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