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[Sizen]

Français: J'ai commencé à re-regarder l'anime Yamada-kun and the Seven Witches (山田くんと７人の魔女), cette fois doublé en français, parce que... est-ce que j'ai besoin d'une raison?

Tiens, c’est drôle. Il se trouve qu’il y a quelques temp j’ai trouvé une scantrad de ce manga en catalan et j’en ai lu quelques tomes. Alors t'inquiète. Si moi je peux le lire en catalan, toi tu peux le regarder en français.

[Josquin]

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.

As I'm also dealing with the question of how to pronounce Biblical Hebrew correctly right now, I was rereading your log and stumbled over this passage. Might I ask what pronunciation system you use when you read Hebrew text? I mean, do you follow Lambdin or do you use a reconstructed pronunciation?

Until shortly, I was basically using Modern Hebrew pronunciation, but after hearing some Semitists reciting the beginning of the book Genesis in reconstructed pronunciation, I'm kind of hooked on it. So, I decided to make a distinction between all the begadkefat consonants (not just b, k, p as in Modern Hebrew), use long and short vowels (instead of semi-long vowels as in MH), and try to employ the traditional Semitic consonants for 'ayin, cheth, sin, teth, qof, and tsadeh, as difficult as it may be for me (please excuse the simplified transliteration, I'm not in the mood for looking up all the correct diacritics right now).

One thing that has been tripping me up though is the correct use of qamets and qamets chatuf. Lambdin makes no real decision of how to pronounce qamets (he says either as /ɑ/ or as /ɔ/), however in his transliteration system he indicates long a for qamets and short o for qamets chatuf. That's basically the Modern Hebrew system inherited from the Sephardic tradition and the way I've pronounced it until now.

However, those Semitists I heard used the Ashkenazic way of reading all qametses as a closed, dark /ɒ/, which is reflected in some transliteration systems with the letter å. Upon reading about it, I found that this seems to reflect the actual reconstructed pronunciation best. So, now I'm thinking of pronouncing all qametses as /ɒ(:)/ rather than /a:/ and /ɔ/, which sounds pretty cool BTW.

My question is whether you've found some information on this matter and how you handle it when reading Hebrew. I know the real vowels probably can't be reconstructed, but maybe you have some more information on this. Also, how do you handle begadkefat consonants and the traditional Semitic sounds? Last but not least, what about ultra-short vowels? Thanks in advance!

[vonPeterhof]

Might I ask what pronunciation system you use when you read Hebrew text? I mean, do you follow Lambdin or do you use a reconstructed pronunciation?...

...My question is whether you've found some information on this matter and how you handle it when reading Hebrew. I know the real vowels probably can't be reconstructed, but maybe you have some more information on this. Also, how do you handle begadkefat consonants and the traditional Semitic sounds? Last but not least, what about ultra-short vowels?

I follow Lambdin aside from the two variant pronunciations of ע and ח even if that's probably somewhat anachronistic when also distinguishing the begadkefat pronunciations. I did try to research vowel pronunciations from the early Biblical Hebrew period (mostly from the Steinberg book) and the actual (invariant) Tiberian pronunciation of the qamets, but in the end I decided not to give too much thought to the vowels. I mean I do try to retain as many distinctions as possible (e.g. ⟨ē⟩ = [eː], ⟨e⟩ = [ɛ] and ⟨ê⟩ = [eː] for tsere and [ɛː] for segol), but I don't go as far as making sure I maintain three distinct degrees of length. And yeah, I do pronounce the ultra-short vowels distinctly from each other, even though it seems like there was no phonemic distinction between them either in early Biblical or in Tiberian Hebrew.

Not sure if that was in Steinberg or in one of the Wikipedia articles, but one interesting idea I found is that some of the differences between the Ashkenazic and Sephardic reading traditions might be explained by pre-Tiberian dialectal differences rather than post-Tiberian divergence. That might explain the dual pronunciation of the qamets in Sephardic Hebrew, or the fact that the name Moses gets rendered into Greek in several ways, including Μωσῆς and Μωϋσῆς (the latter is reflected in variants like the French "Moïse" or Russian "Моисей", but is also reminiscent of the Ashkenazic "Moyshe" as opposed to the Sephardic "Moshe"). Not sure if this is a strong argument in favour of the Sephardic tradition, but it works for me now that I'm more or less used to the two qamets's

As for the Semitic sounds, having practised with Arabic and Avar earlier I'm pretty confident in my fricatives, including the pharyngeals, but I never really quite got the hang of "emphatic" consonants (aside from [q] which I got plenty of practice for, having grown up in Qazaqstan ). With the [tˤ] I often cheat a little by pronouncing it as an ejective. It would have been easier to do the same with tsadeh by using the "ts" pronunciation, but since I'm choosing to use the "emphatic s" pronunciation I'm just going with something that's hopefully in the right range. I'm also pronouncing the śin as [ɬ].

[Josquin]

Wow, very interesting! Thank you. That has given me quite some stuff to think about.

I guess it will still take some time for me till I've settled on a fixed pronunciation system. While I like reconstructed pronunciation a lot, pronouncing everything like Modern Hebrew is much easier. And I don't know if I really want to re-learn everything if and when I really start Modern Hebrew. But then again, reconstructed pronunciation sounds so cool...

Anyway, I'm probably going to read more on the matter of Ancient Hebrew phonology and report about it in my log. Thanks for now!

[vonPeterhof]

Things are going a bit slow with Hebrew right now - I only just got to lesson 40. Part of the reason is a somewhat busy couple of weeks at work, but another one is my growing obsession with Old Church Slavonic. Now I'm trying to make OCS translations for all new flashcards, not just those based on sentences from actual Biblical passages, which is pretty fun, but also makes flashcard making much more time-consuming than if I just went with Russian translations. I don't really have a deadline for getting through Lambdin's book, and getting through lessons too quickly does have the side effect of piling up Anki reviews, but I do also want to get to the other classical languages in my queue sooner rather than later. Maybe I should just get the OCS obsession out of my system by trying to write a post in it once Not tonight though, it's a little too late for that already.

Speaking of OCS, here's an interesting blog post I stumbled upon when searching for usage examples. Apparently someone tried to translate an interview with former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin into OCS. At first I was puzzled why they rendered his family name as Крѫгъ (circle), as 江 doesn't have that meaning, but then it hit me that the person transliterated from one possible reconstruction of its Old Chinese pronunciation, adapting it to the limitations of Late Common Slavic phonology (no /ŋ/ phoneme, open syllables only, syllable final [-n] assimilates into the preceding vowel to form a nasalized vowel): Jiang -> /*kroːŋ/ -> Krong -> Krǫgǔ -> Крѫгъ. Truly an inspiring example of dead language geekdom

In news about other languages, I've finished Syromyatnikov's introduction to Old Japanese. From now on I was thinking of doing exercises on an app I downloaded some time ago, a 古文・漢文 (Classical Japanese and Classical Chinese as used in Japan) quiz app from the 学校ネット series of Japanese school subject drill apps.

And finally, in anime news, I think ポプテピピック/Pop Team Epic easily wins the title of this season's most multilingual anime, with the most recent episode featuring extended dialogue in Japanese, English, French and Okinawan(!). It's not exactly an easy show to recommend though, as it's perhaps most accurately described as "absurdist Millenial anti-humour with heavy doses of Japanese pop-culture references". For what it's worth, I was strongly turned off by the first episode, but when I finally picked up the second one I found it really entertaining, and most of the rest of the show has been pretty watchable.

[vonPeterhof]

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.

[vonPeterhof]

Мендвт! Мини нернм Вадим. Би хөрн нәәмтә. Мини өрк-бүлм Санкт-Петербург балһснд бәәнә. Би Москва балһснд көдлнәв. Би Хальмг Таңһч тал однав.

Okay, that's about as much as I can write about myself in Kalmyk without looking up new words or grammatical structures. I'm pretty hooked on it right now and try to study it at least a little every day. I've even started studying the old Clear script too. One interesting thing I've noticed is the ways of expressing possession. While all languages I've studied have multiple ways of doing so, they tended to favour one out of three as the default one: "I have X" (most Germanic and Romance languages, Modern Greek, Mandarin), "at/by me exists X" (Russian, Irish, Ancient Greek, Biblical Hebrew, Manchu, Japanese [probably more so in negative constructions]) and "my X exists" (most Turkic languages). Kalmyk appears to employ both the second structure as well as a whole other one - "I (am) with X". While the book I'm studying with doesn't clarify the distinction, it seems like the latter structure is more commonly used to show what's known as inalienable possession - things like body parts, ages and kinship relationships. I also keep noticing odd false friends with Kazakh, like орндг (or(ə)nd(ə)g, bed) vs. орындық (orındıq, chair) or киилг (kiil(ə)g, shirt) vs. көйлек (köylek, dress). Not sure if those are even etymologically related though.

My focus on Kalmyk has meant that most of my other languages have suffered, most notably Hebrew - I think the past week was the first one where I didn't complete a single lesson – I barely even started lesson 44. And I'm afraid the situation won't be much different after my trip to Kalmykia, since I've just formally registered for this year's Polyglot Gathering, so I'll need to brush up on my Slovak once again Unfortunately I didn't make it in time to sign up for the 3 Countries Trip through Slovakia, Austria and Hungary, but that doesn't mean that a solo side trip to Hungary is out of the question. I can also kill two birds with one stone by getting an intro to Hungarian through the only Slovak-medium resource for that language I managed to find - a dictionary/phrasebook/grammar guide combo from Lingea I bought last year (though I'll probably also supplement it with Pimsleur to get at least some speaking practice). Anyway, looking forward to seeing and hearing everyone again! Uvidíme sa v Bratislave!

[Expugnator]

For the record, Brazilian Portuguese uses a similar construct which is where it distinguishes between permanent and temporary possessions:

Ter is permanent:
Tenho 34 anos.
Tenho duas filhas.

Estar com is temporary:
Estou com fome (I'd never write tenho fome unless I wanted to sound literary).
Estou com o carro do meu pai.
Estou com os reféns.
Estou com sua chefe na linha.

[vonPeterhof]

The trip to Kalmykia was very interesting. I didn't manage to learn as much Kalmyk beforehand as I had wanted, but, as I expected, there weren't really opportunities to use it there. In fact the only time I even heard spoken Kalmyk was when our guide took us to the homestead of an Oirat family who had moved in from Mongolia and whose adults spoke Oirat/Kalmyk, but no Russian. Finding books in Kalmyk also proved to be a non-trivial task, but I did come back with a small book of fairy tales and a thicker one about Kalmyk folklore. I certainly want to study the language a bit more, but I'm not sure when I'll be able to dedicate the time. If there's something that I really wanna do right now it's to convert all my Anki sentences from Cyrillic into the Clear Script, but that is quite a challenge both from the point of view of getting the script to display correctly in Anki and actually getting the right spellings. While converting from the Clear Script into Cyrillic is fairly straightforward, the other way is trickier due to the greater variety of spellings, and I haven't found a dedicated guide to differences between the old and new orthographies, especially for things like grammatical endings and affixes. The only way appears to be "reverse-engineering" some of those spellings from side-by-side texts like the one here (an excerpt from an early Kalmyk translation of a Pushkin poem in a Latin transliteration of the old orthography and the new orthography), with a little help from Mongolian cognates. I've already done a couple easier sentences that way, but most are proving extremely difficult. I guess it's not a huge problem if I stray away from historically accurate spellings, especially since Oirat spelling conventions weren't static for the several centuries of their existence. At least learning the Clear Script actually helped me improve my accuracy in reading the Manchu script, since a lot of the things about the latter started making sense after going through the former step-by-step.

Anyway, now I've started preparing for the Polyglot Gathering by catching op on my studies of Slovak on slovake.eu, studying some basic Hungarian and low-key refreshing German, Spanish and especially French (looking forward to Rick's talk ). I'm also hoping to make it to the Polyglot Conference in Slovenia in October this year. It's probably a good idea to postpone starting learning Slovene until after the Gathering to minimize the interference with Slovak

[Expugnator]

You're right to do so. Interference between Slovak and Slovene is so intense that it starts with the name of the language(s)!!