ALTVM VIDETVR

[vonPeterhof]

Man, Gen Urobuchi is on a roll right now: he's not even done leaving his mark on Taiwanese wuxia puppetry when they get him on board of the latest instalment of the world's longest running movie franchise. I guess I've got my work cut out for me in Japanese (that is, in addition to my actual paying work ) - I need to fully familiarize myself with the history of the Godzilla franchise until January next year (or later, if I don't manage to catch a screening in Japan).

Anyway, language learning:

I haven't managed to top the tempo of two lessons per week, so the projected time until completion of the available lessons is about three and a half months.

Well, this time I have actually managed to top the tempo - in fact, I've managed to do one Latin lesson per day! Mainly it's because I've had a very slow week at work (though not slow enough to work in a page of the Manchu book a week; in spite of that Manchu has still swollen to around half of my daily Anki reviews). If things continue that way I might be able to finish the course in about three weeks.

I've also spent some of my idle time thinking about the future of my current challenge, and I think I've now got a roadmap figured out for what languages I'll be doing. I mean, the lineup of the actual classical languages I'll be dabbling in remains unchanged from how I initially set it, but now I've more or less decided on which modern language I'll be doing after each classical language. Here's how the overall challenge will look like, from the start (strike - completed the course; underline - completed the reading of a classical text):

Classical Chinese - Hakka
Written Manchu - Mandarin
Ancient Greek - Georgian
Latin [now here] - European Portuguese
Old Church Slavonic - Polish
Old Norse - Estonian
Quranic Arabic - Avar
New Persian (Dari) - Karachay-Balkar
Biblical Hebrew - Yiddish
Classical Sanskrit - Thai

I've thought hard about all of those choices, so I guess I'll explain the reasoning behind them:

Polish: I was considering simply picking Romanian back up for this one, but then thought that I might as well take up a completely new language, especially since I already have a resource on hand (an Ilya Frank reader of Joanna Cmielewska's Wszytko czerwone, courtesy of Serpent). While Polish neither directly descends from OCS nor has been strongly influenced by it (in fact it's probably had the least contact with OCS out of all the major Slavic languages), It should provide some interesting comparisons and contrasts with its phonological conservatism that's in some cases almost equal to that of OCS (e.g. preservation of the nasal vowels) and in others even greater (e.g. preservation of the *-dlo suffix). Besides, learning some Polish vocabulary should help make Belarusian and Ukrainian even more transparent.

Estonian: Here me having the resources on hand was also a decisive factor - I've had a copy of E nagu Eesti my mother gave me as a souvenir from Tallinn lying idle on my shelf for years now. While Estonian probably wasn't as strongly influenced by North Germanic languages as Finnish, there's still apparently a pretty strong overall Germanic component in the vocabulary.

Avar: The other options I was seriously considering were picking Gulf Arabic back up and picking up Maltese, but since I probably wouldn't be able to resist getting back to Avar at the first opportunity, might as well give it more of a focus.

Karachay-Balkar: Yet another choice motivated by the presence of resources, this time a translation of Omar Khayyam Rubaiyat, which should be a good complement to the original text. I've already checked out some of the language through my dabbling in Noghay, since I've also started getting listening practice via news from Karachay-Cherkessia, and it's actually a bit more transparent for me with my Kazakh than I thought it would be (though noticeably less transparent than Noghay). I guess my perception of other Kipchak languages was a bit skewed by Volga and Crimean Tatar, both of which have apparently been somewhat more strongly influenced by Ottoman Turkish (no, I am not regretting having abandoned the Turkic challenge, why do you ask? ). As for Persian itself, I decided to step away from the pattern for the other classical languages and do a course for the modern language instead, since Persian grammar is fairly conservative overall, while Dari is the closest to Classical Persian phonologically.

Yiddish: Possibly the easiest choice on the list, as Yiddish is one of the major reasons why I included Hebrew in the challenge in the first place. That's not to say that iguanamon's log hasn't been tempting me with Judaeo-Spanish

Thai: Picking up a modern Indian/South Asian language or picking Indonesian back up would have been the more obvious choices, but Thai wins out through a combination of slightly greater curiosity about the country and the allure of its writing system. Yeah, I've heard that the video makes somewhat exaggerated claims about it, but it still looks like a very interesting challenge. Although I do hope that learning it won't be like Manchu in that I end up ignoring the actual language almost entirely in order to memorize connections between letter combinations and sounds [says the guy who happily spent half a year memorizing connections between Chinese character strokes and semi-arbitrary English keywords ]

[Expugnator]

Some thoughts:

- I understand that the classical and the modern language in each line aren't necessarily related, but there are a few interesting syntactical common feats between Greek and Georgian;

- I wonder how far you can go with Avar in terms of resources (I might have already asked you that). Last time I tried I couldn't read Russian yet, so maybe it's time for resource mapping as to allow future excursions into the language;

- The Germanic influence on Estonian is far from negligible. It might have fewer Swedish loans (I know no Finish), but German has left an intense imprint on syntax and there are a lot of common daily vocabulary roots that are clearly Germanic. Probably some inventions prior to the Soviet times were named after their German counterparts.

Good luck with your journey!

[vonPeterhof]

I wonder how far you can go with Avar in terms of resources (I might have already asked you that). Last time I tried I couldn't read Russian yet, so maybe it's time for resource mapping as to allow future excursions into the language

Yeah, getting more advanced learning resources might be a non-trivial task. The author of my textbook does list a number of recommended resources for further study, but since the book itself is from 1996 they're all even older than that, with most being from the 1960's. And most of those resources are scholarly literature on specific aspects of the language (morphology, syntax, dialectology, etc.) rather than actual learning materials. There's even a couple in languages other than Russian and Avar - like Chikobava and Tsertsvadze's book in Georgian or Charachidzé's grammar in French. I haven't really looked around for other resources so far, aside from a bit of the media - it appears that the Avar service of RFE/RL has been suspended since May, but there are some government-supported media available. I don't really have any specific plans for achieving a certain level in Avar, so I don't know if I will even want any further resources after I'm done with the book.

[vonPeterhof]

Yesterday I went to one of Moscow's larger bookstore to look for some resources for studying and saw that they've stocked up on materials for Turkic languages. It took all my willpower to limit myself to buying just one of them - a small collection of Chekhov's short stories in Russian-Kazakh parallel text format. I also bought a proper introductory course for Georgian (Mzevinar Akobia's Давайте учить грузинский язык with an audio CD and an appendix for practising writing) and a book in Latin - Mark Walker's translation of The Hobbit, Hobbitus Ille. While I'm not sure if I'm going to make that my reading material after I finish the Latin course (I already bookmarked a site for The Gallic War), but I'm definitely open to these sorts of translations for a bit of fun reading. Still need to get my hands on Ἅρειος Ποτὴρ καὶ ἡ τοῦ φιλοσόφου λίθος

Still keeping the steady pace for the Latin course. Got a little more done in reading Manchu than last week, though still didn't manage to read a page every single day - plus the weekend fell through because the Manchu transliteration site is down again, hopefully not for good. In Nogai there was no new issue of Шоьл тавысы uploaded this week, so I went with Ногай давысы instead. The issues are shorter - only four pages - and are more dedicated to politics and less to culture. While this does make it a little less interesting for me, the upside is that a lot of the articles are translations of official press releases from the websites of the Karachay-Cherkess Republic, the Nogai municipal district and various organisations, so there's more opportunities for bilingual reading.

I've also watched a documentary in Karachay about the Karachay and Balkar communities in Saint Petersburg. Aside from finding out that the head fire inspector of my home district is Karachay I've noticed that the Karachay and Balkar people seem to have a lot more in common with the neighbouring Northeast Caucasian ethnic groups than with other Kipchaks (from costumes and dances to the physical appearance). It also appears that the Northwest Caucasian dichotomy of "Highlanders and lowland Turks" is turned on its head in the Northeast, since in both Karachay-Cherkessia and Kabardino-Balkaria the Turkic Karachay-Balkars tend to live in the more mountainous areas (in fact one of their endonyms is "таулула" - "mountain dwellers"; incidentally, that's also what the Avar self-apellation "магIарулал" translates to). All of that makes it all the more curious that there aren't that many noticeable Kabardian and other Caucasian influences in their language, as far as I can tell.

[Expugnator]

I also bought a proper introductory course for Georgian (Mzevinar Akobia's Давайте учить грузинский язык with an audio CD and an appendix for practising writing)

A good text, though when I went through it my Georgian level was more like a lower intermediate and my Russian level was quite low, so acquiring the vocabulary was a bit tiresome as it was more likely I knew the word in Georgian and not in Russian. I didn't feel much compelled to practicing writing either, because Georgian doesn't have a proper 'cursive' with ligatures and such nowadays and I could already draw the letters on my own. Nonetheless, it works pretty well as a graded reader into A2, with audio.

[vonPeterhof]

The Manchu transliterator appears to have expired, so for now I have no means to continue reading the diary in the script. It could be possible to try to track down the Chinese version published upon the diary's rediscovery, complete with photocopies of the original text, but this sounds like too much effort even if I did have an adequate level of Chinese reading comprehension. For now I've decided to go on reading the transliterated text and the English translation. Since I won't be adding new sentences to Anki I can move through the book faster by going through one page of the Manchu text per day instead of the English. If I can keep that pace I'll be done in about ten days.

While I was waiting for something to happen to the transliterator I also did something I should have probably done at the very beginning - read through the book's lengthy introduction, where the translator provides much needed historical and cultural context. Apparently the diary was written by a mid-level officer named Dzengšeo and the surviving portion of the diary describes the final years of the Revolt of the Three Feudatories. While no direct evidence that would shed light on the author's identity has been found, textual and metatextual clues suggest that he was a hereditary officer born in Beijing after the Qing took over from the Ming, brought up with a good education in Manchu and at least some education in Chinese, but apparently never reached a very high rank in the army. This provides a very valuable perspective on Manchu culture and society in the early days of the Qing, as he was neither clueless about Han Chinese culture nor fully assimilated into it, not so poor as to be illiterate but not so rich as to be completely out of touch with the everyday hardships of war. While Dzengšeo tries to stick to a dry and impartial account of his war days his personal perspective very often shines through, and looking at it from a completely different place and time it's sometimes very relatable (his disdain of his self-serving superiors, sympathy for the common people's wartime suffering, feelings of guilt for not always being able to keep his soldiers in check, crying himself to sleep on New Years Eve because he couldn't spend it with his family) and sometimes very alienating (bureaucratically detached descriptions of the processes of looting and dividing spoils, mentioning as a matter of fact that he had "sold a woman in order to buy horses", dehumanizing remarks about the Miao and other indigenous groups). All in all it's a very interesting look at a historical event from a perspective you wouldn't normally get from an encyclopaedia entry.

My work with other languages is proceeding as planned, so I should be done with the Latin course by this time next week. Since I'll also be visiting my family in Saint Petersburg at that time I'll be able to pick up my old Russian copy of The Hobbit and start reading the Latin translation in parallel. I can always get back to Caesar's memoirs afterwards, but right now I might need something more interesting to hook me. Besides, Hobbitus Ille comes with a small glossary and an appendix on poetic metres, so I guess it can sort of count as an annotated text (and even if not: my challenge, my rules ).

[vonPeterhof]

My work with other languages is proceeding as planned, so I should be done with the Latin course by this time next week. Since I'll also be visiting my family in Saint Petersburg at that time I'll be able to pick up my old Russian copy of The Hobbit and start reading the Latin translation in parallel.

Oops, looks like I was looking forward to my holiday so much that I accidentally "rescheduled" it to a week earlier - sadly, only in my mind rather than in the holiday plan agreed upon with my coworkers I'll have to wait another week to get my hands on the Russian Hobbit, but I guess I can start checking out the Latin text now, since I'm done with Ludus Latinicus. Or at least, the part of the course that was available online - for some reason the online version ends abruptly four lessons into the second half. A shame, because I really liked the way it was structured compared to the first one - instead of introducing bits and pieces of several grammar points, each lesson zeroes in on the various forms and uses of a specific word or grammar point. Although with the other resources available online I'm sure it won't be too difficult to look up explanations for unfamiliar grammar later on.

While I did manage to complete the Latin course as scheduled, it didn't work quite as well with the Manchu book, due to this week at work being much busier than the previous two. It looks like the upcoming week will be even busier, so I might have to finish Dzengšeo's diary during my week off. I did mostly manage to do some work in the other activities. Either way, I am looking forward to diving into Old Church Slavonic and Portuguese tomorrow.

[vonPeterhof]

Last week at work was really hard, with me having to stay overtime past 10 PM on two occasions, so I didn't do as much language learning as I would have liked to. I've made practically no progress towards finishing my Manchu reading and barely started reading the Latin version of Hobbit. Still, I have started on my Old Church Slavonic studies through Turbin and Shulezhkova's primer, and also European Portuguese through Pimsleur. Now that I have a week off I hope I can get as much as possible done before I go back to work.

Reading through the OCS book I've started regretting not getting the other, older one back when I was shopping for resources. That one was very detailed in exploring Slavic historical linguistics and models of reconstruction of the phonology of OCS. While the one I got does spend almost 50 pages, or about a quarter of its volume, on the sound changes from Proto-Indo-European that led to the formation of the phonological system of OCS, it lends next to no time to the discussion of aspects like accentuation or vowel length (beyond the distinction of the "ultra-short" vowels ь and ъ vs. all the rest). It also doesn't seem to benefit much from the 50 extra years of research, as it neglects to mention the Proto-Balto-Slavic stage and straight up denies the concept of Balto-Slavic by offhandedly mentioning that "Common Germanic, Common Romance [proto-Italic?], proto-Baltic and other languages developed out of the Indo-European language in parallel [with Proto-Slavic]", even as modern scholarship appears to be moving into the direction of treating Proto-Slavic as a particularly divergent offshoot of (West) Baltic, making the Slavic languages paraphyletic vis-à-vis the Baltic ones. Several typos and typical Russian native speaker mistakes (e.g. mistransliterating the Greek ἁρμονία into Roman letters as "garmonia") don't help either.

Still, I learned a lot from reading through the book's introduction and the beginning of its phonological section. I had had no idea that there were no written works in the language remaining from the time when the creators of Slavic writing, Cyril and Methodius, were still alive. Neither did I know that there were so few documents remaining in the Glagolitic script (believed to be the older one of the two Slavic scripts), that Glagolitic and Cyrillic don't have an exact 1 to 1 match in their letter inventories, or that the reduction of the ultra-short vowels start so soon after the standardization of OCS.

I intended to make my Anki cards for OCS centered around the Glagolitic spellings from the start, since that's obviously the script I'm less familiar with and would therefore like to learn. I wasn't sure how practical that would be, given the dearth of resources in Glagolitic, the technical issues of inputting and displaying the characters and the mismatches between Cyrillic and Glagolitic spellings. I think I have most things worked out now, since I've done some looking around and found an online Glagolitic keyboard and a database of electronically rendered texts. This should enable me to add plenty of cards in the format of "Glagolitic sentence on the front, Cyrillic transliteration and translation on the back", even for sentences originally from sources in Cyrillic, as long as they don't contain Cyrillic letters without Glagolitic equivalents.

Example
Sentence: Ⱉ҃ⱍⰵ ⱀⰰⱎⱐ · ῾ⰺⰶⰵ ⰵⱄⰻ ⱀⰰ ⱀⰵⰱⰵⱄⱑⱈⱏ · (might not display in some browsers; for me it works in Chrome, but not in Firefox)
Transliteration: Ѡтьче нашь · ῾іже еси на небесѣхъ · (Wrote Ѡтьче in full, even though the original has the abbreviated variant Ѡ҃че; also "corrected" небесехъ to небесѣхъ both here and in the Glagolitic text, as that appears closer to the original pronunciation - as Delodephius said, spelling discrepancies in original texts is a common problem)
Translation: Πάτερ ἡμῶν ὁ ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς (went with Koine Greek rather than Russian in this case, since this is a text that needs no translation anyway - I've known how it sounds in the Russian pronunciation of OCS for ages, and I didn't even have an Orthodox Christian upbringing)

[vonPeterhof]

Writing an early update this week as I'm not sure I'll have the time to do it over the weekend. By now I've made up for the setbacks my language learning suffered last week by finishing reading the Manchu book (although by the end I gave up on reading the transliterated original text in favour of the translation and commentary), so now the focus of my daily studies is on Old Church Slavonic and Georgian, with Ancient Greek, Portuguese and Latin being weekly for now (one Aesop fable, one Pimsleur lesson and two pages of Hobbitus Ille, respectively). In addition to the other languages I had already been doing activities in prior to this week I've also resumed following example word & sentence Twitter accounts in Japanese for Lithuanian and several Slavic languages (a shame there isn't one for OCS) and adding occasional sentences to Anki (mostly in Lithuanian). And, as if that wasn't enough, I'm once again overhauling my Classical Chinese deck by replacing the Hakka transcriptions with Baxter's transcription for Middle Chinese. I had wanted to do something like that since the very beginning, but I was having trouble finding the reconstructed readings for some characters, but now I can use this table of ~9000 characters whenever Wiktionary doesn't have something. I might be setting myself up for burnout once I get back to work, especially with the new anime season starting next week, but well, we'll burn that bridge when we get there

Anyway, about OCS, now that I've read a little more I think I may have been a little too harsh on the book in my previous post. It does actually deal with vowel length and accentuation in Proto-Slavic, inasmuch as it affected the sound shifts that resulted in OCS. It could have spent more time talking about the theories about how those features ended up looking by the time of Cyril and Methodius, but since those aren't exactly aspects reflected in writing they are probably beyond the scope of the book's material. And I do like the exercises in the phonological section, like "read a passage from the Ostromir Gospels, identify all words that had undergone liquid metathesis and try to guess their equivalents in Old Russian and reconstructed Proto-Slavic".

Beyond the book, from reading the aforementioned Twitter accounts I was surprised to find out that many words of OCS origin are believed to have ended up in Serbian not through parallel South Slavic developments or direct borrowing, but through Russian: words like vazduh, rabota, prevashodan, etc. Apparently even the modern pronunciation of Church Slavonic in the Serbian Orthodox Church is based on the Russian recension rather than the historical Serbian one.

[vonPeterhof]

Between the start of the new anime season and another trip to Saint Petersburg I didn't manage to write an update last week. The two weeks that have passed since my last post were very different in terms of my studying: the previous week I managed to do all of my regularly scheduled activities, while the week that's finishing now I could hardly do any reading and just barely managed to finish some lessons, thanks to a very busy and exhausting period at work (and anime in the evenings). Luckily Monday is a national holiday in Japan, which means that we at the Embassy also get a day off work. I guess I'll have the opportunity to somewhat make up for lost study time.

If there's anything notable about this season in anime language-wise it's the great diversity of western Japanese dialects appearing in various series, including the elusive and notoriously impenetrable Kagoshima dialect in not one, but two shows: the gory historical fantasy Drifters and... Keijo!!!!!!!! Just... Keijo!!!!!!!!(NSFW). yyyyyeah, not gonna defend the show (at least, not on this forum ), but it apparently features the Japanese east/west divide as one of its major themes, and the main cast includes characters speaking other western Japanese dialects, like Kansai and Hiroshima. Additionally there's more Kansai in Teekyu 8, Saga in Yuri!!! On Ice and Sanuki (Kagawa) in Poco's Udon World; plus there's Toyama in Kuromukuro, whose second half aired last season, but is only getting released on Netflix on October 10. The show I was most looking forward to though, was of course the sequel of the adaptation of the book series I'm still reading, Sound! Euphonium (響け! ユーフォニアム). The double-length first episode exceeded all my expectations with the musical performance scenes, setups for future drama, stunning cinematography and also much more natural-sounding line delivery. They're apparently planning on adapting both the second and the third book of the series, so I guess I need to hurry up and finally finish the third one (about 5% remaining).

In Old Church Slavonic I finished the long phonology section and moved on the the one on morphology. While a lot of OCS morphology is pretty straightforward for someone familiar with Russian, there are plenty of challenges, like the number of noun declension types being twice as large (six instead of three), the presence of the dual number, the different functions of long-form and short-form adjectives, the lack of a distinction between indicative and third person pronouns, as well as the disappearance and/or merger of certain inflected forms in the modern Slavic languages.

The learning curve in Georgian textbook I'm using is apparently an exponential function. The first 16 lessons each introduce a couple of letters of the Georgian alphabet and only give vocabulary and grammar points that can be used with the letters already learned. This means that while the first couple of lessons are pretty light on content, there is a gradual increase in example sentences and concepts introduced, and once the entire 33-letter alphabet is covered the book just takes off, introducing split ergativity in the aorist tense, two separate verb conjugation paradigms, the morphology of ordinal numerals and some peculiarities in the declension of personal names, in addition to several dozens of new words. I think I might have still had trouble getting through it in one week even if it weren't an exceptionally busy one

And finally, apropos of nothing, here's a music video of a K-pop-inspired male idol unit from Kazakhstan, singing in actual Kazakh