

10:46

immigrant languages, which taught

10:48

him what exactly? What

10:50

it taught me, well, we talked about

10:53

Limburgish earlier on and when I was

10:55

in my teens, I began to compare

10:57

the two linguistic systems, the two languages

10:59

that I had in my head, the

11:02

Limburgish and the Dutch system. And

11:04

I found all these differences and similarities. Now,

11:08

I took that one step further when

11:10

I did these eight languages, which I never spoke,

11:12

right? I mean, I only read about them. And

11:15

I saw that these small differences between

11:17

Limburgish and Dutch would sort of translate

11:20

into huge, but somehow similar

11:23

differences between Dutch or English and

11:25

these languages from all over the

11:27

world. Because in the end,

11:29

all languages have to do the same thing.

11:31

I mean, they are there to enable person

11:34

A to make something clear to person B

11:36

and to do that, they have to have

11:38

recognisable sounds and they have to say, look,

11:40

this is the thing I'm talking about. This

11:43

is the other thing I'm talking about. And

11:45

this is the relationship between those two things.

11:47

And therefore they have grammar and phonology and

11:49

vocabulary. And every language,

11:51

even those languages like Turkish

11:54

and Papiamentu and Kurdish have

11:56

to find solutions to solve those problems.

11:59

So in the end, There's always a point of

12:01

comparison, but in the meantime you come across

12:03

the most amazing differences. Do

12:05

you see certain things and you think, gosh,

12:08

I wish Dutch had that. The

12:10

ability to do that either in

12:12

the writing system or in the

12:14

grammar. There is one thing in

12:17

English. Actually what I'm going to say

12:19

will irritate some listeners because I know that it's a controversial

12:21

thing, but I love the ability of

12:23

English to verb nouns. I

12:25

think most languages do that to a

12:27

degree, but English is particularly flexible at

12:30

that. I love it. And

12:33

Dutch can't do that. Well,

12:36

there is one characteristic, one feature of

12:38

Dutch that English doesn't have, or

12:41

no longer has, I should say, and it is to make

12:43

a verb we have to add a

12:45

suffix. To make a

12:48

verb that sounds convincing

12:50

or sounds natural, we often also have to

12:52

add a prefix. So you end

12:55

up with a longer word and it will not always work. Not

12:58

all nouns will lend themselves to

13:00

being verbed. For instance, I find

13:02

there is a word for holidays or

13:04

vacation in Dutch, which is simply Wacomsee. And I find it

13:06

hard to imagine turning that into a verb. I

13:10

mean, that would be something like Wacomsee,

13:12

I guess, but it sounds horrible. And

13:14

I'm not saying this, hopefully, out of

13:16

conservatism. I mean, I would love it to

13:18

work, but I don't think that would ever find

13:21

acceptance. So you would have

13:23

to add a verb like I'm going on

13:25

vacation. Yeah, actually, there is an

13:27

English word called holidaying. I didn't realize it when I gave

13:30

the example, but holidaying is an existing word in English. Or

13:32

vacationing. Or vacationing, even. I didn't

13:34

know that. Yes, it's a

13:36

good example then of what English can do

13:38

and what Dutch, what to my mind anyway,

13:40

other people may disagree, would

13:43

have trouble accepting that word. The

13:46

more languages you know, or know

13:48

how they work, the more you see these things, patterns

13:51

and possibilities in other languages that you may

13:53

not be able to reciprocate in your mother

13:55

tongue. Gaston's really good at this. Of

13:58

course, how should I say it? he

14:00

thinks about languages depends on his relationship

14:02

to each of them. He's

14:04

more analytical about languages he learned at

14:07

school and college, but for his

14:09

mother tongue or tongues than Bergisch and

14:11

Dutch, well, the words, they

14:13

just come out. He's not analytical about them,

14:16

which means he's much less aware

14:19

of what he's saying, like with pronouns.

14:25

Dutch is one of those languages

14:27

where nouns and pronouns have genders,

14:29

masculine, feminine, or neuter. But

14:32

a linguist, Jenny Ordering, she recently

14:34

found evidence that a gender shift

14:37

is taking place in Dutch and

14:39

most Dutch speakers, including Gaston, weren't

14:41

aware of it. What

14:43

Dutch speakers believe they say is when

14:46

they use pronouns, he, she, and it,

14:48

they use them in agreement with the

14:51

genders of the nouns in question. Here's

14:53

an example. The Dutch word for

14:55

glass, its gender is neuter. So

14:58

if you're following the grammatical rules for

15:00

gender agreement, you'd refer to that glass

15:02

as it. Likewise,

15:05

the word for cup is masculine. So

15:07

you say he, feminine nouns become she.

15:09

This is the theory. This is the

15:11

system on paper. This is what we

15:13

think we do. But what Jenny Ordering

15:15

discovered in her research is

15:18

that we use the

15:20

equivalent of she only for females,

15:24

women, girls, etc. And

15:26

some animals that are very

15:28

obviously female, because we know them personally, you

15:30

know, like your cat, or if you're a

15:33

farmer, your cow, as a farmer, you

15:35

know, the cow is a female. That's

15:38

kind of it for the she pronouns nowadays.

15:40

The Dutch just don't use she for other

15:43

words, even when the gender of the noun

15:45

in question is feminine. And

15:47

guess which pronoun is taking over?

15:50

Yep, he draw

15:52

whatever conclusion you will from that he

15:54

is used for pretty much all things

15:56

and objects, whatever their gender, so that's

15:58

called all of them. them he, as

16:01

they say in Dutch, hey, he

16:04

has become the Dutch it. Except

16:06

the Dutch already has an it, it's

16:08

the neutral gender. And these

16:11

days, just like the feminine gender, it's not

16:13

being used very much. This

16:15

gender shift, and it's only happening in speech, not

16:17

in writing, it's unconscious. More

16:20

than that, the Dutch are in denial.

16:23

People get caught out referring to a glass

16:26

of water with he instead of it, and

16:28

when you point that out to them, they will say, oh,

16:30

sorry, my mistake. I normally don't do that.

16:33

Actually, they do that all the time. And

16:36

so does Gaston, as the linguist

16:38

pointed out to him. She would occasionally say,

16:40

heard what you just said? Ah,

16:42

yes, right. At first I too said, I

16:44

don't normally do that. And then

16:46

after the fourth time or so, I could

16:48

not pretend that was true. I mean, she was absolutely

16:51

right. Very embarrassing at first. This

16:54

all makes it a bit difficult, Gaston

16:56

says, to write naturally. If you write

16:58

according to the way that people have

17:00

started to speak, some people

17:02

will complain that you're violating

17:05

Dutch grammar. But if

17:07

you write the quote proper way, your

17:09

prose may soon seem antiquated.

17:14

Or maybe it won't. We

17:16

may need a few decades, maybe

17:18

a few centuries, to find out

17:20

which way prevails. I

17:29

recorded this conversation with Gaston in 2016,

17:32

though I've added some updates along the way.

17:34

And here are a few more. In addition

17:36

to Babel, his second book that appeared

17:38

in English, Gaston also wrote a couple

17:40

of books in Dutch. The first has

17:42

a fabulous title, a kind of blend

17:45

of Dutch and English. De

17:47

Dutch-on-aire, Dutch-on-aire, if that's how

17:50

you say it. It's

17:52

about English expressions, new and

17:54

old, containing the word Dutch.

17:57

The second is called... I'm not going

17:59

to attempt this. in Dutch. Seven languages

18:01

in seven days. It teaches

18:03

Dutch people how to decipher

18:05

the texts of certain

18:08

other European languages. Frisian, which

18:10

we've done an episode about.

18:12

Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Italian, Spanish,

18:15

and Portuguese. And I

18:17

don't think it's going to come as a surprise

18:19

when I tell you that Gaston is

18:21

learning some new languages. He mentioned

18:23

Vietnamese and Polish to me. Well,

18:25

learning Vietnamese was a three-year experiment

18:27

that he gave up on. Polish

18:30

is still ongoing. It's been four years

18:32

and he says it's going well. Give

18:34

or take some faux pas, sometimes a

18:37

little x-rated, like you say one thing

18:39

and it turns out to be some,

18:41

you know, body part or sexual act

18:43

or something. Moving

18:46

on, Gaston also wrote this

18:49

song. It's called Mother Tongue.

19:24

Many thanks to Gaston Doran, who

19:27

is a tremendously supportive person. He

19:29

just has this endless fascination with

19:31

languages and how they work. And

19:33

he's generous and humble with his

19:35

knowledge. I really appreciate that. Thanks

19:38

also to Alison Shao,

19:41

who manages Subtitles Social

19:43

Media and writes the

19:45

newsletter. Hint, hint. subtitlespod.com/newsletter.

19:47

Thanks also to everyone

19:49

at the World Public

19:51

Radio Program. Subtitles is

19:53

a member of the Hub Unspoke Audio

19:55

Collective, where a bunch of

19:57

independently minded podcasters who... just

20:00

curious about the world around us,

20:02

whether it's science, tech, arts, or

20:05

all of the above, which language can

20:07

be. So let's hear it for some

20:09

more of those Hub and Spoke podcasts

20:11

out there. Rumble Strip,

20:13

The Lonely Palette, Ministry

20:16

of Ideas, and many

20:18

more. Check them out

20:21

at hubspokeaudio.org. That's

20:23

it for today. Thanks for listening. See you in

20:25

a couple of weeks. Hub

20:33

and Spoke. Audio

20:36

Collective.