Guess who gave in to wanderlust once again? Heck, if I weren't more careful I could have ended up with two new languages this week - I spent some time reading about the phonology of northern Welsh a couple of days ago and before I knew it I had to force myself to stop listening to the first lesson of Says Something in Welsh
Anyway, there's a chance I might be going on a weekend trip to Kalmykia with some co-workers in late April, so of course I'm learning
Kalmyk now. While it's not really necessary to get by in Kalmykia (in fact apparently less than half of all ethnic Kalmyks are proficient speakers), like I always say I don't learn languages to travel, I use travelling as an excuse to learn languages
At first I thought that I could do the same thing I did with my Anki sentences in
Old Norse and
Avar: write the sentences on the front in an older script and have transliterations into the modern/conventional script on the back. However, that approach presupposes the more modern script being phonemically straightforward and the ways of converting it into the older script being well-defined, neither of which is true for Kalmyk. One thing that stuck me even before about Kalmyk in contrast to other Mongolic languages were its long strings of consonants: it seemed like most words would have just one vowel near the beginning followed by up to four consonants (e.g., the official name of Kalmykia - Хальмг Таңһч,
Xaľmg Tañhç). Turns out there are more vowels in those words, they're just not written. Apparently in many if not most native words the vowels in the syllables other than the first ones ended up being reduced to schwa-like sounds, in spite of the fact that all words are stressed on the
last syllable. The modern Kalmyk orthography has no letter for those reduced vowels, so they aren't written at all. The author of one of the books I tried to study from, Darvaev, claims that in many cases even unreduced vowels are left out, though since he states frames that as an unfortunate consequence of fighting over which dialect should be the basis for the standard it's unclear if that situation applies to standard Kalmyk or some of the dialects. Either way, unless you know the word it can be tricky to tell whether or not a consonant is followed by a schwa, especially when it's the final written consonant (for instance, the aforementioned placename is apparently pronounced something like [xalʲˈməg taŋɣəˈt͡ʃə], with the first word ending in a consonant and the second one in a vowel). What's more, while the older Oirat/Kalmyk script is called "the
Clear Script" as it was designed to represent the living language better than the more conservative Classical Mongol script, it's still about 370 years old and follows a very different logic from the modern Kalmyk Cyrillic. Also doesn't help that the only resources for learning the Clear Script I've found so far are either
incomplete or
hard to use due to poor quality scanning, as well as the fact that displaying the script properly on the computer is a non-trivial task. Looks like I'm stuck with Cyrillic for now
The situation with resources for Kalmyk as a whole leaves much to be desired. At first I tried the aforementioned Darvaev's Самоучитель Калмыцкого языка, but I've found it a little impractical. It's very clear that the target audience for it are Russified urban Kalmyks who may or or may not be false beginners and are seeking to (re-)introduce the language into their everyday family life. While it does aim to accommodate those who don't have an intuitive knowledge of where to pronounce the hidden vowels with its idiosyncratic alternative orthography, it doesn't really give a clear idea of how to actually pronounce those sounds, and the lack of audio materials doesn't help. It also represents the opposite extreme to the
Ingrian self-learner book I'm using, in that it contains no conjugation or declension tables and only gives the most cursory grammatical explanations. I have now switched to Практический курс Калмыцкого языка by Imeev et al., which has audio materials, detailed phonetic information and grammatical explanations galore.
One interesting thing I noticed right away is the similarity of the Kalmyk word for "grandmother" (ээҗ [eːˈd͡ʒə]) to the corresponding Kazakh word (әже [æˈʒe], or [æˈd͡ʒe] in many colloquial variants) which is unlike any such words in the other Turkic languages (the most similar example I can think of is the Uzbek dialectal "acha"). Kazakhs and Oirats/Kalmyks have had a long history of contact (much of it extremely violent), so it's not surprising for there to be shared words. Interestingly, the Kalmyk words for "grandmother" and "grandfather" appear to be cognate to the Standard Khalkha Mongolian words for "mother" and "father" (ээҗ - ээж, аав - аав), and in fact online dictionaries show that those words can also be used in those meanings in Kalmyk too, even though both of the textbooks I've used only use the "grandmother"/"grandfather" meanings. This sort of semantic fluidity of familial terms is also found in Kazakh: for instance, апа can mean both "aunt" and "older sister", but can also be used as a form of address for one's mother, grandmother and any other older female relative from the father's side of the family.
I've also recently started listening to the
Dari Pimsleur course, which teaches a rather colloquial register of the language (at least in the first part?). It was interesting to compare the experience to FSI where most of the time you would listen while having a transcript in front of you. One interesting thing I've noticed is that the "long a" often sounds very rounded; it's usually transcribed as something like [ɒː], but it was hard to distinguish from the Tajik [ɔ(ː)] (the Tajik alphabet actually spells it as "o"). Actually, the way the speaker pronounced it in the reading lesson did sound more like an [ɒː] when compared to the main lessons. Another detail is that the Dari pronunciation of the "short i" is transliterated in the
Wikipedia article on Persian phonology as /ɪ/, but I generally hear it as more similar to the Tehrani /e/ (in fact the FSI transliteration uses "e" for the sound). But then, my overall impression is that the three short vowels all sound very similar when unstressed and can be really hard to distinguish.
I've also made an interesting discovery in resources for
Japanese. I've long been aware of the
Online Japanese Accent Database and its neat feature where looking up a verb wouldn't just tell you the pitch of its infinitive form, but also a bunch of its conjugated forms. However, it is only recently that I was made aware (courtesy of a poster in
this forum thread) of its
phrase pitch feature, where you can put in a whole sentence and get a graph which shows how the pitch changes from beginning to end. I really wish I had found out about it sooner, as it would have answered a lot of my questions about sentence pitch. It's not entirely foolproof - the vocabulary database is obviously limited, and it doesn't seem to consistently account for the different effects particles may have on word pitch (for example, the fact that の neutralizes word-final accents is reflected correctly in some phrases but not others). Still, should be a very useful tool for practising speaking with the right pitch.