As for my language learning last year, I have had some setbacks and frustrations with my Classical languages challenge, and I didn't manage to use the local languages during my trips to Slovakia, Austria and Estonia nearly as much as I would have liked, but overall I've enjoyed challenging myself throughout the year, as well as meeting some of you at the Polyglot Gathering. I'm probably not going to make it this year, but hopefully next time I go I'll be able to actually converse in a couple more languages (getting over my German stage fright and ending the silent period in at least one Romance language would be a great start..).
Anyway, I'm up to lesson 19 in Biblical Hebrew now. The motivation is still there, although things are starting to get quite tricky with the construct state. The book has also started introducing actual Biblical passages, albeit in heavily edited form to exclude grammatical constructs and vocabulary not covered yet. Comparing the Hebrew text of the Genesis with a translation into Old Church Slavonic has got me thinking about the latter language and to which extent the grammatical patterns we see there are actually calques from Koine Greek and Biblical Hebrew rather than native patterns. Most of the influence would have been from the former, since even the Old Testament was likely to have originally been translated into it via Greek, but the Greek used in the Septuagint apparently also betrays some Semitic influence, and even New Testament Greek isn't immune: apparently the word οὐρᾰνός, "sky, heaven", wasn't used in the plural until the Christian era, according a note here, which may be a reflection of the fact that the Hebrew equivalent שָׁמַיִם is always plural (though interestingly, the mainstream translations of the Genesis into both Greek and OCS use the singular for "heaven"). This makes me curious if the corresponding OCS plural form небеса is also a calque of this kind - unlike with Greek, there isn't a corpus of pre-Christian Slavic written literature to compare usages (notorious forgeries notwithstanding). OCS is the classical language I'm most interested in getting back to, but these sorts of doubts about whether or not it actually reflects a form of a once living language does give me second thoughts.
Additionally for Hebrew, I found a better source for etymological information regarding the historical phonemes /ɣ/ and /x/ (believed to have been realized as [ʁ] and [χ], respectively): an online version of History of the Ancient and Modern Hebrew Language by David Steinberg, specifically these two parts that give large lists of roots and words containing those phonemes. With this it's possible to get a full known picture of the consonantal structure of words in early Biblical Hebrew - just check the lists whenever you see words containing the letters ע and ח . If only it were as easy to trace back the vowels! Unfortunately, the Tiberian vowels reflected in the vowel marks used up to the modern day often have very little to do with the distribution of vowel lengths in the early Biblical era, and I haven't been able to find a definitive answer to the question of whether or not those differences in Tiberian reflect the evolution of a living Hebrew language or changes brought about by its extinction as a language of everyday use. Theoretically it is possible to check each and every word against sound change laws and Semitic cognates to try and see what the original vowel lengths were, but that would be highly impractical. Looks like I'll have to settle for Lamdin's modified Tiberian vowels like I settled for Karlgren's Middle Chinese transliterations in Classical Chinese.
Progress in other languages has been mostly fine, although I've run into not entirely unpredictable trouble with Karachay-Balkar. Apparently its differences from Noghay-Kipchak languages like Kazakh are non-trivial enough that even dictionary lookups can be problematic, so the lack of easily matchable translations of Khayyam's quatrains has come to bite me in the rear. Looks like I'll have to shelve this one for the time being.
Lastly, my traditional(?) ranking of the anime of last year. 2017 has been a really good year for anime, so both picking a Top 10 list and arranging titles within it was pretty difficult (if I think about it for a couple more minutes I might come up with an entirely different list
). Anyway, here it is:10. 僕のヒーローアカデミア 第2期/My Hero Academia 2nd season
9. 賭ケグルイ/Kakegurui: Compulsive Gambler
8. 宝石の国/Land of the Lustrous
7. 昭和元禄落語心中 -助六再び篇-/Descending Stories: Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju
6. メイドインアビス/Made in Abyss
5. 終物語 完結編/Owarimonogatari Second Season
4. 少女終末旅行/Girls' Last Tour
3. けものフレンズ/Kemono Friends
2. リトルウィッチアカデミア/Little Witch Academia
1. 小林さんちのメイドラゴン/Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid
(However, if we include movies that came out last year but I've only managed to catch this year, than everything in the list moves back one place and the first place is now a three-way tie between 君の名は/your name, 聲の形/A Silent Voice and この世界の片隅に/In This Corner of the World).
The Northwest Caucasian family definitely stole my heart first ! I’d love to talk to you sometime about your experience learning these languages, and maybe about resources too, but first I’ll read through your log a little more. (:
