Language-learning through time. Part One.

Or, another reason to love Internet Archive.

One of my various areas of interest and curiosity has always been languages. As a child one of the many things I would get my parents to buy for me were Phrasebooks, in particular the ones by “Lonely Planet”, and before I had to get rid of them when I moved house, I had a collection of around 20 of them. I never properly learned any of the languages contained within these books, I simply contented myself with reading them and admiring the strange words and phrases they contained.

Of course, I have not grown out of this habit entirely, and I still contemplate the exotic words and grammars of languages I don’t necessarily intend to learn as a pastime. On account of this habit, I inevitably came across a source for learning languages that I think does not get as much attention as it deserves.

Internet Archive.

In such a vast virtual library, one can easily find freely downloadable literature covering many of the world’s languages, with the added benefit of allowing you to combine the love of languages with another love I happen to have, history and antiquarianism. Within the Archive you will be able to discover textbooks and phrasebooks written from as far back as the 18th century, or even further, that teach not only the modern languages such as French, but languages that are slowly dying or are no longer with us, such as Ottoman-era Turkish. It is a unique experience, an odd pleasure, to learn a language using a book that was used by someone like oneself in greater, more romantic days like the Victorian Era, and even to in some way pretend that you are a student, or scholar, or soldier sitting in some prosaic university study room, or on a steamship heading towards some godforsaken frontier of the Empire during some vague time between 1820 and 1914 A.D. Consider it a kind of “Mental Cosplay”, or an act of “Intellectual anachronism”, or “Educational time-travel”.

A lot of people would ask why one should “Waste” their time learning languages using “Old, outdated” material. I’d say firstly that a lot of modern languages have not changed to the point that, say, a person speaking 19th century French would have much difficulty speaking to and understanding the French of the 21st Century. Secondly, if you want to learn a language to comprehend historical material it is obvious that learning with “Outdated” resources from the same era makes sense, and thirdly these same people who question your choices of educational pastimes are more than likely going to spend hours scrolling TikTok in search of the most refined “Brain Rot”, or playing Candy Crush, or binge-watching the entire Twilight film series on Netflix after they finish criticising you for your far better choices¹. So, they hardly have any right to complain.

Now, allow me to give you a tour of a few of the many gems of antiquated language acquisition that I have discovered hidden within the great Archive…

1-How to speak French, by Achille Albites.

How to speak French is by far one of the best French textbooks I have come across, being both detailed and thorough, yet easy to read and, assuming that you like the Victorian era, entertaining in both its characteristic style and the many ways it reveals everyday life and conversation of that era. Quite an amazing achievement for a book written in 1868. It combines the usual bilingual parallel text technique with a numbered text block under each text that explains a different aspect of French Grammar and vocabulary.

I have personally been using it to good effect in my efforts to learn how to read French, and with its help I can now parse quite a bit of stuff I come across on the News, or Reddit, or other books on Internet Archive. Not many people realise how much untranslated stuff there is in French, in particular books on Anthropology, Linguistics, History and Occultism. Nor do many know that, just as with English, the Colonialism of the past ensures that a lot of non-European people still speak it as a first or second language, such as vast areas of Africa and Polynesia.

2-A Manchu grammar, by Paul George Von Mollendorff.

A Manchu grammar is a short guide to reading texts in the now rather neglected Manchu language. Not many people remember that the famed Qing dynasty, that last dynasty of imperial rule and Monarchy in China that existed for 268 years before forces within and without finally destroyed it and led to the creation of the Republic, was not ruled by what we usually think of as the Chinese, but by a totally different ethnicity called the Manchu, descended from another great Tungusic people called the Jurchen. The Manchu spoke a non-tonal, agglutinative language with 5 noun cases and written with an alphabet derived from the one used by the Mongolians². This made it a far easier language for Europeans to learn, and so it was common for a lot of scholars interested in Chinese literature to read it in Manchu translation, as many of the classics of Chinese literature had been translated into Manchu during the Qing dynasty, and furthermore a lot of official Qing government archival material was of course written in Manchu as well. This introduction to reading Manchu literature is essentially a crash course in the language for such scholars, using the same parallel bilingual text system used in How to speak French but with the addition of listing all the main Manchu words used in each of the Manchu alphabet-written texts in English alphabet as well.

Ironically, in the end just as the Manchu people conquered the imperial government of China and oversaw its demise, so did the Chinese language conquer the tongues of the Manchu people and led to the demise of their original language, which despite free government courses remains a secondary language known only by a few thousand people in China itself. Only a closely related language, Xibe, is still spoken as a living but minority language.

3-Egyptian self-taught, by Karl Albert Thimm

Egyptian Self-taught is essentially a 19th century phrasebook of Egyptian Arabic. Just like many phrasebooks today, it is largely a collection of words and phrases with only a smattering of Grammar and explanation of pronunciation and writing, and a brief explanation of Egyptian weights, measures and currency.

I think that it would be a nice introduction to Arabic words if you are simply curious about the language, kind of like the “Fast Talk” series of phrasebooks by Lonely Planet. It has the added benefit that the Egyptian dialect of Arabic, usually known as “Masri”, is also one of the most well-known dialects on account of Egypt’s very popular film, music and TV industry, essentially being the Arabic equivalent of Hollywood or Broadway.

4-Ottoman-turkish Conversation-grammar, by V. H. Hagopian

The Ottoman-Turkish conversation-grammar is another great introduction to a language that, strictly speaking, doesn’t exist anymore. Not many people realise that the Turkish spoken today is a very different beast to the Turkish that was spoken even as recently as a century ago. Not in the sense of a somewhat different pronunciation, style of speech and a handful of different slang words as you notice in the difference between the English of today and the English of 1900, but more like the English of today compared to the English of 1600. The reason for this is a very bizarre bit of history whose only comparison I am aware of would be China’s great simplification of its writing system during its Republican era.

To simplify what I learned from the relevant chapter of Gaston Dorren’s brilliant book on the world’s most dominant languages, Babel: Around the world in twenty languages, before the establishment of the Turkish Republic in the 1920’s Turkish was divided into the many colloquial dialects spoken by the rustic masses, and the refined mongrel of largely Arabic and Persian influenced Turkish spoken by the upper-class of the Ottoman empire. The latter class of people were not only often from non-Turkish peoples who were under the control of the Ottoman, but also literati who loved to add the sounds and grammar of these languages to their own native Turkish, to make it sound fancier (Imagine some upper class American or English man who likes to add French words to his speech but taken up to eleven). However, in Ataturk’s great modernisation of Turkey, he ordered the purification and standardisation of the Turkish language, removing almost all foreign words and grammar in favour of many Neologisms derived from “True” Turkish. Within a few decades so much change has occurred in the Turkish language that the language of the Ottomans is at best partially intelligible to modern Turks, certainly not helped by the replacement of the former’s Perso-Arabic script with a modified Latin alphabet that is easier to learn and truer to the sounds of the Turkish language.

Anyhow, it is this older, refined mongrel of a language that Mr. Hagopian manages to teach quite thoroughly in this book. He has created a thorough textbook of the language’s grammar and writing, all re-enforced with reading exercises, and also includes compilations of phrases to allow the quick ability to learn to talk. He also includes separate sections explaining the purely Persian and Arabic aspects of Ottoman Turkish.

Oddly enough, the inspiration that led me to discovering this book was when I came across the film Three thousand years of longing, which featured the Ottomans and their language quite a bit. It is a brilliant film, based on a short story by A. S. Byatt, that has a very “Arabian nights” vibe in the first half of its story. It inspired me to read up on the Ottomans, and also the Thousand and one nights for quite a while.

5-Orbis Pictus, by John Amos Comenius

The Orbis Pictus is the oldest book in this list, published in 1658, and also the earliest known children’s textbook that used pictures as a learning aid for its subject, which is Latin. It is also considered to be a precursor for many audio-visual methods of language learning used today. It is based on the same bilingual parallel text system we have seen previously, but with the interesting addition of including a picture containing the subjects of each chapter, each thing mentioned in the text and depicted in the picture is assigned a number so you can more easily learn the meanings of each Latin word, as you can see below.

Many people suggest Wheelock’s Latin reader for those who want to learn Latin, but I think a case could be made that this Classic textbook for children may be a better fit for those who want to dip their toes into the language, before attempting something more strenuous. It occurred to me that a modern restoration of this textbook, with new illustrations, may be a paying proposition for those who want to cater the growing niche of people interested in homeschooling their kids with a classic liberal arts education, or the Trivium as it is also called.

1. An entire article, at the minimum, could be written on why so many people express a kind of hatred for anyone that chooses to spend their leisure time on learning things that have nothing to do with either education or employment, calling such things a waste of time, when they themselves occupy themselves with things far more worthless, and usually condone others doing it as well.

2. Fun fact for Doctor Who fans. In season 3 episodes 4 & 5 if you look carefully, you will notice that the examples of “Dalek Script” depicted on much of the lab is very heavily inspired by the look of the Mongolian writing system.