ALTVM VIDETVR

[vonPeterhof]

Keeping it brief this week, since I have work to do. Last week it was confirmed that I'll be interpreting at both of the events I mentioned in my previous post (the STEM school visit and the customs meeting), so right now I'm focussing exclusively on Japanese vocabulary. For the STEM-related stuff I downloaded three shared Anki decks (Intermediate Technical Japanese, Japanese Math Pictures and SK Japanese Engineering and Science Vocab). For the customs-related vocab I was given both a Russian and a Japanese language version of a 75 page information brochure about the workings of the Eurasian Customs Union to study. Not sure how much good any of this will do me, but here's hoping I won't embarrass myself too badly...

[vonPeterhof]

Well I guess now I can honestly say that I have professional experience in interpreting - both the school and the customs visits have gone smoothly for the most part. While the latter was clearly the more difficult of the two, it was far less stressful for me personally as I wasn't the main interpreter. In the school one I was the only interpreter available, so I had to speak the entire time. While there were a few awkward moments, with one instance in both events where I could recall neither the Japanese nor the English equivalent to a Russian word ("calculus" in the first visit, "weighing scales" in the second one), I think I did fairly well for my first time, definitely better than I expected.

After finishing the second interpretation job on Friday I went back to my suspended language learning activities and actually managed to make some good progress. In Manchu I finally finished the chapter on noun declension, covering the parts on the ablative case and the predicative possessive, which, like in Turkic languages, is different in form from the genitive. In Hakka I got through the verb chapter with a section on negative forms. And in Old Japanese I read the brief section on reduplication, where I was a bit surprised to discover that a lot of the reduplicated semi-onomatopoeia actually comes from later stages of the language. Anyway, hopefully I can get back to my original rhythm this coming week.

[vonPeterhof]

My studies these past two weeks have been somewhat uneven, but I did manage to make some progress.

Manchu
I'm now more than halfway through the book, having completed the section on what the author terms "attributives" (имя признака). Since there is generally no morphological distinction between adjectives, adverbs and numerals in Manchu the author groups them all into one part of speech. Indeed in some cases these words can also behave indistinguishably from nouns - turgen can mean "swift", "swiftly" or "swiftness" depending on the context. Turkic languages have something similar going on, while Korean and Japanese are different in that adjective morphology is closer to verbs than to nouns. Well, a subset of Japanese adjectives has evolved to behave more like nouns, but they still retain rigid morphological distinctions between the noun, adjective and adverbial forms.

Hakka & Classical Chinese
In Hakka I also read about adjectives and adverbs. Additionally, I've decided to gradually replace the Sino-Korean character readings in my Classical Chinese deck with the Hakka readings wherever possible. While the Korean pronunciations are in many ways closer to the original Middle Chinese than the Japanese ones, they lose to most Chinese ones in terms of initial consonants, not to mention the lack of tone. OTOH Hakka is one of the more conservative Chinese varieties for initials (the three-way contrast between voiced, plain and aspirated consonants isn't preserved, but the palatalised n is, unlike in both Mandarin and Cantonese) and the tones generally map accurately to the Middle Chinese ones. In order to get the transliterations I paste the sentences into this converter, and then check the results against Wiktionary, Moedict and Syndict. If a particular character can't be found in any of these sources I'll probably just leave the sentences it's used in in Korean, but this hasn't happened so far.

Ainu
This week was the last lesson in the cycle by Takanori Nakai, which means that next week the radio lessons will start from scratch with a new teacher. I'll probably check them out, as the teachers do usually introduce very different things and provide information about various dialects. In other Ainu news, I came across an Ainu word that bears an uncanny resemblance to a Russian word with the same meaning. That word is nisapno, which means "suddenly" and sounds a bit like the Russian внезапно. Searching around I found that it's the adverbial form of the root nisap (sudden, suddenness), so it's probably a coincidental false cognate rather than a loanword (this highly fishy "Wendish in Ainu" word list notwithstanding), but it did seem plausible to me for a second, since there was some contact between Russians and Ainu. The Russian name for the Tufted puffin, топорик or топорок, sounds like it means "little axe", but it could have originated from a Russified pronunciation of the Ainu name Etupirka (lit. "beautiful beak"), which is also the source of the Japanese name for the bird, エトピリカ (etopirika [edit: misspelled "eto" as "ero" ]).

[vonPeterhof]

For the past two weeks my language studies were somewhat held back by the start of the Spring anime season. 昭和元禄落語心中 remained the strongest recommendation of the Winter season in terms of language, artistry and socio-cultural commentary, and it's fortunately getting a second season at some later point. Probably the most promising premiere of this season is Flying Witch, a magical realist slice-of-life comedy set in Aomori prefecture. Unlike a lot of works in the genre it appears to be aimed at a general audience rather than otaku, with very grounded and not overly cutesy characters, an atmosphere that's relaxing without being saccharine and good-natured humour without nerdy references. Language-wise, while there hasn't been any full-on Tsugaru dialect yet (which is understandable, since it's apparently so divergent it's often joked that people from outside the region confuse it for French), there are still interesting linguistic tidbits here and there. The protagonist, who moves in from Yokohama, consistently speaks politely with everyone, from her new classmate to her cat, while the locals start talking to her in plain language right away, consistently with Aomori's image as part of the 無敬語 or "no polite language" region. The male lead is the one who comes the closest to speaking in dialect with a single instance of sentence-ending べ. It also could be my imagination, but I could swear that in a couple of lines in the second half of the episode he pronounces the u's as [ɨ] instead of the standard [ɯᵝ]. The voice actor playing him is a newcomer with no other named roles so far, so I couldn't find out if he's actually from the region or not, but I wouldn't be surprised if he were (one of the other characters is played by a voice actress famous for her Tsugaru dialect, but I couldn't hear any hints of it in her speech in the show).

In addition to anime I also started reading an interesting book - Праздничная гора (literally "Holiday Mountain", but apparently officially known as The Mountain and the Wall) by Alisa Ganieva. While I was originally trying to find the author's debut story, Салам тебе, Далгат!, which from the descriptions of its themes and language I imagined to be like a Dagestani version of a Irvine Welsh novel, I couldn't find it anywhere, so I had to "settle" for her first full novel. It turned out to be a very fascinating look at the contemporary society of Dagestan, with its patchwork of ethnic communities with decades-old grudges, insecure relationship with Moscow and intergenerational rifts fuelled by ancient traditions, Soviet-era secularism, modern pop culture and newly fashionable Islamic fundamentalism. It's certainly refreshing to hear about these things from someone who's neither dehumanizing nor embellishing the subjects of the story. The use of language is also a bonus, with both unusual turns of phrases in Russian (some of which are very similar to the way Russian is used in Kazakhstan, where I grew up) as well as words from various Dagestani languages peppering the conversations, always given in the original spelling and translated in brackets. Looking up the pronunciations of these words had made it hard not to start learning Avar immediately - while Abkhaz has the most consonant phonemes in the region, it has nothing on some consonants that Avar has, like кь [t͡ɬ’] or къ [q͡χːʼ]. The latter is apparently this but also geminated - just imagining that makes my throat hurt a little

Anyway, it's pretty late by now and I have work to do, so writing about my actual language learning will have to wait until next time

[vonPeterhof]

I should really stop writing these posts after midnight - I get really embarrassed re-reading them later, when I notice all the silly typos and grammar mismatches Couldn't really write earlier today (yesterday by now) as Sunday was the first day in a while where I could properly catch up on my language studies. The week at work has been pretty busy and I was usually too tired to do much studying in the evenings, and I spent most of Saturday catching up on anime. While I haven't taken up much more series this season than in the previous ones, this time nearly all of the series that I ended up choosing to follow come out later in the week.

One more anime that I feel like bringing up in particular is Kumamiko, another slice of life comedy with elements of magical realism set in the Tohoku region. From the very first artwork I saw of the series I thought that the outfit worn by the female lead appears to be inspired by traditional Ainu clothing, so when watching the latest episode I was pleased to hear not only an explicit acknowledgement of this, but also a discussion of how Ainu influence isn't just limited to Hokkaido, but has also been preserved to varying extents in rural locales scattered throughout Tohoku. Even for Japanese fiction taking direct inspiration from Ainu history and mythology it's a bit unusual to actually mention the Ainu by name, so that was a nice touch. However, overall the series is a very cautious recommendation, due to the jarring juxtaposition of the cute quasi-familial relationship between the two leads and the off-colour humour that dominates whenever other characters enter the picture. The positive emotions from the aforementioned Ainu scene were nearly undone by the following sequence not only sexualizing a 14 year old girl, but also being somewhat smugly self-aware about it. As far as I'm concerned, in the anime industry only the Monogatari franchise has the narrative strength and the empathetic characterization to get away with this.

Anyway, while we're not too far from the subject of Ainu, I have started listening to the new lessons focusing on the Tokachi dialect. While some clear differences from the Ishikari dialect can already be noticed, most of the expressions covered so far sound pretty familiar. I felt the same way when the previous cycle of lessons started and probably ended up not paying enough attention in the beginning. This resulted in the situation where in a couple of months I find myself reviewing sentences in Anki that seem to fully consist of words I had never studied before and I can't quite figure out how I got there. One thing that throws me off in this cycle compared to the previous one is that the stress marks given in the textbook don't always match where the speakers in the radio lessons actually place the stress. I wonder if it's those are errors in the books (though they usually mention it in the lessons whenever they notice errors) or if it's some sort of discrepancy between the dialect and some sort of modern Ainu standard.

As for Manchu, I'm currently making my way thorough the section titled "verbal words" - basically verbs, participles and transgressives, which the author identifies as closely related but still separate parts of speech in Manchu grammar. Just finished the chapter on participles. Some interesting similarities with Japanese grammar, like participles in many cases becoming interchangeable with or completely displacing pure active verb forms, as well as a frequent lack of context-free distinction between participles describing the actor and those describing the recipient of the action. My optimistic prediction is that I'll be done with the book by the end of the month, but it's probably not very likely.

[vonPeterhof]

Once again I feel compelled to start my post by discussing an ongoing anime series: Concrete Revolutio, which is currently in its second season. The product of the reunion between the director, writer and animation studio that produced the 2003 anime version of Fullmetal Alchemist, it's an anime-original action series with elements of both sci-fi and urban fantasy, as well as an outspoken commentary on the political and cultural processes that have happened in post-War Japan (mainly the 60's and 70's). The reason I'm bringing it up this time is that, by a strange coincidence, the latest episode of this show also had something to do with the Ainu. Unlike the episode of Kumamiko I wrote about previously it doesn't actually use the word "Ainu", instead relying on more indirect hints like the setting of the episode in Hokkaido, the name of an ancient deity made up of actual Ainu words, the design of said deity's clothes, and, somewhat more arguably, the facial features of one of the characters. If my interpretation of the symbolism is correct the episode actually makes some pretty strong commentary on the erasure of Ainu culture in the name of modernization and on the very idea of Japan as a homogenous nation; although the commentary on the struggle between modernization and tradition reads just as clearly without specifically applying to the Ainu, I guess (I wrote about all of that in a bit more detail on the ANN forum).

If you're interested in recent Japanese history, the roots of Japanese popular culture or just some spectacularly animated action (two words: Yutaka. Nakamura.) I would really recommend you to watch the first season (available for free at daisuki.net) and catch up on the current one. The first episode turned a lot of viewers off due to its non-linear storytelling and seeming thematic incoherence, but trust me that it gets a lot better once you get the hang of the timeline. It might also be a good idea to consult a blog like this one if you feel like the cultural references are flying over your head - I can personally attest that episode five can be extremely confusing if you go into it without knowing that the idea of Godzilla as a metaphor for nuclear catastrophe is a gross oversimplification. Plus, the latest episode is possibly far from the first time the series has left thematic clues in languages other than Japanese or English (alright, I promise this is the last time I'm linking to a post of mine on an anime forum ).

As for actual Ainu language learning, there's not much to report as the last two lessons were almost wholly focused on pronunciation. The next one apparently discusses stress, so it might clear up my confusion about the mismatch between the spoken stress and written stress marks. In Manchu I unfortunately haven't managed to finish the section on transgressives and move on to verbs proper. Now that I think of it, marking transgressives as a separate part of speech from verbs is perfectly natural in Russian grammar but might be totally alien to, say, Japanese grammar, where the closest equivalent to what Avrorin terms the "transgressive" in Manchu is the -te form of the verb. What's more, most guides to Japanese grammar (or at least, those aimed at general learners and not at linguists) treat its function of one verbal root describing another verb as secondary to the main function of connecting two actions either as a sequence or events or as simultaneous events; Avrorin book does the opposite in treating the latter functions as a subset of the former, almost in passing. For someone who placed such a heavy emphasis on looking at a language's grammar from within rather than from the perspective of other languages, that almost seems like an unconscious example of slavocentrism. But then, he does acknowledge that the "transgressive" is far less distinct than the "participle", which can fully replace the verb in one sentence while being declined like a noun in another.

[vonPeterhof]

Just finished the book I mentioned a couple of posts ago, Праздничная гора, and I'm still trying to make sense of its impact on me. I certainly got a lot more than I bargained for when I started reading what I thought would be "Dagestani Irvine Welsh" - although there is a certain similarity to Welsh's Filth, with the brutal portrayal of grim reality slowly making way to more or less explicit social commentary via the exploration of backstories (the antihero is a lot less off-putting though). The second half, where the book's main "what if" scenario finally unfolds, keeps shifting very rapidly between matter-of-fact listings of increasingly shocking events and perspectives of individual characters, often diving deep into their personal and family histories. The style is reminiscent of Alan Paton's Cry, The Beloved Country at its best, and of Mario Puzo's The Godfather at its worst. But perhaps what made that part of the book most compelling and gripping for me were the eerie parallels with events that happened in real life a couple of years after the book came out, namely the armed conflict in eastern Ukraine and the rise of ISIS. Going into greater detail would likely get too political for this forum, not to mention spoiling the book, so I'll just say that it's both an interesting introduction to Dagestan and a very thought provoking look at the universal issues of cultural and ideological clashes, even if the chaotic narrative might not work for everyone.

Anyway, about Manchu:

My optimistic prediction is that I'll be done with the book by the end of the month, but it's probably not very likely.

Well, I guess I am done with the book in terms of reading through it, although I haven't yet managed to add all the remaining example sentences into Anki. Once I've done that, hopefully by the end of this week, I'll move on to studying Ancient Greek. The final parts that I read dealt with verbs, "image words" and words that can't be classified as parts of speech, like grammatical particles or interjections. What Avrorin defines as "image words" seems to correspond pretty neatly to the Japanese mimetic words, ranging from pure onomatopoeia to onomatopoeia-like vocalizations representing complex abstract concepts.

Now there's a bit of a difficulty with choosing a Manchu text to read after I'm done, since A) Most of Manchu texts available are translations of Chinese classics rather than originals, and B) Most full texts available on the web are in transliteration rather than the script. I could really use some reading practice, since even after having added 270 sentences my letter recognition is still pretty sloppy, to say nothing of reading comprehension. While I have got better at recognizing most letters, I still confuse a and e as well as o and u in certain contexts; syllable-final consonants can also be pretty confusing. What I'm thinking of doing right now is taking a book like My Service in the Army, passing whole paragraphs through the converter and then trying to read them with the English translation close at hand.

While searching for texts I've also come across this short snippet from a Qing era Manchu textbook, together with sound recordings of a text and several separate words by a student of Manchu. Compared to classical written Manchu there seems to be a lot of final vowel dropping going on.

[vonPeterhof]

Finished adding sentences from the Manchu grammar book today, so I guess now I can move to the next stage. I've already talked about what I'll do for reading in Manchu in my previous post, but I haven't touched on what to do about the third part of the challenge - studying a descendant or strongly influenced language. Since both modern descendants of Classical-era Manchu, modern Manchu and its somewhat less endangered cousin Xibe, don't have that many readily available resources, I've decided to bite the bullet and finally dive into the Big One - Mandarin. Sure, the extent to which Manchu influenced the development of Mandarin in general and the Beijing dialect in particular is debatable, but it's probably the most practical option for this part of the challenge. Besides, I was going to get to it at some point, so why not now However, so as not to overextend myself for now I will A) postpone starting with Mandarin until after I'm done with the Hakka book (there's less than a fifth of the book left, but that fifth is relatively example sentence-heavy, so it might take some time); and B) limit myself to one learning resource - the Pimsleur course. Well, technically two, since I'll also be using Limsico's pronunciation and character guide to Mandarin Chinese I, which wasn't part of the original course, but should be of great assistance in adding sentences to Anki. I guess I'll write about this in greater detail when I start learning.

Now, in order to proceed with the challenge and make way for Ancient Greek I'm going to have to suspend learning activities in a couple of languages, so I guess I'm putting Korean, Ainu and Old Japanese on hold for the time being (the latter at least until I'm done with reading the 百人一首 in Classical Japanese). Plus, I already stopped adding sentences in Vietnamese weeks ago, as it was becoming too time-consuming. Their place will be taken by reading in Manchu, Assimil in Ancient Greek and, when I get to it, Pimsleur in Mandarin (plus I'm still slowly making my way through the Three-Character Classic in Classical Chinese). I'll try out this workload for a couple of weeks, and if I feel like I can handle it I can further mark my transition from East Asia to Europe by resuming some sort of learning activities in German. Resumption of activities in French is a given, as that's the medium language in the Assimil course. In addition to that, when I went window-shopping for prospective Chinese resources yesterday I instead ended up buying a book I've been looking out for for a long time - Amélie Nothomb's Stupeur et tremblements. This book is often described as a cautionary tale for those thinking of working in a Japanese organization, so I might be getting to it a bit too late

[iguanamon]

Just wanted to say that I enjoy reading your log, vonPeterhof. It's nice to see another learner delving into other "obscure" languages. I read Amélie Nothomb's Stupeur et tremblements in Spanish translation a few years ago after listening to this podcast on RFI. She has a very unique style which I find refreshing. I enjoyed the novel and laughed, which is always good for me.

Belgian writer Amélie Nothomb is an enigma: she writes several novels each year, but only publishes one, she never corrects her work, she spends hours each day answering fan letters, and she can't drive or use a computer. Her novels are all best-sellers, and they have been translated in over 30 languages. ...

[vonPeterhof]

As is traditional for me I have succumbed to unpremediated wanderlust and fell for a language outside of my challenge schedule. Yesterday I went to another bookstore, and again instead of resources for Chinese I came back with something else - a small self-learning book for Avar. Yup, Праздничная гора still has a hold over me, so I couldn't resist getting a taste of its protagonist's (and author's) native language. And man, what a taste that was! The first lesson unsurprisingly dealt with the alphabet and the pronunciation, and by the time I was done my throat was actually in pain. I think this may be the first language I've encountered that distinguishes between all three of /h/, /x/ and /χ/. We Russian speakers tend to find the former two indistinguishable, while I believe that a lot of speakers of Western European languages have this problem with the latter two. Avar is thus a more or less equal opportunity challenge. Well, for Russian speakers there's also additional confusion in that the letter х doesn't represent the phoneme /x/. And that's not even mentioning /ħ/, /q͡χː/, /q͡χːʼ/, /t͡ɬ’/, /ʕ/ and other fun consonant phonemes. Anyway, I'll try to keep it one lesson per week so as not to stretch my schedule even further (it's a good thing that I managed to resist buying books for Classical Tibetan, Syriac and Gothic ). Oh, and keeping with a Caucasus theme in my Russian language reading I started reading Sandro of Chegem by Fazil Iskander. Who knows, maybe this will help me reignite my interest in Abkhaz...

As for my current central task, Ancient Greek, while it wasn't exactly easy I did manage to pick up the Assimil course where I left off last time, at lesson 16. Now I finished lesson 21, so next week should be the equivalent of the fourth week into the course, if I manage to get into the rhythm of one lesson per day. I'm not really doing much else for AG right now, but I did resume following the Japanese Twitter account @Hellenike_tan. There are Japanese language learning bots for nearly every written language out there, although most of them either post simple words with Japanese translations or are simply inactive. This Ancient Greek bot's operator tries to keep things interesting and fresh with not only example sentences, but also detailed commentary and general observations on Greek culture and mythology. By a strange coincidence earlier today it tweeted about a quote that also appears at the end of lesson 21 in Assimil - Euripides' Κοινὰ τὰ τῶν φίλων. Apparently it can be translated into Japanese as a pun - 友のものは共のもの (tomo no mono wa tomo no mono).

It's been a bit less smooth with my other languages. I've been putting off doing my reading exercise for Manchu until the end of the week, but now I can't do it because the site with the transliterator is down. Since I couldn't use it I tried to transliterate a sentence from the text myself, by hand. However, even seeing the instructions and examples on Wikipedia and Omniglot it's not easy, since a lot of the variation in forms goes unexplained in those two resources. I can't check how I did with the whole phrase without the transliterator, but judging by the Wikipedia page about the Kangxi Emperor I got the "h" in his Manchu name wrong (interesting to note that while his Manchu name is apparently a translation of the characters in his Chinese name - 康熙/Elhe taifin/'peace and tranquility' -, the second Chinese character is translated with a Manchu word which itself appears to be a loan from Chinese, 太平). As for Hakka, while I was intending to do something in it every day I only really managed to get through the relatively small sections on counter words and postpositions, as well as read the section on prepositions and conjunctions without yet having added the sentences to Anki. It's interesting that apparently none of the counter words in Hakka match those in Standard Chinese/the Beijing dialect (for example, people are measured in 個 in Mandarin but in 隻 in Hakka).

Anyway, I'm still trying to adjust to the new rhythm, as well as a new routine - the warmer weather and longer days have made it possible to spend some time reading in the park every evening, away from the distractions of a Wi-Fi connection. On the plus side, I get more reading time in addition to the commute and the now rare free minute at work. The downside is that I lose track of the time and then end up staying up late doing all my other tasks, with hardly any time left for things other than Anki reviews (which is the main reason why I didn't get much done in Hakka or Manchu). I'll see if I can make it work this starting week.