Ari wrote:Teango wrote:However I'm also currently delving into the mysteries and delights of languages from much more distant Afro-Asiatic and Polynesian families (e.g., Ancient Egyptian and Hawaiian), and find the linguistic variety, cultural perspectives, and pure challenge of something utterly different very rewarding!!
I was really disappointed when I started to study Mandarin and realized how similar it is to English. Which of the languages you've studied did you find the most different from Standard Western European? In what way are they utterly different?
Great to see you posting on the new forum, Ari (and forgive my presumption if you're not Ari from HTLAL!) As I mentioned above, I think Ancient Egyptian and Hawaiian are good examples of languages that are very different from others I've studied before. Admittedly, they're still languages, and thereby share many of the same features I've found in other languages over the years, but they're also very challenging in other respects, which is (perhaps somewhat masochistically) quite refreshing.
Hawaiian, for example, requires a very different way of thinking about time and personal space, as well as the world and how everything relates to one another in it. This is fundamental to the way it is traditionally taught and passed on through hula (dance), mele (song), oli (chant), and moʻolelo (storytelling). For example, the Hawaiian language classifies everything into either a-class or o-class to indicate its
inalienability of possession (which is not a straightforward topic), as well as using a variety of pronouns, depending on whether they are inclusive or exclusive, and singular, dual, or plural. There are also lots of particles that indicate exactly where and when something is happening in relation to the protagonist and the main characters in a story.
Ancient Egyptian, on the other hand, can often require some Turing-like feats of focus to put together all the orthographic clues and shed light on what initially looked like a short 4-5,000 year-old inscription. And this largely depends on when it's written too, i.e., whether it's written in Old Egyptian, Middle Egyptian, Late Egyptian, or in a cursive form of Demotic, all falling under the umbrella term of "Ancient Egyptian". Similar to Japanese kanji and kana, hieroglyphs (and there are up to 5,000 of these little critters) can indicate both phonetic and semantic meanings. However, they can also provide additional information with regards to the overall context, plurality, pronunciation, and sacredness of a piece of text, in addition to a host of other grammatical and formally pragmatic features required for full interpretation. Ancient Egyptian also uses a highly sophisticated morphological grammar similar to Arabic with consonantal roots and multiple suffixes (including infixes), but I've been told by Arab linguists that this differs considerably from conventional Arabic morphology. In many ways, trying to think like an Ancient Egyptian scribe, and working out the meaning of an extract from the "Book of The Dead", feels more like an esoteric art than a modern science. So all in all, it's a pretty complex language to get one's head around, and whilst I think it's wonderful to connect to a people and culture living so long ago, it's certainly not for the linguistically faint-hearted.
