Guyome's log

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guyome
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Re: Guyome's log

Postby guyome » Sun Aug 01, 2021 9:43 am

Thanks, cjareck! I'll have a look at these.

Finding these names on maps is not essential but I like having a better feel for the physical places mentioned in these documents (and distances between them). Of course, the difficulty lies in the fact that they provide the Manchu version of 18th c. Mongolian names, while contemporary maps of Inner Mongolia will often provide the Mandarin version of 20th c. Mongolian names. It's not too hard too recognize Mongolian names under the guise of Chinese syllables but during these two and a half centuries a lot of the smaller places have either disappeared or changed names.

The best resource, I think, may be maps made in the early 20th c.: detailed enough and closer in time to the documents. I just found a very likely candidate for Bumbutu (where Bandi stole Sainbayar's camel in 1762) in a 1917 Complete atlas of China. It's not too far from Ice Hoton (Suiyüan on the map) where he later sold this camel.

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guyome
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Re: Guyome's log

Postby guyome » Mon Aug 02, 2021 10:00 am

Manchu
Just a short post about the sometimes rather complex structure of the Manchu memorials I have been posting about recently (because I know it's the only thing preventing you from cracking open Roth-Li's Manchu: a Textbook for Reading Documents).

As we have them, these memorials are communications from a very top level official to the emperor:
Official A says: "Something happened, so I did this and think we should do that. What say you?".
So far so good. But Beijing-based official A is not the only one involved in the business he is reporting about. He is only acting on information communicated to him by lower Official B, whose report is quoted verbatim by higher Official A, leading to the following structure:
Official A says: "Official B says: 'Something happened, so I did this', so I did this".
But there are rarely only two levels of administration involved and at the beginning of memorials we can follow the chain of reports down to local low-level officials, whose reports started the legal proceedings. With sometimes 5 or 6 different officials involved and 20 pages of text, your average memorial can quickly turn into a maze of quotes by officials, witnesses and defendants, and it's sometimes easy to lose track of who's doing or saying what.

Thankfully, there are some mitigating factors. Some of the officials or people involved do very little except passing on information, so the layer they add is quite thin (still, quotes opened at the beginning of the document by top officials are only closed at the very end, 10-20 pages latters, even if they didn't intervene much).
It also helps that officials sometimes write "I, official X", giving the reader an anchor point.
Last, Manchu memorials make good use of a feature of the fact that in Manchu a quote generally starts with a non-finite saying verb and ends with a finite saying verb. So something like: Sainbayar saying Bandi stole my horse in 1765 spoke. This means that you can help the reader of a memorial by using different saying verbs for different actors and bracketing their quotes accordingly. For instance, the overall structure of a simple three-level memorial would look like
Official A memorialising: about Official B sending: about Official C reporting: about Sainbayar informing Bandi stole my horse in 1765 informed, so I (Official C) did this, reported he. So I (official B) did this, sent he. So I (official A) did this, memorialised he.
Official A's words are bracketed by the verb "to memorialise", Official B's by "to send", Official C's by "to report" and Sainbayar's by "to inform", making the Russian-doll-like structure A[B[C[Sainbayar]C]B]A easier to apprehend.
The juicy bits (the depositions) would be located in official B's statement, for instance, and bracketed by the verb "to answer": ...So I (official B) did this and questioned X, who answering "this and that" answered, and I questioned Y, who answering "this and that" answered,... (leading to A[B[C[Sainbayar]C]B[X]B[Y]B[Z]B]A).



Edit. Rereading this post, I'm not sure it does much to enlighten the reader :? Indentation would probably make the structure thing much clearer but is there a way to do that on the forum?
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guyome
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Re: Guyome's log

Postby guyome » Wed Aug 04, 2021 6:21 pm

Manchu

And the award for the stupidest murder of the year 1795 goes to the Inner Mongolian contestant, Arabjai:
buya niyalma bi Karacin i jasak gūsai monggo ajigen ci lama ofi. Gaogartu gašan de tehebi. ere aniya orin nadan se. Šaobandi i emu gašan de bi umai kimun buhiyecun akū.
ere aniya aniya biyai orin i yamjishūn. buya niyalma bi Šaobandi i boode bai sargašame genefi. ini booi juwe indahūn feksime tucifi saire de. buya niyalma uthai wehe be tunggiyefi. indahūn be tantaha. Šaobandi tucifi bi sinde indahūn be ilibuci wajiha. si aiseme kemuni indahūn be tantaki sembini seme gisurehe de. buya niyalma bi terebe tantarakū niyalma be sairahū seme gisurehe ini gisun simbe saiha de. jai terebe tantaci inu sitaburakū. buya niyalmai gisun. sini booi indahūn niyalma ci hono ujen nio. ini gisun esi sinci majige ujen seme gisurehe turgunde. buya niyalma emu erin i jili de. uthai ici ergi gala i Šaobandi i ici ergi yasa de emgeri tantaha. i uthai jamarame toome buya niyalma be amcame tantaki serede. buya niyalma jili de nukcibufi Šaobandi be emgeri anara jakade. i sarbatala tuheke. tere erinde. buya niyalmai etuhengge ineku sukū i hafiraha sabu. uthai ici ergi bethei imbe juwe ilanggeri fesheleme. Šaobandi i sargan inu tucikebi. buya niyalma inu boode genehekū. uthai ukame amasi genehe. amala niyalmai gisun. Šaobandi bucehe sehebe donjifi. buya niyalma geleme teni Cahar i lamun gūsai bade ukame genefi. tere emu inenggi Gio Šen Miyoo sere juktehen i juleri janggin Norbu be ucarafi. uthai buya niyalma be jafafi ubade benjihe.
ere Šaobandi buya niyalma de. an i ucuri hūwaliyasun sain bihe. yargiyan i i indahūn be haršame anggai ici niyalma be tooha turgunde. buya niyalma emu erin i jili de terebe fesheleme tantaha. gūnihakū i uthai bucehe damu kesi isibureo seme jabumbi.


I am a mongol from the Karacin jasak banner. From my youth, I have been a monk and lived in the village of Gaogartu. I am 27 this year. I live in the same village as Šaobandi, without grudge or distrust.
This year, on the 20th day of the first month [February 9th, 1795], I went to pay Šaobandi a visit at his house, for no special reason. His two dogs ran out towards me and bit me, I picked up a stone and hit the dog. Šaobandi came out and said:
- I'm holding the dogs for you, it's over. Why do you still want to hit them?
- I'm not hitting them, I'm afraid they're going to bite me.
- If you hit them again after they've bitten you, I won't hold them.
- Are your dogs more important than a person?
- They're certainly more important than you!
At this, I immediately saw red, so I hit Šaobandi's right eye once with my right hand. And so he cursed me and wanted to go after me and hit me. When this happened, I was blinded by rage and I pushed him. Because of this, he fell writhing. At that moment, I was wearing shoes made of (pressed?) leather. I kicked him two or three times with my right foot and that's when his wife came out. I didn't go into the house. I fled and went back. Later, I heard that Šaobandi had died and I fled to the Blue Chahar Banner. One day, I ran into Adjudant Norbu in front of the Gio Shen Miyoo temple. He caught me and sent me here.
I was normally in good terms with Šaobandi. Truly, it's because he was partial to his dogs and was so quick to rail at me that I hit him in a fit of anger. And then he died unexpectedly. Please, be kind to me.

(清朝前期理藩院满蒙文题本, volume 23, p. 260-276 for the full memorial)
I'm not entirely sure of my translation of the underlined bit.
The village of Gaogartu must be somewhere around the city of Pingquan (formerly Bakou, Manchu Bageo) since that's where one of the top officials in the transmission chain reports from.
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guyome
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Re: Guyome's log

Postby guyome » Tue Aug 24, 2021 7:24 pm

Persian
I've been getting slowly back into Persian for the last few weeks. Nothing crazy, just reworking quickly through Assimil and reading short stuff here and there. I've forgotten quite a few words I had learned at the end of 2020 but other than that it doesn't seem that this almost complete break away from Persian has done too much harm. We'll see how for I can carry it this time.

Gascon
Reading some short and not too difficult texts, which means mostly tales. Two (out of three) volumes of Bladèr's Contes de Gasconha are available from Per Noste at the very low price of 2€. It's a 1980/90s republication, in Classical Norm spelling, of the original, 19th c. texts.



Uzbek
I've also spent some time with Uyghur but reading about what's happening in Xinjiang right now is too depressing. Instead, I'm dabbling in Uzbek using the course freely available at http://jblmflc.com/.

Until today, I thought that the course was only available online, at http://jblmflc.com/Uzbek/Uzbek%20SOF%20 ... /index.htm, which made it less user friendly since you can't batch download the audio from this address. After looking around for a solution, I found that you can download the entire course in one zip file from the homepage: http://jblmflc.com/ (Resources > Familiarization Courses > [Geographical area] > [Language] > Download).

Their offer is a rather large one, with many rarer languages available. The courses (all following the same format) are not exactly pretty but content-wise they don't seem worse to me than your average Colloquial or Teach Yourself.
A nice feature of the downloadable version is that, apoart from the exepcted pdf and mp3 files, it also comes with a software called Rapide Rote and the corresponding files based on the contents of each lesson. Basically, it enables you to work through the lesson's material from various angles (cards, memory games, comparing your pronounciation to that of the recording, etc).

Here are four screenshots:Image
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DaveAgain
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Re: Guyome's log

Postby DaveAgain » Tue Aug 24, 2021 8:09 pm

guyome wrote:Gascon
Reading some short and not too difficult texts, which means mostly tales. Two (out of three) volumes of Bladèr's Contes de Gasconha are available from Per Noste at the very low price of 2€. It's a 1980/90s republication, in Classical Norm spelling, of the original, 19th c. texts.
I'm reading Das lied von Bernadette [Soubirous] at the moment, it has some teeny tiny snippets of Gascon here and there :-)
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guyome
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Re: Guyome's log

Postby guyome » Wed Aug 25, 2021 1:26 pm

DaveAgain wrote:I'm reading Das lied von Bernadette [Soubirous] at the moment, it has some teeny tiny snippets of Gascon here and there :-)

It's always nice to find some unexpected Gascon :) The Virgin indeed spoke Gascon* to Bernadette: "Que soy era immaculada concepciou".

*Pyrenean Gascon, complete with enunciative que and feminine definite article era.

Image
Last edited by guyome on Wed Aug 25, 2021 7:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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nooj
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Re: Guyome's log

Postby nooj » Wed Aug 25, 2021 1:50 pm

That reminds me of something I saw in a church in Urepel or maybe it was Baigorri:

Image

Ni naiz pekaturik gabe kontzebitua
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زندگی را با عشق
نوش جان باید کرد

guyome
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Re: Guyome's log

Postby guyome » Tue Sep 07, 2021 7:36 pm

Persian
Still doing a bit with Persian everyday, sometimes reviewing Assimil lessons, sometimes reading/listening in the wild.

I was lucky enough to stumble upon a large collection of second hand books for sale at a very, very low price. I've bought a couple dozens of them as I know owning physical books is going to do wonders for my motivation and extensive reading (that is, as soon as my level hits this sweet spot where you can read, albeit slowly, actual books).

Uzbek
I've been spending more and more time with/on Uzbek during the week and I really enjoy it. This, of course, means slower progress with Persian but I'm kind of ok with that, it's not like I'm relocating to Iran anytime soon, so there is no rush there.

I've done the first five lessons of the Familiarization course. I quite like the course for the moment, especially the fact that it doesn't throw dozens of new words in each lesson. There is a decent number of exercises and audio files for around half of them.

I've also been gathering some free (and legal) resources for Uzbek:

Media
- https://mediabay.tv/ (Uzbek TV/radios)
- BBC Uzbek
- Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
- Voice of America

Everyday speech

- YangiKulgu (short comedy clips)
- a vlogger

Books

- https://kitob.uz/catalog/allbooks (books and audiobooks)
- https://eduportal.uz/ (school textbooks by level and video lessons)

Tools
- Uzbek-English dictionary
- GLOSS Uzbek (149 short texts+audio, various levels)
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guyome
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Re: Guyome's log

Postby guyome » Sat Sep 11, 2021 6:12 pm

Yiddish
A few months ago, I "discovered" https://www.yiddish24.com/ but it's only during last week that I had a closer look at it. Basically, it is a website offering a very large number of podcasts on a wide variety of topics (news, interviews, analysis, business, etc.). I don't know when they started operating but there is already more than 250 episodes of their History podcast and more than 300 interviews on general topics, so it all seems very active, with quite a few new podcasts added on a daily basis.

As you might have guessed if you're even vaguely familiar with the linguistic situation Yiddish, such a massive and sustained effort can only come from the Hasidim, the only sizeable segment of the population for whom Yiddish is an everyday language. This means many of the podcasts are not exactly what you would find on your average, English-speaking news site or radio. To me this only adds to its value because, while I don't really need another New York Times-like take on what's happening on Afghanistan, I find it interesting to hear what members of a devout Jewish religious movement might have to say on the matter. In the same way, I have started listening to a 10-episode series on 17th c. Izmir-born false Messiah Shabbatai Tsvi, probably not something I can get elsewhere.

I have sometimes lamented the lack of contemporary online content in Yiddish (secular material is mostly archives, large and very interesting but archives nonetheless, and Hasidic material was mostly religious in nature, very interesting in its own right but up to a point). Maybe Yiddish24 will be kind of a game changer, providing me with more varied content.

Here are, for example, the topics of the first four (out of 12) podcasts in the "Various" category: Shabbat Pack, Marvel of Marvels (about wildflife), Good Question! ("what came first: orange the fruit or orange the colour?" and the like), and Exciting Stories.

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guyome
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Re: Guyome's log

Postby guyome » Wed Sep 15, 2021 8:53 am

Uzbek
Working through lesson 8 of the Familiarization Course today. I'm usually not a fan of textbooks having lessons centered around a theme (Saying Hello, At the Restaurant, Taking the Bus, etc.) but this one I enjoy. I think it hits my sweet spot as far as the new vocab/grammar/exercises ratio is concerned.

The 20 lessons probably cover all the basic grammar and around 600 vocab items. Maybe I'll manage to go through the whole thing, we'll see.
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