More of my ramblings about languages and one of my stories will be published eventually sometime

Cosmic Horror Monthly has accepted one of my pieces! I can’t remember if I’ve already mentioned this or not. I unfortunately have no further information about this, except that’ll it’ll be fun to have one of my weirder flash fictions out in the world.

Awhile ago, Learn German with Falk asked which languages we would learn after we learned German. I caught up with the video again recently, and it was a question I pondered while belatedly planting the last of my garden for this year.
There are some languages I think I might actually possibly learn, and other languages I’d like to have beamed into my head so I wouldn’t have to actually learn them, I could simply know them.

I also filled out the Canadian 2026 Census short form in May.
Because Canada is an officially bilingual country, a good chunk of the short form asked questions about language, particularly the official languages of Canada – English and French (you could fill in a space for other languages if they fit the questions for you.)
For one question: “Can this person speak English or French well enough to conduct a conversation?” I indicated I could conduct a conversation in both languages.
I qualified this in my head – “If the other person is speaking standard French and using helpful gestures and patience and I’m having a good day.”
I’ve been making a routine of listening to Radio France for the international news over the past month, and I am frequently uncertain if an event is happening, has happened, or is expected to happen.

And sometimes, I know I am not fully fluent in English. Even though it’s my first and main language.
This past week, I encountered this as part of a literary magazine’s description of what they’re looking for in works – “we support exigent narratives.”
I did not know what that meant – except that it clearly conveyed to me “don’t bother submitting, we’re too highly educated and fond of fancy language for you.”

Approaching the sentence as part of a language I’m trying to learn – I understood “we” and “support” and I think I know what “narratives” are but perhaps not in this context – I had to look up “exigent.” (I correctly guessed we have Latin to blame for “exigent.”)
Merriam-Webster “exigent” 1. requiring immediate aid or action 2. requiring or calling for much: demanding
Okay, so perhaps what the literary magazine is saying is they want stories relevant to today’s events, which might challenge the reader in some way. (Perhaps linguistically.)

I did not submit to that magazine – leaving aside snobbery, I am not sure I know what’s happening in the world because I can’t always catch the difference between past, present and future tense in spoken French – but I did submit to close to twenty other magazines last month, and seven more earlier this month. (I also had a story accepted recently, a little more on that at the end of this post.)

Latin is one of the languages I’d like to have beamed into my head so I could understand it but I don’t think I’ll ever really bother learning it. I do think it’s a shame that it’s not offered in public schools anymore. They could have tried teaching us a little bit, anyway, and kept a long tradition alive. But, I know that some people still learn at least a little, and that’s cool. (And it still has minor usefulness in some professions.) Maybe if I had infinite time. (And, well, okay, probably everyone who understand a European language understands a little Latin simply by linguistic evolutionary accident.)

Here are some other languages I think it would be cool to understand if I could simply wake up one day understanding them:
– Gaelic and Scots (’cause my last name is MacMichael)
– Russian (’cause I was born in the 80s and the alphabet is seriously funky – plus if you have English, French and in some future, German, you might as well magically acquire the last of the big European languages, right?) (Sorry Italian)
– Bungee (’cause I grew up in the province of Manitoba, and I think helping in reviving a dialect would be fun, plus it would help me with one of my long-term-lingering writing projects)
– Swahili (’cause I actually learned a few words of this a long time ago now and it seemed like a fun language)
– Australian
– North American Spanish (because it would make sense to learn, but I don’t wanna)
– magically being able to converse in one of the Chinese languages would completely blow my mind

And the languages that I’d like to actually study in some wild future where I somehow learn more than three:
– Spanish (because it would make sense to learn, although I don’t wanna)
– American Sign Language

Not actually languages, but related to language –
– Musical notation (I hope I might pick musical notation up again fairly quickly, because I did learn this once already)
– Morse code (’cause I’m weird)

I think that’ll be far more than enough.
At the moment, I think I will be lucky if I ever hit B1 in German while retaining whatever I’ve got in French.

Have I told you that when I attempt to talk to myself in German in the shower (or, now that I’ve started practicing writing out German sentences, when I try to painfully cobble together a written sentence) I often insert French? Sometimes without noticing it until much later.
And the other day while talking to someone random, I flung out an English sentence in what I still think of as German-backwards-grammer.
I may end up with only “what-the-heck-is-that-person-speaking” as my language.

What Which languages would you like to magically acquire?