Languages: the origins

Have you ever wonder where so many languages originated from?

Let’s go back to Genesis 11. In verses 1-4, we see that everyone spoke one language. There was no need to learn French, Hindi or Korean for everyone understood one another even when they greeted each other with a simple hello. One day, the people came up with a bad idea: to build a city and a tall tower to reach up to heaven (skyscrapers are like modern towers of Babel). They wanted to make a name for themselves and to be famous. They wanted to be like God.

In verses 5-9, we see that God isn’t pleased with the people’s behavior, and so, He puts a stop to their plans. They were trying to live without Him and their mindset was all wrong. God gave the people different languages, so they wouldn’t understand each other, causing work on the city to stop. This caused them to scatter all over the world.

And this is how we ended up with so many languages! Evolution and cavemen had nothing to do with the origins. We need to stop discrediting God when it comes to history. All theories about how languages originated wouldn’t have to be in the first place if we’ll just look to the Bible for answers. When God created the first humans, they were given breath and speech in which they can communicate with Him. He never left them trying to learn how to speak for He values and loves communication. 

***GIFs/Images that don’t belong to LPM are via Google Search (Right-click for original source)

Disclaimer

Advertisement

The most fun language I’ve ever come across and cat in 10 or fewer languages.

I am falling in love with languages all over again! I may have to rename this category to Languages or something of the sort.

Cats in 10 languages… or less

One of the first/early words that we learn to say in French is chat which translates to, yes, you guessed it, cat.

So I decided to learn the word ‘cat’ in a few other languages besides English of course!

French: chat

Italian: gatto (In Polish, it’s also gatto or kot)

Romanian: pisica (so cute!!)

Hindi: billi (I learned this from watching Don)

Spanish: gato (In Greek, it’s gata)

Vietnamese: mèo (The word for cat in Egyptian hieroglyphic was miu or mii).

Japanese: neko

Hawaiian: popoki (💙)

German: Katze (In Dutch, it’s kat) 

Okay, so I went a little overboard. I blame les chats!

Another fun language!

I haven’t updated this category in almost a year given that I started it in the first place to track my French language progress, but somewhere along the way, I stopped learning. Then a spark was relit last month while I was on vacation. A family friend called on me to help him with some holidaying French tourists for he thought I knew French as I should. Although in the end, the tourists didn’t end up going on the trip, it was an eye-opener for me. Long story short, I rediscovered my love for the language and I’m having lots of fun learning!

And only yesterday, I came across the most fun language in a long time! Can you guess what it is? I’ll give you a hint…

Yes, that’s right. The Hawaiian language! Although I read that the Hawaiian language is rarely spoken among the locals, I learned so much.

‘Ae e lei – yes, wear a lei (lei also mean garland because… duh!)

‘a’ole mahalo – no thanks

ʻŌlelo – language/speak

e’ai -eat

E ʻōlelo – speak

e hele -go

mahalo – thanks (it can also mean “to admire”)

Some of the words remind me a little of the Greek language but with fewer letters. If you look at some of the words above, you’ll notice the letter ‘e’ in front of a few. There are 2 types of E’s: the imperative (where the E is used to signify a suggestion/command) and the vocative (if the E is used before a noun which is a person most of the time, it indicates that you’re addressing him/her. Ex.:

E hele e Kiana – Go Kiana (this happens to be the Hawaiian form of Diana)

ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi (the Hawaiian language) has been classified as an endangered language by UNESCO, but since more people, today are interested in the language once again, it’s taught in immersion schools and one can obtain a Master’s degree in the Hawaiian language from the University of Hawaii. Beautiful language!

RELATED: Ten Languages

***GIFs/Images that don’t belong to LPM are via Google Search (Right-click for original source)

Disclaimer

French Friday: an update

Bienvenue à un autre édition de vendredi français. 

Bonjour and welcome to another segment of French Friday… yet, not quite.

Non, Je ne parle pas français, but I do understand the vocabulary well. It’s just that I haven’t been committing myself to take French seriously… or any other language for that matter. I learn on and off. I’ve thought about moving to France over the past few years just to get closer to the culture and language. I thought that it would’ve given me the extra motivation to actually sit and learn the language properly, but I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m lazy or maybe I have ADD. 😞

However, in the upcoming weeks, I’ll share the other languages I’ve been attempting to learn. It gets weird and sometimes funny, but I love learning basic phrases of many languages. Also, I’ll be adding the word or phrase of the week from now on during these post. Let’s begin, shall we? This week its…

Haha! I like it! 😍

Wishing you a blessed and restful weekend!

***Images and GIFs via Google Search unless stated otherwise.

French Friday: a French quiz and talking like a Parisian

Bienvenue à un autre édition de vendredi français. 

I have to confess that I haven’t been making the time to learn French weekly, but I wanted to update this category as I haven’t done so in a long time. My schedule is currently messed up and I am adjusting to some changes in the workplace so it’ll be a while before I can have a normal flow of things in my life again. Anyways, the most I got around to learning some French was taking a fun French quiz via BuzzFeed. There were 14 questions and I got 2 wrong. 

The only other thing I learned was how to talk like a Parisian. Parisians are like their own breed and they’re blunt and even sometimes rude, but they can be nice, too. 

Your turn now. What language are you learning? Is it what you thought it’d be?

French Friday: football terms ⚽

Bienvenue à un autre édition de vendredi français. If you’ve been reading or simply passing through my blog, you’ll see that the World Cup fever has taken over. 

Before I continue, I just want to say how happy I am for Les Bleus moving on to the round of 16 in the coupe du monde. They have room to improve, but even if they don’t make it past the round of 16, they’ll always be my heart. 💙

Impossible N’est Pas Francais!

Votre force, notre passion. Allez les bleus!!!

It’s day 9 of the World Cup and I’ve decided to learn a few football terms in French. 😄

Football (le football)

game/match – le match
halftime – mi-temps
overtime – la prolongation
stoppage time – les arrêts de jeu 

People & Players (Gens et joueurs)

team – une équipe
coach – un entraineur
referee – un arbitre
player – un joueur
forward – un avant, attaquant
striker – un buteur
goalie – un gardien de but/goal
defender – un défenseur
winger – un ailier
Les Bleus – “the blues” which refers to the French national football team

Scoring and Penalties (Buts et pénaltys)

goal – un but
own goal – un but contre son camp
perfect pass – un caviar
corner kick – un corner
free kick – un coup franc, coup de pied arrêté
yellow card – le carton jaune
red card – le carton rouge
tackle – un tacle

French aside, I’ve not been brushing up on my Greek and Italian. What about you? What have you learned this week that you’ll love to share?

French Friday: Ways of saying “You’re welcome”

Bienvenue à un autre édition de Vendredi Français. I haven’t been too keen on picking up French lately, but let’s dive into today’s offering.

My goal is to become fluent in French, hence the reason why I started French Fridays, but lately, I’ve been putting it on the back burner and accept that I’ll just take it in small doses. However, I learned a few phases this week and they’re all to do with how to say ‘You’re welcome’ although I already knew some of them.

After saying “merci beaucoup” the most automatic response that comes to mind is “de rien” which is the most common way to say “you’re welcome”. But we can also say:

Je t’en prie. This form is informal and you can use it with people you’re on “tu” basis with. 

Je vous en prie. I learned that when in doubt, use this term for it’s formally friendly and it’s considered more polite than “de rien”.

Pas de quoi/ll n’y a pas de quoi. Like “De rien” it means it’s nothing and it’s casually used in Southern France.

Pas de problème/Pas de souci. No worries. This is considered a slang like the English “no problem”.

Avec plaisir – With pleasure. This is used mainly in Toulouse.

As for “de rien“? It is informal and shouldn’t be used in formal situations. It’s similar to Spanish “de nada” and it literally means “it’s nothing” when someone thanks you for something unimportant. 

Here’s a nice fun fact: While we use “s’il vous plait” to say please in French, in Belgium, it means, yeah, you guessed it: “you’re welcome”.

French aside, I managed to watch a football game in Russian last week and I learned that màn màn chī in Chinese means enjoy your meal from Total Drama World Tour. 

The things I learn while watching Chris McLean destroy so-call famous dreams. I’ll be talking more about this show in a later post, so over to you now.

What have you learned this week that you’ll love to share? Doesn’t matter what language you’re learning, we’re all here to learn.

French Friday: L’alphabet en Français

Bienvenue à un autre édition de Vendredi Français. I haven’t posted anything for the last two weeks so this evening, I’ll be talking about the alphabet. 😄

When I first started to learn French, the alphabet was tricky for me. I kept forgetting that the ‘G’ is actually pronounced as we would a ‘J’ in English and the ‘J’ as we would a ‘G’ in English. We coo for ‘Q’. Haha! You’ll see what I mean in a bit. 

This is the pronunciation guide that I use:

A – aah

B – beh

C – say

D – day

E – euh

F – eff

G – jay (Yes, as in an English J!)

H – ash

I – ee

J – jee (Just say G!)

K – kah

L – el

M – em

N – en

O – oh

P – pay

Q – coo (See what I mean when I say that we coo Q! 😄)

R – err

S – es

T – tay

U – oo

V – vay

W – dooble vay (My absolute favorite to say!)

X – eex

Y – ee-grayk

Z – zed

This video also helped me a lot when I started to learn the alphabet:

I can say my French alphabet pretty well now. 👍

On another note, I watched Ali Baba And The Forty Thieves – The Lost Scimitar Of Arabia in Spanish for no apparent reason. I thought the prince was alright to look at:

But eh, he ain’t no Aladdin, darling! I won’t be writing a review, but the movie was pretty decent. 

What about you? What have you learned this week that you’ll love to share? Doesn’t matter what language you’re learning, we’re all here to learn.

French Friday: accents

Bienvenue à un autre édition de Vendredi Français. Thank you for this suggestion, divinebc! I utmost appreciate it. 😃

Okay, so this week, I want to cover two things if the time permits. If not, well, I’ll just have to wait until next Friday God’s willing. I’ve spent some time listening to French on YouTube and I must say that not all of the YouTubers are very reliable when it comes to describing the accents and their functions, so I want to discuss that today. I also found some notes while going through my old French notebook. 😄

Accents

No, not that one. The ones above or under a letter and in French, there are 5 accents:

1. Accent Aigu {é}

This accent makes the “AY” sound and it’s only found on the letter “e”. It is also the most popular of the French accents.

2. Accent Grave {à, è, ù}

This accent defines the meaning between words that sound the same. For example: “ou” – or/ “où” – where) and “à” – at/”à” – has. It also gives the letter “e” a short sound as in “let”.

3. Accent Circonflexe {â, ê, î, ô, û}

This accent lengthens the vowel sound. It also indicates that an “s” used to follow that vowel (eg. écouter and escouter).

4. Accent Cédille {Ç}

My favorite accent! It can only be found under the letter “c” before the vowels “a, o, u”. It changes a hard “c” to a soft “c” sound and it gives the “c” and “s” sound. 

5. Accent Tréma {ë, ï, ü}

This accent indicates that the vowel is to be pronounced separately from the one immediately before it. I learned this one from Rocket Languages. This two parallel dots accent is the least popular one of the five. I don’t know why. I think this accent is pretty cool for it looks like two dots and acts like a crown. 

And that’s all the time I have! I was expecting this session to be lengthier as I wanted to talk about the alphabet, but time is not on my side today. To quickly recap:

Apart from relearning French accents and the alphabet, I did not really get into another language this week. However, the Japanese Embassy just sent us (the library) a DVD on Japanese cuisine and handouts on sake so I’m going to watch/read those over the weekend and I’ll tell you what I learned next week God’s willing.

What about you? What have you learned this week that you’ll love to share? Doesn’t matter what language you’re learning, we’re all here to learn.

DISCLAIMER: None of the GIFs or images used in the post belongs to La Petit Muse. If any of the photo/GIF belongs to you (Joe/Jane Public), please contact me/leave a comment and I’ll gladly take it down. God bless. 

French Friday: À bientôt?

Welcome back to French Friday! I don’t know how to say that in French as yet, but I’m guessing it’s Bienvenue au vendredi français? Come on French speakers, help une fille out, oui?

This week flew by pretty fast, but I managed to make time for some French, although it was more like a walk through since I managed to cover the topic a long time ago. Anyway, enough musing. 

How do you say “See you later” in French? Well, I know there are a few ways to say it, but I’ve been using “à bientôt” for as long as I can remember. I recently had a conversation with my French-speaking South African friend and he told me that “à tout à l’heure” means the same thing, but “a plus tard” is the best form to use when telling someone that you’ll see them later. And if you’ll like to tell someone that you’ll see them tomorrow, one can use “à demain”. 

So basically, upon parting company, one must know the right term to use just as we do in English. 

• à bientôt – see you soon {bien + tôt = very + soon = adverb}
• à plus tard – see you later {au plus tard means at the latest}
• à demain – see you tomorrow
• au revoir – goodbye 

On a side note, I learned the word for thunder in Japanese is kaminari and I know how to say coffee in 5 languages:

Hindi: kofi (KOH-fee)

Finnish: kahvi

Swedish: kaffe

Italian: caffe (KA-fee)

Icelandic: Kaffii

I have no idea why I even learned to say coffee in a few languages, but I found it fun. Thanks for joining me this week as I continue to pursue French. What about you? Any language that you’re learning? What interesting things have you learned this week?

Welcome to French Friday!

Salut! Bienvenue! Est-ce que tu parles français? Oui? Non?

Okay, before I get into it, let me begin by saying that this new series is actually for me. As I said in my last edition of  Thursday Ten, I am very fond of many languages especially the French one which holds a special place in my heart. Whenever I hear French being spoken by someone who is not French…

But when it’s coming from a French native’s mouth…

Even when they’re talking about cobwebs on the ceiling…

Okay, I think by now you’ve gotten the point. I am simply in love with the French language and it’s been a blast relearning it so allow me to introduce you to my new series.

I’ve loved the French language ever since I was little, but during the school years, I’ve lost interest in it because I had no one to speak it with and I was afraid to butcher the pronunciation. In due time, however, I learned that it was okay to start by speaking badly when entering a new language territory. 

With this new series, I can look back to see how far I’ve come in learning French (and probably other languages). My aim is to update this weekly with the new things I’ve learned in French for the week, but we’ll see how that updating thing goes. 

If you speak French (or is French), I welcome all the help that you’ll be willing to give during this series. 😃

À bientôt!

***GIFs via Giphy & photos via Pinterest