ALTVM VIDETVR

[emk]

Now I'm wondering whether I should go back to that course or get my hands on the classic Introduction to Old Norse by E. V. Gordon.

Gordon's Introduction to Old Norse is more of a primer than a real "introduction" to the language.

I have an ancient copy of Gordon's Introduction to Old Norse. It's basically just a reader, with translations of the first several texts, and a grammar and a glossary in the appendix. The glossary is fairly hard to use: it only lists a single form of each verb, for example, but Old Norse verbs undergo somewhat tricky vowel mutations in the stem, so I found myself saying, "Well, I know I'm looking for some verb that begins with s-", and then going through through the entire "S" section trying to conjugate likely verbs to find a match. Some of this was me being young and clueless, surely.

My gut feeling: If you already read modern Icelandic, or multiple Germanic languages at a high level, you could probably tackle this directly. But it would make far more sense to use it as a reader once you've picked up the basics elsewhere.

[Josquin]

Old Norse verbs undergo somewhat tricky vowel mutations in the stem, so I found myself saying, "Well, I know I'm looking for some verb that begins with s-", and then going through through the entire "S" section trying to conjugate likely verbs to find a match. Some of this was me being young and clueless, surely.

For problems like these, the Zoega dictionary is perfect. It has an index of conjugated verb forms with the corresponding infinitive form. Great if you're a total beginner.

[vonPeterhof]

@Josquin & emk: Thank you both for your input! I have tried reading Icelandic before, but my knowledge of Norwegian, German and English didn't seem to help at all (or at least, far less than it did in reading Swedish, Afrikaans or North Frisian). Looks like it might be better to get acquainted with the grammar elsewhere and postpone Gordon until the second stage of my stint in Old Norse.

[vonPeterhof]

One thing I forgot to mention in my previous update is that this year I would like to keep my updates at least somewhat regular and more frequent than once every month or two. Once a week should be a reasonable target to aim for, but this might fly out the window once work begins again . Since I'll be spending most of tomorrow on the road back to Moscow, it's probably better to get this week's update out of the way now.

And, speaking of things I didn't mention in the previous update, while scouring the bookshelves of my Saint Petersburg home for books to take back with me I stumbled upon a book I had forgotten I had - V. A. Avrorin's Grammar of the Manchu Written Language. Well, since I happen to have an actual resource might as well add another language to the list - Classical/Written Manchu, one of the administrative languages of the Qing Empire and and the only Tungusic language with a (pre-20th century) literary form. There are still lots of things for me to consider about dabbling in this language, like where exactly to stick it in the timeline of my challenge, or how I would go about making Anki cards for its script (picture cards with images generated by this site sound like a possible way of doing this, but I'll need to experiment). Nevertheless, this'll be an opportunity to both study an interesting layer of Chinese culture and add one more supposed branch of Altaic to my collection (the only one left after that will be Mongolic).

As for my current Chinese project, I might actually be done with the textbook even earlier than the end of the month. It turned out that unit 51 was the last one to introduce new grammar points (the subordinating conjunction 故 "because/therefore" and structures indicating preference). The remaining four units are basically reading comprehension and/or translation practice using excerpts from actual literary texts (Korean chronicles and Tang era poetry). I've already completed units 51 and 52 and will probably do most of unit 53 tomorrow, meaning that completing the book within next week should be possible. While the reading units do introduce new vocabulary, the main chronicle of Samguk Sagi wasn't very hard to understand with my existing vocabulary. Having peeked into the next unit I can see that the excerpts from the additional scrolls are a lot harder to understand due to much more varied vocabulary. But just being familiar with the characters that comprise a sentence isn't enough to understand its meaning, since the meanings of characters can vary very drastically depending on what function they play in a particular sentence. Due to the highly analytical nature of Classical Chinese grammar, reading sentences longer than four characters often turns into a puzzle where you first have to figure out which character is most likely to be the core of the predicate, and then determine the roles of all the other characters depending on their positions in relation to the predicate, the subject and everything in between. I wonder if reading modern Chinese is in any way similar to this...

Aside from Chinese I've done a lesson in Korean, read and analysed a poem in Classical Japanese, just now completed volume two of 響け! ユーフォニアム and watched some of the first episodes of this season's new crop of anime. So far the most promising-looking offering language-wise appears to be 昭和元禄落語心中, a dramatic story revolving around the relatively obscure Japanese art of rakugo storytelling. The first episode certainly does its best to convey the attractiveness of this art form to the audience. The old-timey Shitamachi brogue that the stories are delivered in is a bonus for language buffs. Also honourable mentions to だがしかし for its showcasing of much more prosaic Nipponiana, namely Japanese cheep sweets, and for the cute pun in its name (while its official romanization on the original manga is "Dagashi kashi", Ayana Taketatsu's placement of pitch accents in the trailers is clearly "Daga shikashi"), and to 僕だけがいない街 for having by far the most exciting season premiere so far and for its protagonist's decidedly un-anime line delivery (his mother's Hokkaido dialect is also a bonus).

[vonPeterhof]

Hanmun (Classical Chinese) textbook: completed! Now I will proceed to read the Analects, one paragraph a week, adding all sentences containing unfamiliar vocabulary to Anki. In addition to that, I will be devoting some time every week to studying a modern Chinese variety - Hakka! Why Hakka, you ask? Well, mostly because I already own a resource for it - Диалект хакка (китайский язык). Фонология, морфология, синтасис / А. Н. Алексахин (Hakka Dialect (Chinese Language). Phonology, Morphology, Syntax by A. N. Aleksakhin). I bought it because it was the only book on a non-Mandarin Chinese variety that I've managed to find in a Russian bookstore (I also remember having seen the same author's introduction to Shanghainese, but I haven't been able to find it anywhere any more). Besides, I always thought I'd dabble in a "dialect" before taking on Standard Chinese seriously.

As for my next classical language, I've decided to postpone Ancient Greek a bit and get into Classical Manchu for now, so that I can be done with East Asia and then take on the next region. Speaking of which, I'm also reconnecting with Vietnamese a little by following an example sentences twitter account and adding sentences (whose meanings I can confirm independently). I've only ever done a short Pimsleur course in this language and I don't know if I'll ever seriously pick it back up, but I am curious about it, so might as well get the full East Asian combo while we're at it.

[vonPeterhof]

It's been a somewhat slow week at work, so I've had lots of time to read language learning materials I guess I'll report on what I've been learning about each language separately, starting from the language I've spent the most time on.

Manchu
If there's anything truly special about Avrorin's book it's that he approaches Manchu not as a Sinologist or a general "Orientalist", but as a specialist in Tungusic languages and the foremost expert on Manchu's relatively close relative Nanai. That gives him a perspective on the history of the language's development that most academic Manchu scholars don't have. He also tries as much as possible not to assign grammatical categories and terminology from other languages on the languages whose grammars he describes, preferring to build his grammatical description up from the language in question. Somewhat notoriously this approach resulted in him coining at least three new parts of speech for his grammar of Nanai, but this approach certainly has merits if the goal isn't to identify some universal qualities and categories in a language, but instead to get into this particular language's speakers' heads and see how the language works for them.

Before buying the book I did skim through it and saw that all the example words and sentences were given in Cyrillic transliteration and that the Manchu alphabet was almost completely absent. So I was prepared that if I wanted to learn to read the script and to add the example sentences to Anki in their actual written form I would have to turn to other resources. However, I didn't realize what a non-trivial task that was, at least as far as non-Chinese resources freely available online are concerned. Like the Arabic script Manchu is written in a cursive-like form by default, so most letters have distinct initial, medial, final and isolated forms. However, even within those forms there are variations depending on what letters come before or after, and the resources that I've consulted (Wikipedia and Omniglot) explain them only partially. The table of syllables often comes in handy (in fact, traditionally the Manchu and Chinese scholars have treated the script not as an alphabet, but as a syllabary where you have to learn each syllable separately), but even it doesn't always explain things, since it only gives the isolated forms of syllables. Often after I've transliterated an example sentence in the script generator I find myself confused: why exactly is there one horizontal stroke instead of two? Why is the dot on the same level as the vowel and not below it? How am I supposed to know that this is this vowel and not that consonant if their final forms are apparently identical? Okay, Avrorin's book does mention the latter point, saying that if you can't figure it out from context due to not having the vocabulary, knowing the permissible syllable structures goes a long way. The problem is, there are lots of rules for syllable structures in Manchu, so it looks like the most feasible way is to bruteforce whole words into your memory until you start recognizing patterns.

Aside from the alphabet frustrations though, I'm still very interested in the language itself. I had always thought that after the Manchu conquered China and established the Qing empire they gradually assimilated into Chinese culture, forgot their language and stopped using it altogether. Later I found out that Manchu was always referred to as the "national language" under the Qing, but I still thought that surely this must have been a purely symbolic title. But according to both Avrorin's book and Wikipedia, while most of the Manchu living outside Manchuria did switch to Chinese as their primary spoken language, knowledge of Manchu was mandatory for ethnic Manchu who wanted to work in the civil and military bureaucracy. A lot of official documents were originally issued in Manchu, and palace chronicles apparently often contained details that were omitted from their Chinese translations. Pamela Crossley dubbed this function of written Manchu "security language" - a means of encoding and transmitting information intended to be known only to a select elite. Apparently even the text of the Treaty of Nerchinsk, the first treaty between China and Russia, was signed in Latin, Russian and Manchu, with the latter referred to in the text as "idioma sinicum" ("Chinese language"). Original literature in Manchu is comparatively scarce and hard to access, but there are plenty of Manchu translations of Chinese classics that provide valuable insights for understanding those texts (or at least, for understanding how those texts were understood in Qing era China).

Hakka
This week I only read the introduction to Aleksakhin's book and the part dealing with the phonology, but my mind was blown anyway. The author was apparently among the first Soviet Sinologists who, after decades of political tensions, was allowed to do field work in China for a large comparative study of Chinese vernaculars (namely, Beijing Mandarin, Shanghainese and Meixian Hakka). While reading the introduction I snickered at the fact that one of the conclusions from that study was that Chinese consonants cannot form syllables on their own. "A shame that he never reached Guangzhou or Hong Kong", I thought, since that way he would have learned of the Cantonese syllabic ng and m. However, it turns out that these were accounted for by his proposition for Hakka phonology that also works for most other Southern Chinese varieties, and that is that they don't have syllable-final consonants. His argument, apparently backed by experimental data, is that the syllable coda phonemes traditionally denoted as consonants /-n/, /-ŋ/, /-m/, /-t/, /-k/ and /-p/ are actually realized as nasalized vowels /-ĩ/, /-ɨ̃/, /-ũ/, /-ɪ̈̃/, /-ɨ̈̃/ and /-ü̃/, respectively. The author describes the latter three as "naso-pharyngeal vowels", with their difference from the former three being in the abrupt cessation of the airstream accompanied by an opening of the vocal cords, resulting in a distinct feeling of swallowing (the author speculates that this might be the reason why the short fourth tone of Middle Chinese, which only occurs in words ending in "stop consonants", is traditionally known as 入聲 or "the entering tone"). I think a somewhat more conventional way of describing this sort of articulation is saying that those sounds are stop consonants pronounced with nasal release, but even that is something you wouldn't normally see described in materials intended for layman learners.

Classical Chinese
I did the first passage from the Analects in the beginning of the week, but then I discovered this site which provides the Classical Japanese gloss and modern Japanese commentary for the Three Character Classic. Since this is one of the texts that served as an early introduction to the Classics for young children in Imperial China, this might be more level-appropriate for me than actual Confucius. Either way, I'll switch to this one for now and see how that goes.

[vonPeterhof]

This week was a little busier, but I guess I still got some studying done. I also went shopping for books yesterday and bought two books for the future stages of my challenge: one for Old Church Slavonic (Старославянский язык: учебное пособие/ Г.А. Турбин, С.Г. Шулежкова) and one for Sanskrit (Учебник санскрита/ В.А. Кочергина). I was really torn between two textbooks for OCS - the 2016 7th edition of a 2011 textbook that I ended up buying and a reprint of a much thicker Moscow State University textbook from the first half of the 20th century. The latter book had a much more detailed look into the hypothetical phonology of the language and a lot more information on the subject of comparative Slavic linguistics, but I suspect the newer book would benefit from half a century's worth of new research (and it's also noticeably less expensive ). I was also considering buying a very good-looking Hebrew textbook (a Russian translation of Thomas O. Lambdin's Introduction to Biblical Hebrew), but that one was really expensive and I've already found a bunch of interesting-looking online resources anyway.

Manchu
This week I started working on the part of the book that deals with noun morphology with lots and lots of example sentences. This, combined with my busier schedule, has slowed down the progress, but considering my issues with reading the Manchu alphabet I probably wouldn't want to add that many example sentences at once anyway. An additional factor that makes adding sentences not so straightforward is the Cyrillic transcription that Avrorin uses. The script converter works using Möllendorff's transliteration with slight changes to avoid the need for diacritics, so you need to input the words how they would have been spelled in Manchu. However, the transcription reflects not the original spelling, but how Avrorin thinks the words would have been actually pronounced. It's phonemic and not phonetic, so there is no distinction between [k] and [q] and the voiced consonant letters stand in for unaspirated voiceless ones, but there are noticeable differences in the representation of palatalized consonants, diphthongs and the lack of the vowel ū (Avrorin believes that it merged into u by the time of the Qing). So before adding the sentences to Anki I have to search around to make sure how the words would have actually been spelled. Here are a few examples:

Translation: Won't you lend a few notebooks?
Möllendorff's transliteration: emu udu debtelin juwen bureo
Avrorin's transcription: Эму уду дэбтэлин ӂу͜эн бурэ͜о? (Emu udu debtelin ju͜en bure͜o? The actual letter he uses for j looks like a Cyrillic cursive з with a breve on top).

Translation: holding the pommel
Möllendorff: burgiyen jafambi
Avrorin: бург'эн ӂафамби (burg'en jafambi)

Translation: walking on the road
Möllendorff: jugūn yabumbi ("jugvn yabumbi" in the converter input)
Avrorin: ӂугун јабумби (jugun yabumbi)

Hakka
Got through a brief chapter dealing with vocabulary and methods of writing. Apparently many characters have alternative readings - a "vernacular" one that's native to Hakka and a "literary" one which is a borrowing from Mandarin, adapted to Hakka phonology. There are also apparently words that are traditionally written with certain standard characters, even though it's not necessarily the case that they are cognates to the standard Mandarin words written with those characters. Characters specific to Hakka and/or those shared with neighbouring varieties do exist, but not for every words. Oh, and I've added my first example sentence:

Traditional characters: 飛機飛得恁快。
Simplified characters: 飞机飞得恁快。
Transcription in the book: fi33gi33 bi33dɛɪ̈̃21 ɑĩ31 kʷai55
Pha̍k-fa-sṳ orthography: Fî-kî pî-tet án khoai
Translation: The plane flies so fast (or "this fast").

The word for plane, 飛機, uses the literary reading of the character 飛, while the verb "to fly" uses the colloquial reading. The character 恁 in this context is Hakka-specific, used where 這麼/这么 would have been used in Mandarin (or 咁 in Cantonese).

I actually only really looked into pha̍k-fa-sṳ just now as I was writing this post. I've been avoiding it because I assumed that it was based on the Hakka dialects of Taiwan and not that of Meixian, but apparently the tonal notation is applicable to all dialects, since it's based on traditional tonal analysis going back to Middle Chinese tones. Maybe I should integrate it into my cards.

Vietnamese
Since the bot that I started to follow on Twitter seemed to have run out of vocabulary that I was unfamiliar with, I've switched to another one. I've always found it fascinating how different Vietnamese was from Japanese and Korean for a language that has been influenced by Chinese to a similar extent. I mean, of course there are differences in fundamental grammar (isolating vs agglutinative, SVO vs SOV, noun-adjective vs adjective-noun, contour tones vs pitch accent or no tonal distinctions, etc.), but even the Chinese influence manifests itself in very different ways. For example: here's the full official name of North Korea in all the CJKV languages:

C: 朝鲜民主主义人民共和国
J: 朝鮮民主主義人民共和国
K: 조선민주주의인민공화국 (朝鮮民主主義人民共和國)
V: Cộng hòa Dân chủ Nhân dân Triều Tiên (共和民主人民朝鮮)

Apparently even in compounds consisting entirely of Chinese loans Vietnamese grammar takes precedence. Also note the truncation of 共和國 and 民主主義. And Vietnamese vocabulary keeps defying my expectations: how come they use a native word for "airport" (sân bay, "yard" + "to fly"), but not for the particle "not" (không, from 空)?

Azerbaijani
No, I haven't taken it back up. It's just that this week I ended up running into it in the least expected place - in an anime:

teekyuu_azeri.jpg

Trust me, it doesn't make much more sense in context. Teekyuu is just that kind of a show. Incidentally, it's also the only anime that I'm still watching with English subs. Just check out an episode for yourself (this one is my favourite) and see if you can judge me

[vonPeterhof]

A very important professional challenge is coming up for me - this coming Tuesday I'll be interpreting at an Embassy reception for the first time. Considering that I've never done this professionally before I'm pretty nervous about this, but at least there shouldn't be any terribly important matters discussed at a dinner reception, so this should be a good opportunity to test my skills. It's a good thing I don't look like I got punched in the face any more (got into a little slipping accident on Tuesday - gonna be removing the stitches tomorrow).

Manchu
Haven't managed to advance very far this week - still on the noun morphology chapter. I only finished getting through the section dealing with the nominative yesterday. Although considering that I completed the one on the genitive in one day today, the rest shouldn't take as long. It could be argued that the nominative section is inflated a bit by examples where different cases are implied but the case markers are omitted - a phenomenon that exists to varying extents in all agglutinative languages I've encountered, perhaps most ubiquitously in colloquial Korean.

I guess the newest thing I encountered this week were the special characters used to represent Chinese (Mandarin) sounds that don't exist in native Manchu words. I find it pretty curious that the Manchu added several letters to their alphabet to accommodate Mandarin proper names and loanwords, while at the same time doing their best to keep the number of said loanwords as low as possible. But then, older Japanese texts also contain noticeably fewer Chinese loanwords than modern ones, in spite of how much direct and indirect Chinese cultural influence Japan was under at the time. Maybe there's a pattern of there being more of an effort to preserve linguistic purity in societies where access to literacy is limited to a relatively small elite, with the purism getting eroded as education spreads to the lower social strata. It would be interesting to see how colloquial Manchu compared to literary Manchu in this aspect.

Speaking of older Japanese texts...

Old Japanese
I'm not sure if I've mentioned this before, but some time ago I bought a book on Old Japanese by Syromyatnikov, the author of the book from which I started my foray into Classical Japanese. I started reading the Old Japanese book a few weeks ago and was initially just thinking of reading it without adding anything to Anki. But this week I read the chapter on the writing and I couldn't resist the temptation. Given the fact that the same syllable could have been written using a number of Chinese characters (not to mention the cases where the characters weren't used for phonetic representation) the cards for my new Old Japanese deck go only in the kanji->reading+translation direction. I don't see much point in memorizing how exactly the various poems and passages were written in the old texts, let alone memorizing all possible ways of writing an Old Japanese syllable, but learning to recognize what syllables what characters could have stood for might come in handy. Here a few card examples:

Example 1: "pure man'yōgana"
Side 1:
Sentence - 多太爾安布麻弖爾
Side 2:
Transcription - ただに　あふまでに。
Translation - 直接、再会できるその日まで。/Until we meet (again) directly (i.e. face-to-face).

Here each Chinese character stands for a single Old Japanese syllable with no consideration given to their meanings. While I could have used the Romanization that the book uses, since this sentence contains no vowel distinctions that have been lost by the time of Classical Japanese it can just be represented by hiragana (as long as you remember that ふ back then was pronounced /pu/ and not /fu/). While all the words and particles used here have been preserved in modern Japanese (only あふ having been respelled to あう) the phrasing is a bit too vague if left word-for-word, so a more wordy modern translation is given.

Example 2: "broken Chinese"
Sentence - 此二柱神亦獨神成坐而　隱身也
Translation - この二柱の神もまた獨神で、お姿を現されることはありませんでした。(These two gods also being hitorigami, they didn't reveal themselves)
Transcription - Könö putapasira-nö kamï-mo pitörikamï-tö narimasimasite, mï-wo kakusitamapu.

In this one the characters are all used for their meaning rather than sound. However, it's different from Kanbun in that the syntax isn't exactly Chinese, since the complex verb form of the first clause 成坐而 follows the indirect object 獨神 instead of preceding it. While in this case the characters don't reflect the distinctions between pairs of vowels that would later merge into o, e and i, the transcription indicates them based on evidence from other texts, using the presence or lack of diaeresis ("Umlaut" dots). There is still no consensus on what exactly those distinctions were, and Syromyatnikov only speculates that they were all vowel quality distinctions (as opposed to tone, length, etc.) and, based on Altaicist reconstructions, presumes that ï was pronounced like the Russian ы (ɨ). While Old Japanese does display traces of a vowel harmony system, it's apparently too rudimentary to tell which vowels in the other two pairs were more fronted.

Example 3: mixture of the aforementioned two

Sentence - 內者富良富良外者須夫須夫
Translation - 中は広々として外は狭くすぼまっている。(The inside is open and spacious, the outside is cramped and stuffy)
Transcription - Uti-pa porapora, to-pa subusubu.

Here we have the characters 內 (inside), 外 (outside) and 者 (topic marker) used for their meaning, while the rest of the sentence consists of characters phonetically representing quasi-onomatopoeic descriptors. Apparently even crazier cases existed, like characters getting used for their sound, except not for the way they are pronounced in Chinese, but rather the way their most common meaning is rendered in Japanese. My favourite example is 忘金鶴 (wasure-kane-turu): the characters mean "forget", "gold/metall" and "crane" respectively, and the pronunciation is these three words in Japanese, but the latter two characters don't represent those actual words but instead their homophones. "-kane-" is also the root of an auxiliary verb meaning "hard to do" (still surviving in polite phrasing like わかりかねます), while "-turu" is the past tense attributive ending, so the whole sequence is describing the noun it's referring to as something that "was hard to forger". If you thought the Japanese writing system is crazy now...

Chinese
Not headlining this as "Hakka" because I did relatively little in it this week. I have completed the chapter on morphology, but it was relatively brief and didn't have any complete example sentences. However, it did have some interesting comparisons with the Beijing dialect, which sent me on a tangent about different forms of Mandarin and led me to discover a couple of interesting pieces of information on Wikipedia, relating to my discussion about syllable-final consonants in Chinese from a couple of weeks ago. First I discovered that someone recently left a lengthy rant on the talk page of the Wikipedia article on Standard Chinese phonology. Some points of that rant, particularly the one about how the way final consonants are taught to learners doesn't really reflect how native speakers of Chinese varieties pronounce them, reminded me of Aleksakhin's thesis that those consonants aren't consonants at all but instead varying forms of nasalised vowels. The impression that this is what the author of the rant had in mind only strengthened after I read through the article on the Beijing dialect:

Moreover, Beijing dialect has a few phonetic reductions that are usually considered too "colloquial" for use in Standard Chinese. [...] Also, final -⟨n⟩ /-n/ and (less frequently) -⟨ng⟩ /-ŋ/ can fail to close entirely, so that a nasal vowel is pronounced instead of a nasal stop; for example, 您 nín ends up sounding like [nĩ˧˥] (nasalized), instead of [nin˧˥] as in Standard Chinese

While the analysis of the nasal vowels given later in the article isn't identical to the one that Aleksakhin makes for Hakka, it seems to be describing the same phenomenon. The article positions this as a colloquial feature and a deviation from Standard norms, but if we take into account the point from the aforementioned rant that Standard Chinese is a largely artificial construct (and one apparently created with much heavy input from people who were at least to some extent bilingual in Manchu) and that the Beijing dialect existed long before it, then it may well be that no natural variety of Chinese contains actual syllable-final consonants and that their presence in the prescribed Standard pronunciation is a hypercorrective form modelled on a simplified/foreign-influenced interpretation of Mandarin phonology.

Vietnamese
Starting to get a strong temptation to dive deeper into this language. Yesterday I only wanted to refresh Vietnamese pronunciation in my mind after I had realised that I had completely forgotten what some of the diacritics actually mean, but I ended up spending most of the day reading up on the Vietnamese language and Vietnam in general. There was a Vietnamese lady in my group in Osaka last summer, and I remember that she would always disagree whenever someone said that Vietnamese was hard to read, saying that the rules were very internally consistent. That they may be, but there's still a ton of them to keep in mind, and that's not even getting into the huge variation in pronunciation between regions and the lack of a real standard for the spoken language. But right now I really want to drill at least be able to read it out loud with some accuracy and internal consistency. I wonder if there's something like the FSI drills, but for the Hanoi dialect instead of the Saigon one. I wouldn't mind doing Saigon instead if I weren't already so used to the Hanoi one from Pimsleur; besides, there's probably not as much native audio available in the Southern dialect these days.

[vonPeterhof]

The reception at the Embassy happened, but it turned out I didn't really have to do much in the end. Since there weren't any Japanese people who weren't Embassy employees present, and the employees can all speak either Russian or English. Plus, a lot of the Russian guests could speak English, so there wasn't all that much need for translators - the most we had to do was guide people to the Ambassador. In addition to speaking Russian pretty fluently, he got a good reaction out of the audience by making a reference to a currently popular viral video (a version of the song with "clean" lyrics here). So, this turned out to be neither a challenge nor a practicing opportunity, but at least the food was great

I didn't manage to get that much studying done last week (only completed the accusative and a small part of the dative in Manchu, read through the bit on noun morphology in Hakka and a small bit on hypothetically interrelated stems in Old Japanese), so I don't really have anything interesting to report. Instead, here's a couple of songs in some of the languages I've been doing:

A Manchu song


A Hakka hill song


A song in Norwegian and Uyghur by Eldos Gayrat, a contestant on Norway's Got Talent


A song in Mandarin and Kazakh by Aray Aydarxan, a contestant on a similar Chinese show

[vonPeterhof]

I might be getting a proper translation challenge this time - in a little more than a week I'm going to have to translate at a meeting between Japanese and Russian customs employees. Back when I was in the language school in Japan I did take an elective class on international trade which included a visit to the Osaka customs, but I'll still probably need to cram a lot of customs-related vocabulary before I can feel prepared. I also might have to accompany a MEXT employee on a visit to a STEM-focused Moscow high school the day before, which worries me a little more since my STEM vocabulary is probably even weaker. In addition to these professional challenges, tax day is approaching, and one of the not-so-good aspects of working for the Embassy is that, unlike the vast majority of legally employed Russian citizens, we actually have to file our own income tax returns. With all this happening I might not have as much time to devote to languages other than Japanese in the coming couple of weeks. And it's not like I've been making steady progress as it is - I'm still not done with the noun cases in Manchu and with the verb morphology of Hakka, and I've been unable to make the time to add new Vietnamese sentences. Just a couple of highlights:

Hakka
In the process of making Anki cards I eventually decided to drop the Pha̍k-fa-sṳ romanization and stick to the system used by the book. While it can reflect the tones accurately regardless of the dialect, it seems like some sound combinations that exist in the Meixian dialect can't be reflected by it - namely gʷɔ- and ŋʷ-. However, I am modifying the book's system a little, since it apparently doesn't account for tone sandhi.

Also, while looking around for other sources on Hakka pronunciation and written representations I found this online dictionary for Taiwanese Hokkien and Hakka. While it apparently only covers the Taiwanese dialects of Hakka, there are usually at least a couple of sound samples that are pretty close to the pronunciation described in the book, while the information on written representation is invaluable. The book claims that the noun-forming suffix -ɛ51. and the verb suffix -ɛ31 can't be represented by Chinese characters, but according to the dictionary (and Google search results) they can be written as 仔 and 欸, respectively.

Ainu
Since the two latest episodes of the Ainu radio classes featured the language as used in yukar epic poetry, I guess technically I have now dabbled in one more classical language, namely Classical Ainu. It's apparently supposed to use polysynthetic constructions that aren't really used in modern spoken Ainu. While the lessons did introduce some constructions that sound like they fit the bill (kourarcimi - "to clear away the fog", sirikoraye - "to drag up really high", sikeranaatte - "to cast down one's eyes"), due to the short format of the lessons they didn't really go into detail about their morphology and etymology, so it's hard to tell. Regardless, it was interesting to learn about this aspect of a vanishing culture. The poem wasn't covered in its entirety, but it's apparently available online in animated form here, along with two others.

Turkmen & Uyghur
Got a bit of a blast from the past - by a strange coincidence the lang-8 posts I wrote months ago in the two aforementioned Turkic languages both got their first corrections this past week. Well, at least it's good to find out that the posts weren't too poorly written.