Cèid Donn's French and Gaelic SC thread

[Cèid Donn]

I saw brillantyears had signed up for the next 6WC, which I assume will starte on Nov. 1, so I went ahead and signed up for it too, for Navajo.

I've already been getting things ready for doing Navajo for the 6WC, although i sent myself into a panic when I realized I have no idea where the physical CDs for my copy of Breakthrough Navajo are. I only have the 1st CD ripped to MP3, and honestly, if I used BN for this challenge, I probably won't get tot he 2nd CD anyhow. But mainly I'll be using Goossen's book, Speak, Read, Write Navajo, with the audio. I have a German cop of the textbook that I will use, but I also have a pdf of the English version that a Navajo tutor gave to me a while back that I can use from when my rusty German fails me.

Other textbooks I have but have not yet worked on, so I cannot give anyone my impressions jusy yet:

• Speak Navajo: An Intermediate Text in Communication, Wilson and Dennison (OOP)
• The Navajo Language, US Indian Services (public domain, there's a reprint by the LDS church available on archive.org)
• Navajo Basic Course, US Dept. of Health, Education and Welfare (public domain, also reprinted by the LDS church and available on archive.org)
• Haa'isha' Dine Bizaad Deiidiiltah (Let's Read Navajo Preprimer) (Goossen, OOP and extremely rare--my used copy hadn't had an easy life prior to my acquiring it for an outrageous price many years ago and is two stages away from being a pile of dust. There is also a .pdf of this made by the LDS church as well floating around but I do not think it is actually public domain.)

Of these, I will most likely use the Goosen preprimer, both because of its content and because I paid good money for it and I should probably use it before is does turn to dust.

I'm also trying out some of the apps that are available. There aren't a lot, but there are a couple that look promising. In addition, I'll be using these online stories for Navajo children. These are all new stories designed for students and not traditional stories, so I can avoid any cultural faux pas regarding the cultural observances of traditional storytelling. Overall, while I have fewer resources at my disposable than with Russian I think I have more than enough to keep me busy for 6 weeks.

I had a dream about Navajo a couple night ago that was kind of funny. I was at my job, and in my class I had a student who was a Navajo and he was working on translating a Navajo children's story into English and I was helping him with his English writing. At one point I was checking his work and I read a couple sentence of the Navajo text out loud. The student started giggling at me and say "Mą’iiłtsxooí isn't a dog, it's a fox!" I stopped, realizing i somehow made a mistake, and read the sentences aloud again, when I realized I wasn't speaking Navajo, but Swedish. And I didn't know the Swedish word for the fox so I said hunden instead when I read the Navajo sentence out loud. And the boy caught this, as if he understand me speaking Swedish just fine. Look, it's a dream--it's not suppose make sense.

Anyhow, in my spare time when I haven't have a lot of motivation to work on one of my currently prioritized languages, I've been refreshing my Swedish pronunciation, which is probably why it was part of this dream. And I did look up fox in Swedish: räv, räven.

By the way, the Navajo word mą’iiłtsxooí is pretty easy to remember for even people like me with very limited Navajo knowledge because it's a compound of the common Navajo words for coyote, mą’ii, and orange, łitsxoo’í. It means "orange-colored coyote"--even when referring to the North American grey fox--for those of you who are into Latin, the grey fox's scientific name is Urocyon cinereoargenteus, that latter word meaning more or less "ashy silver colored." Why am I talking about this, you wonder? Well, I am particular fond of grey foxes, because when I was much younger, I once cared for one )that a very stupid human had tried to keep as a pet and ended up abandoning) until I was able to find a sanctuary that would take her. Personally I find them exceedingly adorable, although even while they are often very sweet and dog-like when acclimated to humans, they do not make good pets and truly belong in the wild, trust me.



Anyhow, I've had one hell of week dealing with real life stuff. I got a message from my lawyer about the legal issue that's been plaguing me for the past few months--not resolved yet, but hopefully soon. Just any time I have to deal with that my stress level skyrockets. I don't like dealing with this sort of thing in the best of situations, and dealing with this right now is not even close to a moderately good situation. Also, my mom is still in in-patient rehab and she's understandably nervous about coming home before she is strong enough. We have a meeting with her therapists and care manager yesterday and she was able to talk about how she was feeling and what she needed to work on, and I got to address the problem with her meals. Right now, she doesn't have a firm discharge date, which means basically they want to see how well she does in the next week and then decide from there. This is good in terms of her care, but not great in terms of my real life routine getting anywhere back to a relative normal. But, with fingers crossed, I hope that with the cafeteria getting clearer instructions on what she can eat, I can spend a little less time making food for her and taking it to her (and washing tupperware before going to bed so it'll be ready to do it all again in the morning). That said, I baked her some gluten-free banana bread first thing this morning, which by the way, turned out really good and I wish I had made a double batch.

I've been trying to step up on Clozemaster again, and have revived some of my laddering courses. I feel like next year I want to work on translating from and to French more with my other TLs, in particular Spanish, German and Indonesian. My plans for Darija and maybe Yoruba (or even maybe Hausa) factor into this as well. But I really want to get comfortable using French as a primary language. I can already do so, but I'm not at the level of fluency that I personally want to be at yet.

As for my SC, pffft. I kind of have run out of steam, and it's largely due to stress with my real life stuff, although with Gaelic there's the added issue that everything associated with Gaelic right now makes me feel depressed and unmoored. I am slowly reading Cementerio de animales for my Spanish SC but it's been almost 2 weeks since I finished my last Gaelic book and I don't know what to read next, While I can still steady work away at my Film SC for Gaelic with various content, I don't have much motivation to read Gaelic. I would rather read something in French, but I've already completed that SC so I should probably use my time to work on the SCs I haven't finished. Ugh.

And instead of watching something in Spanish, I have been watching Zone Blanche on Netflix. I started watching this for my French SC several months ago and didn't like, but now I find it interesting--at least more interesting than watching something besides soccer in Spanish. I kind of drive myself crazy with this, because of all my TLs, Spanish is by far the one that I can use in my "real life" the most, and it's the one I am least motivated to work on. As I have frequently said, I wish there was a pill for this. Es simplemente estúpido.

[Cèid Donn]

I was annoying my cat this morning by listening to this Bandcamp album of Manx songs for children. For those of you who are on the look-out for Manx resources, be sure to check this out. If you click on the song title and go to the song's page, there's the Manx lyrics with English translations. Anyhow, my particular favorite--and definitely my cat's least--is Lughee Beggey.

My poor cat--you see, he's a sickly little guy. Both of my cats are "special needs" cats, but this one especially so. He has an autoimmune disorder (he's a rescue cat and I suspect he originally came from a kitten mill or irresponsible breeder) that when it flares up, makes his joints stiff and he has trouble walking, and right now he is recovering from a recent bad flare-up. So I have to "cat vac" (my own play on the term "med vac") him around the house, and when I'm home I keep him on a cat bed near me so if he needs to get up I can help him. So he's basically a captive audience for the time being for all my language-related nonsense.

I posted a video of the Indonesian speed climber Aries Susanti Rahayu earlier and this morning, before I got on my Manx children's song kick, I read (or rather did my best to read) this DW Indonesia interview with her. My Indonesian reading skills are definitely wanting, and one of my hopes for 2019 was to be a lot better at it by the end of this year. Alas, life happens. But I do think I am noticeably better at reading Indonesian than I was at the start of the year, When I read a chunk of Indonesian text I don't feel I'm drowning in a sea of unfamiliarity. I think that's largely due to doing Indonesian on Clozemaster daily as part of my 365 Day Challenge. Clozemaster, unlike my Decks courses, makes me read full sentences in Indonesian, and since I've done at least a few sentences daily for the challenge, I think it's paid off.

(Clozemaster also lost my streak on my Indonesian course a couple of months back due to an ongoing glitch they have on the site, so sadly the streak number doesn't reflect how it's the only Clozemaster course that I have actually done every day this year so far. All the others I have either missed a day unintentionally or dropped so a short time for one reason or another.)

Speaking of DW, I noticed a few days ago that iguamamon (I think) mentioned the Learning By Ear series to someone else, and I checked it out myself and got pretty excited that they have it for Hausa. I'm not about to go run off and start learning Hausa just yet, but it is a language on my "What to learn next" short list. Instead I've been listening to some of the French version of this series and it's really good. Just adds to my long-held belief that the Germans really know what they are doing when it comes to making language learning resources. The series has the added bonus of being largely Africa-centric, which is the kind of thing I am looking for with French for my 2020 plans, but the downside of the series is it's limited to only a few languages that appear chosen for their direct relevancy to communication in Africa (and 3 of those languages are colonial languages). Pity there's not more languages available with this series, and pity that Africa-centric content is treated as a limited market like that.

That said, one of the languages available is Swahili. Could this revive my interest in Swahili? It's tempting. Wait, how many noun classes does Swahili have again?

Another thing I wanted to mention in this log entry is earlier I was whining about my lack of motivation with Spanish so I am trying out LyricsTraining again to see if that helps. I don't simply whine without trying to also resolve the problem. I'm not that kind of person, OK? I used this site when it was still pretty new and only with French. Seeing the first Spanish song it offered me this week is both 1) by Latin American artist and 2) a song I find appealing, it seems promising for this purpose:



That reminds me, I think after I finish my next two library books for my Spanish SC, I'm going to just read Harry Potter books for the rest of the year. Why? Well, 1) Spanish copies are all available in multiples at my library so I don't have to give JK Rowling any more of my money, 2) I have all the books, which I've read before, in English, somewhere, and 3) I read that one of the "criticisms" of the Spanish translations of these books was that they were is in Latin American Spanish, which for me isn't a drawback but a good reason to read them.

[Cèid Donn]

It's that very special time of the year where traditionally I talk about turnip lanterns to very indifferent people within earshot of me and complain about how people misrepresent Samhain in relation to modern observances of Halloween! I have a fun one this year!

So, I got in a little verbal disagreement/confusion with my brother yesterday over a Jeopardy! question from yesterday's show.

There was a question about Samhain that said the traditional black and orange for Halloween are believed to come from Samhain observances, with black symbolizing "death" and orange "harvest." I pointed out to my brother than I wasn't so sure about that, since in Gaelic languages, the word for the color orange (orains-GD, oráiste-GA, oranje-GV) as well as the concept of a distinct color between yellow and red were introduced to Gaelic culture along with the fruit. My brother argue that "But the color would have still existed for them even if they didn't call it "orange" right?" Ugh, not the point, Brother. Anyhow, my point is while yes, physically ancient Gaelic eyes probably were able to discern the shade differences between reds and what we modern people call orange, that in their culture, this distinction didn't matter and so the color orange itself has no traditional meaning attached to it. So, orange didn't matter to the ancient Gaels--the closest things with cultural meaning I can come up is "dearg-òir" ("golden red") which seems largely meant for copper and copper-colored things, and "ruadh" which specifically means red hair or fur. It seems likely what ancient Gaelic were thinking in terms of symbolic colors associated with Samhain that was handed down to modern Halloween observances is red rather than orange, and in which case, it probably wasn't so much associated with the harvest, but with the bonfires traditionally lit on the night of Samhain. (Yellow is another alternative possibility, but is less likely because in Gaelic tradition, especially for Scottish Gaels, yellow is more associated with the spring festival of Beltane and with new life and prosperity. Granted, bonfires are also traditionally lit for Beltane. The ancient Gaels were really into bonfires. )

So, why are the modern Halloween colors black and orange and not black and red? I suspect probably to make it distinct from other Christianized pagan holidays where the traditional use of red could be adopted to symbolize Christ and his very bloody sacrifice for us pagan sinners. Pumpkins, once introduced from the Americas, possibly helped too.

Which leads me to my other quibble about this Jeopardy! question: I don't think traditionally Gaelic cultures have associated black with "death," that this too is likely an introduced concept, via Christian mourning traditions. Rather it was associated with night (among other things in other contexts, from evil to beauty), which seems more appropriate with the traditional meaning of Samhain as oppose to post-Christian associations of the festival with All Saint's Day that led to Samhain evolving into Halloween.

Personally I'm not a fan of contemporary Halloween observances. While I am not about to go LARPing around as a 5th century Gael--never mind that good turnips are hard to get in this part of the US and it's illegal to have a bonfire within city limits here --I much prefer to think of this time of year as a very important time in Gaelic tradition rather than whatever people are doing with the gross make-up, rubber masks and candy corn.

***

I've been using LyricsTraining to help me stay motivated with Spanish for a whole 3 days, and as result I have nearly all of Stormae's Papatoutai memorized, right down to the uvular trill he does in faire in the line "faire au moins mille fois qu'on a/bouffé nos doigts": (clearly audible in this performance at 1:57)



Yeah, I might be letting myself spend more time on French songs than Spanish ones...

But with it being almost Halloween--which in this part of the world has been conflated with another pre-Chrisitan tradition-- I suppose I can spend some time with the couple of songs on LyricsTraining that are from the movie Coco:





***

But if jumping around Celtic and Mesoamerican traditions isn't enough, next month is Native American Heritage Month here in the US. Which leads me to the next 6WC, which starts Friday. I am not sure I'll be able to start until the weekend. I have to wait and see what happens with the next meeting with my mom's therapists and care managers. In theory, she could be coming home this weekend, but I sincerely hope not, as both she and i want her to be stronger and more able to do things on her own before she is discharged.

But doing Navajo is going to be...heh, a bit intensive. At least I think I remember how to use the Navajo keyboard. But on the fun side, Navajo is one of the handful of extant languages where its culture and placenames align with the natural environment of my place of residence, and the Navajo Nation has a pretty sweet flag:



I would like to try and record all my language learning times with the 6WC bot this time around as well, but I'm not sure how I want to do that. It will be easy to track one language, but my schedule right now is in chaos and even of a slow day I do work on at least 2 languages, not counting Clozemaster or other apps. So Navajo will be in addition to that. So I don't know. I will try. I'm a bit out of practice will recording ALL my study times and if it gets too insane, I'll just sick to tweeting my Navajo time to the bot.

[Cèid Donn]

Oidhche Shamhna shona dhuibh, a h-uile duine.

The meeting at the rehab center went well. While my mom is making good progress, due to her age eeryone agrees she needs more time there and so they'll keeping my mom there for at least another week. Now I don't have to panic and deal with all the logistics of bringing her home this weekend. Whew.

Meanwhile I am feeling anxious about this 6WC so I decided this morning to keep things simple and as streamlined as possible. The problem isn't doing the 6WC so much as doing all the other stuff I want to do before the year is up. Oh and I have to start planning now for Thanksgiving, both in terms of my studies and with Thanksgiving dinner , because guess who does all the cooking and baking in this family? Ok, my sibling helps when and where he can but anything more complicated than a quick 30-minute one-skillet meal falls on my shoulders around here. Anyhow, I may not be the most mature or reliable adult around, but I at least understand the power of pre-planning.

For my Navajo 6WC, I needed to set myself up with a new notebook for it--I have an old 8-subject notebook that has one section dedicated to past Navajo studies, but for this 6WC I wanted to start with a fresh notebook. I've gotten in the habit of using Moleskine Cahier journals, the smaller size (3x5 inches or whatever), for when I spend time on focusing on different languages, like with the LangJam (Yoruba), the last 6WC (Russian) and most recently with my Breton review. It's a system that works for me--little notebooks for short projects. Problems is, I usually bum the Moleskines off my sibling who buys them in bulk for his own stuff and right now he's low. So I had to order some new ones. They'll be here tomorrow, hopefully. I got the "Brisk Blue" ones--it is close to turquoise so I think that would be a very appropriate for Navajo.

I listed most of my resources for Navajo in an earlier post. I looked on Decks (Memrise) to see what they had, and it's all the same slim picking--very short vocab courses and unfinished courses. Oh well. One thing I do want to focus on is vocabulary building and making a notebook to record vocabulary I learn that I can use as my own reference and review tool (hence the need for a fresh notebook). That's going to be my little project within the 6WC itself.

I've finished my Gaelic Film SC. Now I just need to read a Gaelic book, or a dozen. Technically, with finishing Cemeterio de Animales yesterday, I've finished my Spanish SC too, because I originally signed up for a half SC with Spanish. But I'll keep plugging away at it because I really do need to practice my Spanish more...besides doing Clozemaster and LyricTraining....

Speaking of Clozemaster, yes, I got the bug this week where my weekly leaderboard score didn't reset, which is why I'm #1 right now (and Expugnator isn't--sorry). Without my score from last week, I think I'm around 100k for this week so far.

[Cèid Donn]

So the 6WC is underway. I got a lot done over the weekend although not everything I had hoped. I just try to do too much as always. But keeping a notebook with my plans for the day helps keep track of the things I don't get done. With needing to fit in yet another language, it is easy for me to forget what I need to do with my regular TLs.

My mom got the staples from her surgery out today and there is a likelihood she will come home later this week. Add to that, I'm majorly stressing out about my legal issue, which should be resolved this week. So I'm glad I got a lot done this weekend with my languages--I have no idea what time and energy I will have for languages for the week and next weekend at this point. Things could all go smoothly or they may not. We'll see.

I'm getting re-familiarized with Navajo at this point. I always forget how deceptively dense the Goossen text is. It's also not exactly thorough in the way you would expect a textbook to be. It will throw you one form of something, whatever form he feels you need to know at that point, but leaves related forms for later. This can get a little irritating if you want to say you personally do/want/are something and so far you only know how to say he/she/it does/want/are that something, so you have to spent time looking it up elsewhere in the book. I think this is one reason self-learners give up on it. It makes you feel like it throws a lot at you but not linearly and also leaves you feeling you haven't learned anything useful.

The other day I came across this project, Amazing Things Happen, aimed at creating video media for parents and educators that explain the experiences of autistic children and fostering better understanding of autism and the needs of autistics. Their video project, Amazing Things Happen, is pretty good and well-researched--those familiar with the autism community will probably recognize Tony Attwood's name--but the really nice thing about it is it's available in several languages, including a number of my own TLs and many of the ones I watched also had subtitles available. This makes it a nice resource for learning some basic vocabulary for talking about autism in a TL. Sadly no Gaelic, Irish or Breton versions yet (I found this via a tweet by Catrìona NicilleDhuibh requesting help with making a Gaelic version):

[kanewai]

So, I got in a little verbal disagreement/confusion with my brother yesterday over a Jeopardy! question from yesterday's show.

There was a question about Samhain that said the traditional black and orange for Halloween are believed to come from Samhain observances, with black symbolizing "death" and orange "harvest." I pointed out to my brother than I wasn't so sure about that, since in Gaelic languages, the word for the color orange (orains-GD, oráiste-GA, oranje-GV) as well as the concept of a distinct color between yellow and red were introduced to Gaelic culture along with the fruit. My brother argue that "But the color would have still existed for them even if they didn't call it "orange" right?" Ugh, not the point, Brother.

I was fascinated when I heard John McWhorter talk about the order that languages develop words for color. In the Pacific Islands there is only one word to cover both blue and green, but I never knew that there were linguistic reasons behind this, or that it was perfectly normal. And it seemed like an easy enough concept ... but if I ever try and explain it to anyone I usually get something along the lines of "but that doesn't make any sense."

[Cèid Donn]

I was fascinated when I heard John McWhorter talk about the order that languages develop words for color. In the Pacific Islands there is only one word to cover both blue and green, but I never knew that there were linguistic reasons behind this, or that it was perfectly normal. And it seemed like an easy enough concept ... but if I ever try and explain it to anyone I usually get something along the lines of "but that doesn't make any sense."

Oh, this is a topic that fascinates me too, but I haven't really gotten too deeply into it. Prior to studying Gaelic, there was the occasional footnote on this with the languages I had studied, or the occasional annoyance for me personally as someone with some background in visual arts and (European) color theory, but it wasn't until Gaelic that I really got a sense of how very complicated this gets. With Celtic language, it's not just warm colors that traditionally divided differently from how Modern English speaker think about these colors, but for cooler colors, there are also traditional spectrums of sky blues to grey, darker blues to black, and in-between blues to greens that don't correspond with how we divide up cool colors in English and this gets confusing for beginner earners, like if they learn liath is light blue and then hear someone say a person has falt liath (grey or silvery hair).

I later learned that in North American indigenous languages, the "color map" is every more different and influenced by religious and spiritual meanings of different colors that have no correlation in IE languages. Turquoise in Navajo is dootł’izh, and it is connected to Navajo spiritual teachings of the evolution of the soul (the 2nd of the 4 worlds of the Navajo soul is the Turquoise World--we currently live in the Yellow, or 3rd World, as defined by the sun), so it's a kind of primary color in their worldview, from where other greens and blues on the Earth are derived. But in English we think of turquoise as a blended color dependent on the primary and secondary colors of blue and green, and so it loses the connotation of primacy it has in Navajo--it's just one of the dozens shades of blue-green and not a color uniquely imbued with Creation.

I haven't had the chance to delve into Oceanic languages as much I would like. The only language in that family I study right now is Indonesian and that's probably not the best language for digging into the traditional color map of this language group because of its IE influences and standardization. But I will definitely keep an eye out for this now in my dabbling with Hawaiian and Maori and whatever piques my interest down the line.

Here's a short video on this issue as a topic within linguistics. People have opinions on it! Surprise!

[jeff_lindqvist]

And here is Gareth Popkins with A Polyglot's Prism (Polyglot Gathering 2015):

[Cèid Donn]

This week has been pretty exhausting. Legal stuff, car stuff, house stuff, pet stuff and my mom, who's being discharged Saturday so there's planning stuff, more house stuff, calling medical equipment company stuff. Top it all off, for the past 3 days I've been struggling with chest pains and an irregular heartbeat--the kind of stuff normal people in sane countries not run by greed-driven ghouls go to the doctor for, but I live in the US. So in lieu of the doctor, I've been having to rest a lot and hope I don't have a massive heart attack at some point.

All things considering, I am getting a lot more done than should be possible. I credit my study habits for this. Due to low energy reserves, I have slacked off on Clozemaster a lot this week and for at least two days, I just went on and did one or two sentences for each course to keep my streaks. Didn't count that on my 6WC total, of course--I only counted work on Decks and Drops because the bare minimum for those apps requires at least 5 minutes and some effort. (Granted, I forgot about Drops last night and lost my streak--fortunately I don't like Drops enough to care that much.) Hopefully tonight I'll get the ball rolling with Clozemaster. I think I have almost 3000 reviews sentences for the French<English course alone.

Clozemaster and other apps aside, I've been making sure I get in enough studying done with at least one of my 365 day languages every day, in addition to Navajo for the 6WC. I'm actually really proud that I managed to stick to this all the time my mom's been in the hospital. There were a couple of night in October that I thought "Would it be so bad if I miss a day--I certainly have good cause to do so." But I managed to rally myself and get in at least 30 minutes. So barring myself having a full-blown medical crisis (which is possible, not going to lie here) I am still very committed to completing the 365 challenge.

I made an executive decision regarding the remainder of my SC. Technically I've completed all my SCs except my Gaelic Books SC. I signed up for a half SC fo Spanish so I've reached 50/50 in both, I finish my French SC a while ago and my Gaelic Film SC a week or so ago. So I'm just going to focus on Gaelic reading now.

Which leads me to my next decision: with the time remaining for that challenge, I have two choices. I can read extensively, and quickly, and make up ground lost earlier for various reasons, or I can use the remaining time to read moer intensive, slowly, and accept I probably won't complete the SC. You see, I have spent much of this SC readily extensively and it's be good practice. But I've read/re-read/re-re-read nearly all the Gaelic books I have, and what books I am interested in re-reading, I want to do so more intensively and carefully, but I'm getting bored with extensive reading in Gaelic. So I can just go through the motions and reading extensively to finish the challenge, or I can do what I feel is more beneficial for me right now. I've decided to do the latter, which means I probably won't complete this SC, but that's not really to point of doing all of this anyways, right?

That said, I will continue to read, mostly extensively, in Spanish because I feel that's beneficial for my Spanish progress as this stage, but I won't be tweeting any more Spanish reading to the SC bot.

EDIT: I hit send before mentioning this:

To help with my heart troubles, I've been singing--if I get enough work done, I record it for my 6WC as well. I'm currently working on French, Spanish and Breton songs. I want to get back to some of my Gaelic songs too. But here's the Breton song I'm working one--a deceptively challenging little ditty, I confess:



The singer here is Yann-Fañch Kemener, who died earlier this year at the sadly young age of 61. He was a major figure in recent efforts to revive traditional Breton music and his untimely passing was kind of big deal for the Breton community.

EDIT 2: Speaking of his passing, there is a collaborative that's been putting together tribute recordings in Yann-Fañch's honor, and here's one very interesting effort--the ending doesn't make much sense unless you've listened to the video I posted above. But I love stuff like this, where regular people are motivated to participate in music and culture:



EDIT 3 - 11/18/2019: This will be the last entry for this log. With both the SC and the 365 challenges winding down, I don't see any reason to post in this log again. Twitter is sufficient for tracking my 6WC progress.