ALTVM VIDETVR

[vonPeterhof]

This has been a very productive week. Most notably, yes, I finished the Biblical Hebrew textbook. While my second foray into Semitic languages was better structured than the first one, I did get somewhat burned out on memorizing verb forms pretty soon and was basically ignoring all exercises requiring active production by the end. Let's see how it goes with my next Semitic language, Classical Syriac. A standardised version of Middle Aramaic, it was an important literary language of the early Christian churches and the lingua franca of the Middle East prior to the rise of Arabic. The literary tradition of Syriac ended up splitting into two branches, Eastern and Western, with different pronunciation conventions and different variants of the Syriac script (in addition to the original one, ʾEsṭrangēlā). The book apparently teaches both variants and all three scripts, but starts by introducing the West Syriac Serṭā script. So far I've only skimmed the introduction and read through the first lesson introducing a few of the letters and vowel marks. So far the reading conventions seem similar to Hebrew, with the opposition of stop and fricative pronunciations of certain consonant letters depending on their position in the word (a feature of Hebrew that is itself suspected to be the result of Aramaic influence during the Babylonian captivity).

I also just finished the last lesson of the Avar textbook, and will probably do the reading texts in the appendix. Unfortunately I can't say that I've managed to grasp this language any better than the other Caucasian languages I've tried out, Abkhaz and Georgian. I guess the fact that they're so different from everything else that I've studied mean that they require much more of my attention, and I generally haven't been able to provide it adequately. I am interested in the Caucasus and its languages, but probably not enough to actively pursue their study in spite of the dearth of resources and media.

Additionally, I've started flipping through the Ilya Frank Galician reader I got almost a year ago. Like his Irish reader, it includes a relatively detailed phonetic and grammatical overview. Although one thing that the phonetic overview failed to mention is that, apparently unlike Spanish but like many other Romance languages, Galician contrasts open-mid and close-mid vowels ([ɛ] vs [e] and [ɔ] vs [o]) in stressed syllables, so I guess it's not just "Portuguese pronounced like Spanish" as I was led to believe.

In preparation for this year's business trip to Vladivostok a couple of weeks from now I'm also trying to lowkey refresh my Korean, Mandarin and Vietnamese via a combination of Pimsleur and uTalk. For Korean I'll also try reading a translation of the manga よつばと!, which I've always considered the perfect early reading material for Japanese. I think I should also try to get more serious with Slovene, but I'm already a bit worried that I'm spreading myself too thin. (Anyone say anything about Setswana? Ga ke thlaloganye... )

[Expugnator]

Are you still using that Classical Syriac textbook in Russian you referred to me before, the one the belongs to a series of language textbooks?

[vonPeterhof]

Are you still using that Classical Syriac textbook in Russian you referred to me before, the one the belongs to a series of language textbooks?

Yeah, that one, Классический сирийский язык by Akopyan. Although I don't think I realized at the time that it was part of a series. Looking at it now, it seems like all the other books in the series are for modern living languages.

[vonPeterhof]

This week has also been pretty productive, which probably won't be the case for the following two weeks due to my business trip. Anyway, I've started on the Classical Syriac textbook, completing the lessons introducing the writing system and the first lesson of the course proper. Since the script, especially the Serṭā font that the book introduces first, looks like the halfway point between the Hebrew square script and the Arabic script, it was fairly easy for me to memorize. One interesting thing about the grammar that I've noticed so far is that, unlike in Hebrew and in Arabic, the definite article in Old Aramaic was attached to the end of the word rather than the beginning. And then by the time of Middle Aramaic and Syriac the old definite article had lost its function and just ended up being the default ending for nouns and adjectives, which is why their dictionary forms in Syriac all end in an alef (pronounced -a in Classical Syriac and -o in the Western Syriac tradition).

I've also started reading the Ilya Frank Yiddish reader which adapts several short stories by Sholem Aleichem. I've had some exposure to Yiddish by skimming some articles on http://yiddish.forward.com/, but I was still a bit unprepared for both how many Hebrew words are actually used and just how different they are from their Tiberian forms. I was aware of the differences between Ashkenazi and Tiberian Hebrew pronunciations, but I didn't realize just how different the colloquial Yiddish pronunciation of Hebrew words are even from Ashkenazic Hebrew. For example, the phrase בעל־הבית (master of the house): báʿal habbáyiṯ in Tiberian, baal habáyis in Ashkenazic, bal(e)bós in Yiddish.

Perhaps the most surprising similarity to German that I've found in Slovene is that it has the same numeral structure, putting the units before the tens (e.g. 25 - petindvajset, which is exactly equivalent to fünfundzwanzig, cf. Croatian dvadeset pet). That is, of course, on top of lots and lots of loanwords and shared idioms. So far the only similarities to Italian I've found were the word "adijo" form "goodbye" and the opposition of open-mid and close-mid vowels only in stressed syllables (I guess I could also mention the fact that vowel length is non-phonemic in most multisyllabic words due to the stressed syllable automatically being long, but that's something that's also true of Russian).

[Serpent]

напишу по-русски что ли))
ооо, не знала, что есть идиш по методу франка. а как там с алфавитом?
впечатления от рассказов тоже интересуют

[vonPeterhof]

напишу по-русски что ли))
ооо, не знала, что есть идиш по методу франка. а как там с алфавитом?
впечатления от рассказов тоже интересуют

В начале книги есть таблица с буквами, и по-моему она хорошо объясняет как читать несемитские слова (было бы полезно, если бы там еще были помечены буквы, которые используются только в семитских словах). А как произносить семитские слова похоже придется запоминать каждый случай по отдельности, пока никаких закономерностей не вижу

Я пока не дочитал первый рассказ, но пока довольно занимательно, чем-то напоминает повествования от первого лица в рассказах Фазиля Искандера. Собственно почему там так много слов из иврита - поскольку повествование от первого лица очень много разных причитаний типа "слава Богу" и "чтоб не сглазить", которые практически все на иврите.

[vonPeterhof]

As I expected, the business trip wasn't very conducive to language learning, and I've only now more or less returned to my normal schedule. The language I'm most into right now is Syriac, although I feel like rather than studying the actual language I've spent more time on meta-studies: reading up on the history and various historical and regional versions of Aramaic, listening to different renditions of the western Syriac Lord's Prayer hymn (see below), scouring the Internet for whatever pieces of Aramaic media I can possibly find, etc. There's actually a surprisingly decent selection of children's media for both Eastern and Western Syriac on Youtube, with songs (including translated Western ones - example below) and cartoons on channels like RinyoToons, BET KANU and Nineveh Kids TV. Although at least right now it's hard for me to judge whether a given video is in one of the two forms of Classical Syriac or in one of the Neo-Aramaic dialects descended from/influenced by those forms, and I've yet to properly research the extent of the differences between those historical stages and whether or not they exist in any sort of diglossic relationship in Neo-Aramaic speaking communities.

Sadly I couldn't take part in the latest Setswana group study session, but at least I've finally caught up in the Memrise course to where I got in the book, so now I can do the book and the Memrise course concurrently. I've also finally downloaded the Memrise app, and just like Rick said, the interface and the reviewing process on the app is very different from the browser version - in fact most of the time doing it in the former almost feels like cheating when compared to the latter (aside from the few cases where the app requires you to input two alternative correct answers in exact order, whereas in the browser just one is enough).

I've also been making my way through the Slovene course, but I feel like I should also supplement it with something. Unlike the slovake.eu course, this one almost completely lacks grammatical explanations. Being a native speaker of a Slavic language does make it much easier to catch on to the rules, but I still would like to see some explicit instructions, especially on thing that are absent in Russian, like the dual number or the supine.

[vonPeterhof]

Have had yet another less productive period, both due to being busy at work and moving apartments. Okay, there's also the start of the new anime season, with such linguistic highlights as the return of the Ainu Western/horror/cooking show Golden Kamuy, Kyushu dialects in Zombieland Saga, not one but two shows with ad lib content (Devidol! and Himote House), as well as some of the best Russian I've seen and heard in anime, courtesy of a certain... questionable show. As for what language learning I did manage to do, I find myself spreading myself too thin yet again, trying to pursue both Syriac and Slovene and not really getting far in either (and the less said about Setswana the better..). At least in Syriac I've managed to get through introductions to the noun morphology and the use of prefixes, as well as starting on the verb conjugation paradigms.

Also, after recently finding another classical language to add to my challenge, I realized that I haven't actually decided on the modern language influenced by Syriac/Aramaic I'll check out after this. After considering some form of Neo-Aramaic (I've managed to find a cool-looking textbook for Turoyo, available in both German and English), Levantine Arabic and, somewhat more tentatively, Maltese (FWIW there is just one entry in the English Wiktionary's Maltese terms derived from Classical Syriac category ), for now I've decided to cheat a little and pick Modern Standard Arabic. I have already tried doing Quranic Arabic, somewhat unsuccessfully, but seeing as how written Arabic was influenced by Syriac, and how right now I'm kind of hooked on Semitic languages (I've even started listening to Pimsleur's Modern Hebrew during my commute), I do want to try it again with a better structured course, probably something like the FSI. Alternatively I could work with the Syriac connection and work through a Russian textbook called "The Language of Arab Christian Culture in Texts" (since some Middle Eastern Churches, like the Maronite Church, use both Syriac and Arabic in their liturgy), but that book seems to be aimed more at advanced learners, and the beginner's book from the same series is a bit harder to track down.

[vonPeterhof]

This time last week I was still in Slovenia, resting after my first Polyglot Conference. It's definitely a more modest outing than the Gathering, but not by much; the number of participants has apparently increased quite a bit, and it comparable to what we had in Bratislava. Like I expected I didn't manage to use my measly Slovene that much, but I did manage to catch up with a few familiar people and get to know new ones. There was even another person with Kazakh on their badge, and we managed to have a brief conversation. There were plenty of interesting talks as well, with the highlights for me being the introductions to Prekmurje Romani and Friulian, as well as my first attempt at listening to a talk in Italian (I didn't mention it here, but I listened to Pimsleur in Italian before the trip, thinking it might be a good idea to do at least something in the only national language of a country neighbouring Slovenia that I'd never dabbled in). And the most surprising news for me was the fact that the next year's Conference will be held not somewhere in Europe, but in Japan's Fukuoka! I absolutely have to make it there, now that I have a perfect excuse for another trip to Japan.

Speaking of trips, I was thinking of visiting Finland during the New Year's holidays in early January, so I've started learning Finnish using the FSI course. I'm honestly not sure why I never picked up Finnish earlier: I've long had an affinity for agglutinative languages, the area where I was born used to be Finnish-speaking for centuries, plus the language's pitch pattern is a perfect fit for my naturally monotonous manner of speech My experience with Estonian and Ingrian should also give me a leg up, hopefully.

As for my classical languages studies, I actually ended up picking up some new resources while I was at the Conference. I couldn't resist grabbing Complete Babylonian: A Teach Yourself Guide ("Babylonian" referring to one of the two standard forms of Akkadian, the other one being Assyrian) as well as Assimil's Cahier d'Exercices Arabe Faux-débutants. I'm not entirely sure that my past achievements in Arabic even qualify me as a false beginner, but I guess we'll see how that goes later on.

While I missed the last Setswana group study session due to travelling back from the conference, I have been reading There Is No Word for Grammar in Setswana, as well as watching the soap opera Morwalela. While I can't say I've fully wrapped my head around the grammar, many things definitely seem a lot less arbitrary to me than they used to, most notably the use of various particles and how it relates to noun classes. The book could definitely use a lot more example sentences, if only to break up the dense grammatical jargon with some space..

Oh, and here's something I wanted to post back when I was still studying Slovene but forgot: enjoy a cover of Despacito in Prekmurje Slovene!

[vonPeterhof]

I was hoping to have done at least a couple of FSI Finnish units by now, but apparently forgot just how demanding those courses were in terms of time and concentration, so I only managed to get through the first unit. Another thing I forgot is how long the units go on without getting into the grammatical explanations, all of which are pushed into the very end of the units; if I wasn't already familiar with a lot of the concepts through Estonian I'm not sure how well I would have been able to keep up. One person I've met at one of the Polyglot Gatherings had actually found Estonian easier to learn than Finnish, but my impression so far is more in line with what Chung and others were saying here, that Finnish is more consistent and transparent in its inflections, which is very welcome. I guess the use of possessive suffixes kind of complicates things, but I'm familiar with them through Turkic languages, and their use is apparently not obligatory in the colloquial language anyway. Negative particles being inflected by person still trips me up though, as I keep wanting to just use ei for all persons, like in Estonian.

Recently I've been trying to diversify my media consumption away from anime and try to add in some visual/audio media in languages other than Japanese. Well, in the case of German I can do that while also watching anime, as there are easily accessible German dubs of anime. I'm almost done rewatching the dub of Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid, and Crunchyroll still has German dubs of at least two shows I've watched before, Mob Psycho 100 and Yamada-kun and the Seven Witches. This isn't really an option with Kazakh though, so instead I decided to reconnect with Kazakh pop culture by watching the TV series Қағаз кеме ("Paper Ship"), starring the members of the popular boy band Ninety One. Another TV show on the same website also caught my eye - Метод ОрыStar, or The OryStar Method, OryStar being a trio of ethnically Russian comedians running a humorous Instagram account about the Kazakh language ("orystar" is Kazakh for "Russians"). The premise of the show is that the comedians, playing themselves, move from Almaty to a rural area of Kazakhstan for some hardcore immersion; linguistic mishaps and culture shock shenanigans ensue. My only complaint is "where the heck was all this interesting Kazakhstani pop culture back when I was living there?!"