ALTVM VIDETVR

[vonPeterhof]

I was going to write an update last night, but I got home later than expected and forgot about it, so writing a quick now. I guess the most important news is that I've registered for this year's Gathering in Bratislava! I was putting off making the final decision and even considered not going in order to focus my preparations on the Conference in Fukuoka, but last week they finally won me over by announcing language courses before the Gathering. Since I've already done a bit of travelling in Slovakia, Austria and Hungary and dabbled in the respective languages to varying extents, I decided to go for the one option I haven't experienced in any form - the Czech course in Brno. I guess I am risking ruining my Slovak with interference from Czech, but hey, it's probably better to walk around Bratislava speaking a mixture of Slovak and Czech than a mixture of English and Russian I am going to prepare myself a bit by reading through an Ilya Frank reader, but for the most part I'll avoid serious study until the actual course.

[vonPeterhof]

This week I actually managed to get through two lessons of the Syriac textbook, at the expense of a few non-ongoing anime and TV series. Now I'm done with lesson 25 and not only has the ʾEsṭᵊrangelā script been introduced, there are already reading exercises without vowel marks (albeit accompanied by a version of the text in vowel-marked Serṭā script). ʾEsṭᵊrangelā is the oldest form of the Syriac script and it's traditionally written without diacritics, aside from the plural mark, a line above silent consonants and a dot for distinguishing words with the same consonant sequences, as a general rule placed above the word for the more vocalized variant and below for the less vocalized one (e.g. qāṭel 'killing (m.)' vs. qᵊṭal 'he killed'). It's still a bit difficult to determine the right vowels in specific words, but at least I'm used to the appearance of the consonants in ʾEsṭᵊrangelā and can recognize them just as well as in Serṭā. I'm already itching to try out the Maḏnᵊḥāyā variant with its completely different system of vowel marking, which isn't introduced until lesson 31 for some reason.

[vonPeterhof]

This week has been a bit less productive than the last one, since I technically didn't even manage to finish a single lesson of Syriac this time - the only thing I finished is an extra reading exercise module between lessons 25 and 26. And, to make matters worse, I've once again succumbed to wanderlust and started looking through a Chechen textbook I've had for a while (Зулай Хамидова, Самоучитель чеченского языка). My interest in the language was piqued by a few events that have generated discussion in the Russian internet this past couple of weeks (perhaps most strongly by this video). Considering my track record with (non-Turkic) languages of the Caucasus I don't really have high hopes for this, but I do want to at least get the basic grammatical concepts down and learn to read at least a little bit (which may be tougher than with some of the other Caucasian languages - more about this below).

The book consists of only 18 lessons, although those are all rather large and rich in content, so that it seems like completing even one of them in a week would be quite the feat, even without my already crowded schedule. The first half of the book is apparently mainly dedicated to the sounds and letters with some grammar on the side, while the latter half is centred on texts. I've tried reading through the parts dealing with the uses of the letter А and we're already faced with a problem. It seems like all the Cyrillic orthographies of the languages of the Northern Caucasus (with the exception of Ossetian, possibly because it is spoken on both sides of the Greater Caucasus range) were designed with the same principles in mind: unlike in most other Cyrillic alphabets conceived in the former Soviet Union, sounds not present in Russian are represented by letter combinations rather than modified letters, and the only non-Russian character used is Ӏ. Chechen apparently got the short end of the stick with this system, since its vowel inventory is unusually large for the region, and letter combinations can only take you that far. For example, the letter А on its own can represent the sounds [ə], [ɑː] and [ɑ̤], and the difference between them isn't indicated in normal writing at all (though it seems like at least [ɑ̤] is apparently just an allophone of /ɑː/ in closed syllables). To complicate matters even further, in monosyllabic words the letter Н can represent either the consonant [n] or the nasalization of the preceding vowel, meaning that the grapheme -ан at the end of a monosyllabic word can theoretically have up to four different realizations: [-ən], [-ɑ̤n], [-ə̃] and [-ɑ̃ː]. Oh, and also in multisyllabic words nasalization isn't indicated at all, and the vowels in final syllables are reduced/devoiced. At least the stress is consistently on the first syllable.

I feel like I already might be burning out on Chechen just from having written out the above paragraph

[vonPeterhof]

Why are you doing this to me, Polyglot Gathering. You've already roped me into signing up for a Czech course, and now you announce a Hindi challenge? Welp, guess we're learning Hindi now! I wasn't planning on taking up Hindi or Urdu without having done some Sanskrit first, but now that I think about it, this might be advantageous for my interest in the more obscure writing systems: if I learn to read the Devanagari script through Hindi I won't have to bother doing that when I get to Sanskrit and would be able to immediately start making flashcards for another script. As the ancestral script of the South Asian family, the Brahmi script sounds like the most logical choice, but I'm personally biased towards Siddhaṃ for its connections to East Asia. I'll have to figure out how to input it into Anki on my computer though, as all the input methods I've seen so far appear to be Windows-exclusive.

Anyway, for Hindi I'm using the website recommended on the Gathering's homepage, http://www.learning-hindi.com/, the Pimsleur course and an Ilya Frank reader. I've calculated that if I want to finish the learning-hindi.com course by the time of the Gathering I'd need to do about three lessons a day, which does seem doable at a glance. Going in the order the lessons are listed in, over the weekend I've completed the lessons introducing the vowel sounds and letters (aside from the nasalized vowels, which are apparently only explained in lesson 24) and started the consonants.

In other languages, I've finally finished reading the Japanese novel (君の名は。 Another Side: Earthbound), but didn't manage to finish the 26th lesson of the Syriac textbook. As for Chechen... sigh, I really picked the wrong time to become curious about it, apparently. I think I might be able to work it into the routine after I'm done with the slovake.eu Slovak lessons, of which I have one left to do and should be able to finish this coming week. Some day, some day I'm sure I will get my wanderlust under control

[zenmonkey]

Hindi? Noooooooooooooooo. Setswana!!

[vonPeterhof]

Hindi? Noooooooooooooooo. Setswana!!

I never said anything about dropping Setswana If I keep up the current pace I should be done with An Introduction to Spoken Setswana by the time of the Gathering. Probably. Hopefully.. maybe?...

[zenmonkey]

Hindi? Noooooooooooooooo. Setswana!!

I never said anything about dropping Setswana If I keep up the current pace I should be done with An Introduction to Spoken Setswana by the time of the Gathering. Probably. Hopefully.. maybe?...

You sir, are a machine.
I'm very impressed by the number and difficulty of the languages you approach.

[vonPeterhof]

Hindi? Noooooooooooooooo. Setswana!!

I never said anything about dropping Setswana If I keep up the current pace I should be done with An Introduction to Spoken Setswana by the time of the Gathering. Probably. Hopefully.. maybe?...

You sir, are a machine.
I'm very impressed by the number and difficulty of the languages you approach.

The key word being "approach"; it would be nice to actually get somewhere meaningful once in a while Still, thanks!

Oh, and apparently I overestimated my progress in the Setswana book, mostly because I wasn't looking at the book itself, but the Memrize course. I assumed that the course covers the whole book, not just the first 1/3-ish. Oh well, I think I can still get through a good chunk of it.

[Expugnator]

I've been trying very hard not to give in to Hindi. As with Persian, my excuse is that I have no mental energy to learn a new script now, and the script is part of what makes those languages interesting, so there would be no point in dabbling, approaching it half-bakedly. Well, maybe next year.

[PfifltriggPi]

I've been trying very hard not to give in to Hindi. As with Persian, my excuse is that I have no mental energy to learn a new script now, and the script is part of what makes those languages interesting, so there would be no point in dabbling, approaching it half-bakedly. Well, maybe next year.

Interesting, I'm also trying to resist Persian. My excuse is that I can't afford to buy the books. I have a friend who's family is Iranian, but she doesn't speak it, otherwise I probably would be learning it now.