Said & Done

Said & Done

By Columbia University Language Resource CenterSociety & CultureEducationLanguage Learning
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Said & Done episodes

  • Italian Letters in a Shoebox, with Chris Kaiser

    Chris Kaiser talks about how discovering a box of letters in his grandmother's house as a child inspired him to undertake a lifelong journey of language learning.

    This episode is also available on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zIyVO0vjGc

    18 min
  • Yiddish Part II: Men, Women, and Dybbuks, with Agi Legutko

    In part II of our conversation, Agi discusses the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, Yiddish women writers, and the motif of the Dybbuk in 20th and 21st century literature.

    Yiddish at Columbia: https://germanic.columbia.edu/programs/yiddish

    Isaac Bashevis Singer Nobel Speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpCzuvNmnOA

    Found Treasures: Stories by Yiddish Women Writers https://shop.yiddishbookcenter.org/products/found-treasures-stories-by-yiddish-women-writers-by-ethel-raicus-frieda-forman-sarah-silberstein-swartz

    38 min
  • Yiddish Part I: A Different Education, with Agi Legutko

    Agi Legutko, Instructor of Yiddish at Columbia University, speaks about her journey to uncover her Jewish roots, the Yiddish language past and present, and her work on the Mapping Yiddish New York project, which maps the use of the Yiddish language in New York City.

    Yiddish at Columbia: https://germanic.columbia.edu/programs/yiddish

    Mapping Yiddish New York: https://jewishstudiescolumbia.com/myny/

    Naomi Prawer Kadar Fellowship: https://www.iijs.columbia.edu/naomi-fellowship

    40 min
  • The Korean Wave, with Joowon Suh

    Professor Joowon Suh discusses the rise of Korean cultural products on the global stage such as K-dramas, K-Pop, films, television shows, and food. We talk about how cross-linguistic rhyming works in K-pop, the popularity of the boy band BTS, archetypes in the movie Parasite, and her experience of visiting South Korea after living in the US for many years.

    47 min
  • Precise Words in Quechua, with Odi Gonzales
    Odi Gonzalez, a professor at NYU, specializes in Andean culture and the Quechua language, in addition to being a writer and poet. In this conversation, he discusses growing up in Peru speaking both Spanish and Quechua. He shows how Quechua, which is more properly called Runa Simi, is a precise language because it is largely a spoken language rather than a written one. He illustrates this precision with several examples, and discusses the challenges of translating written texts from other languages into Quechua.

    Learn more about Quechua at NYU here: https://as.nyu.edu/content/nyu-as/as/research-centers/clacs/quechua.html

    41 min
  • Prized Papers in Dutch, with Wijnie de Groot

    Professor Wijnie de Groot, instructor of Dutch at Columbia University, speaks about how the Dutch 17th century, and the powerful reach of the Dutch East India company, have had an enduring yet often unrecognized influence on our modern, interconnected world. She discusses her class on reading documents from this time, which is a skill that few possess, despite the existence of an expansive archive of written and printed materials. She also talks about the status of the Dutch language today.

    46 min
  • Benuaq Part II: Becoming a Shaman, with Richard Payne
    In Part II of this conversation, Richard goes into about the specifics of becoming a shaman. He describes the epistemology of the Benuaq people, that is, their way of knowing things about the world. He also discusses the pressures that this traditional worldview faces as Indonesia begins to move its capital from Jakarta to Kalimantan, just a hundred miles downriver from where the Benuaq live.
    45 min
  • Benuaq Part I: A Chance Encounter, with Richard Payne
    Richard Payne, professor of Anthropology at CUNY Queens College, speaks about how a chance encounter led him to spend two years living in a small village in Indonesia called Engkuni Pasek, which is on the island of Borneo. In part one of this conversation, Richard shares his journey to and initial observations in this village, and how he learned to speak the local language, which is called Benuaq. He describes how Engkuni Pasek is a center of shamanistic knowledge and practice, and how he found himself observing and participating in rituals known as Belian ceremonies.

    Part I of this two-part conversation closes with his decision to study to become a shaman himself, a process that he will recount in detail in Part II, to be released on May 12, 2022.

    39 min
  • Uploads and Downloads in Indonesian, with Anggi Suharja
    Prof. Anggi Suharja, instructor of Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian) at Columbia, discusses growing up speaking Indonesian as a native language, as well as speaking two local languages. She discusses how local languages of Indonesia serve as a resource for constructing neologisms in Indonesia. She also discusses her identity as a member of the Sundanese ethnic group, which is primarily located in West Java.
    45 min
  • Finnish is Epic, with Heli Sirviö

    Heli Sirviö, instructor of Finnish and Swedish discusses growing up speaking both languages. She talks about how the Finnish people see themselves with respect to their neighbors and the rest of the world. Then, she gets into the Kalevala, which is the Finnish national epic. She discusses the world of the Kalevala, and how JRR Tolkien was inspired by this epic poem when he wrote the Lord of the Rings sequence.

    45 min

About Said & Done

From the publisher's feed

Said & Done is a podcast from the Columbia University Language Resource Center that explores languages at the intersection of culture and biography. In conversation with host Chris Kaiser, guests…