ALTVM VIDETVR

[vonPeterhof]

Having read through all the lesson materials in my Syriac textbook I guess I'll consider the "studying" bit for that language completed. I still have example sentences from several lessons left to add to Anki, but I'll be counting that as part of the "reading" bit, since the reading proper will also be from the textbook, or rather its numerous appendices. Meanwhile I'm continuing my familiarization with the phonologies and writing of Thai and Sanskrit, while also dabbling in Babylonian and picking up Turoyo. Turoyo is apparently not a very commonly written language, but there do seem to be two broadly agreed upon spelling conventions, one using the Latin alphabet and the other on the Serṭā (Serṭo) variant of the Syriac script. If you're familiar with the West Syriac pronunciation tradition, the writing system for Turoyo is basically that, except spelled more phonetically: for example, the vowel ā is pronounced like o, so it stands for o in all cases, with the vowel-waw only representing u, and since the pronunciation of ḇ has shifted to w it's respelled with the consonant-waw, with the old letter ḇ only used to represent v-like sounds in loanwords. Plus there are additional letters for certain fricatives and affricates that didn't exist in Syriac, as well as more precise use of vowel marks (in traditional Serṭā it doesn't matter whether vowel marks are placed above or below the consonants, but in this version of the script the position of a and e marks indicates vowel length). The only unusual thing about the Latin alphabet for Turoyo is the use of the letter C for the Semitic ʿayin sound; the only other orthography I'm aware of with something similar is the Somali one.

Aside from the languages mentioned above, keeping up with current events in Xinjiang and Hongkong has reignited my interest in Chinese (the "Asian languages" theme of the latest Polyglot Conference may have helped as well ). I've actually noticed a slight improvement in my comprehension of written Chinese, even though I hadn't really done much intentional study of it for a year if not more. I've now added listening to Pimsleur Cantonese to my morning commute routine, with later additions of Anki sentences in written Cantonese and translated into standard written Chinese. I'm also adding new sentences into the Mandarin deck and slowly reactivating the Hakka one, while also doing a bit of Mandarin pronunciation practice with Glossika Chinese Pronunciation & Tone Training.

All this probably sounds like a lot, but this is somewhat mitigated(?) by the fact that I haven't really developed a solid routine since coming back from Japan, so now I'm pretty much doing whatever I feel like doing at any given moment, which results in a somewhat unbalanced distribution of time dedicated to various activities from week to week. I should probably start doing something about it, but that's a bit hard to do right now, between sporadic busy periods at work and the fact that my extended family happens to have a lot of celebrations in autumn and winter, including my upcoming 30th birthday which I've yet to start properly planning. Maybe I can figure something out over the New Year holidays...

[Deinonysus]

Good luck with Babylonian! It's on my bucket list but I've never spent much time on it.

FYI, John Huehnergard has put the latest edition of his well-regarded 700 page textbook A Grammar of Akkadian on Academia.edu for free:
https://www.academia.edu/234695/2011_A_ ... d_edition_

He starts introducing cuneiform in chapter 9 out of 38.

A Manual of Akkadian by David Marcus starts with cuneiform from the very beginning, but that one isn't free.

[edited for word salad]

[vonPeterhof]

Time sure flies, huh. Hard to believe that the last time I updated this log it was still the 2010s and I was still in my late 20s Maybe writing brief activity reports every day will be easier than trying to summarize everything each week.. I guess right now I could write status reports on each individual language I'm learning, but overall I guess I could say that not much has changed since the end of last year in terms of me not having a solid routine and instead basically just trying to do at least something in each of my languages each week, and often failing even that. Anyway,

Sanskrit: guess I should start from the Classical language du jour, seeing as how they're supposed to be my main focus on this log. I have completed eight lessons in the textbook, which covers the Devanagari script, the phonology and the basics of present tense verb conjugations. Due to my existing familiarity with Devanagari I've been adding the Anki sentences in the Siddham script instead, while also incorporating the Thai script into the reverse of the cards, in order to help with learning the reading of Thai letters (it's a lot easier to remember which tonal class Thai consonant letters fall into if you know whether they represent voiced or voiceless consonants in Sanskrit and Pali). A few weeks ago I decided that it might actually be better to roll back on Siddham in favor of the Brahmi script, as 1) Brahmi is the ancestral script of the entire family, and 2) aside from a few letters and ligatures Siddham isn't all that visually different from Devanagari. By now I've converted all the "Pronunciation" sections on my Anki cards to the Thai script and I'm adding all the new sentences in Brahmi, unless the sentence would contain an interesting ligature in Siddham.

Since I have only scratched the surface of grammar so far, right now the biggest challenge is reading, and not just due to me juggling between the various scripts I knew in advance of Sanskrit's notoriously extensive system of sandhi (changes in pronunciation of sounds at the boundaries of morphemes and/or words; most such changes are reflected in the spelling), but something I wasn't prepared for is the spelling convention that words ending in consonants are written without a space separating them from the following word. These two factors sometimes make it hard to see word and morpheme boundaries, not to mention the challenge in figuring out the default forms of words for dictionary lookups.

Syriac: still making my way through the reading sections I skipped in my rush to the end of the book, currently doing the section in Lesson 38, which is an excerpt from the Old Testament, specifically Genesis 1:1-31. An interesting feature of Old Testament Syriac is the use of the prepositional direct object marker yāṯ, which is used as an equivalent to the Hebrew ʾeṯ/ʾēṯ. Translations of the New Testament and original Syriac literature the prefix lᵊ-/la- plays the role of both the dative and the accusative marker, although the direct object can also be left unmarked.

Thai: I remember back when I wasn't yet learning Thai, whenever I heard people complain about the lack of spaces in Japanese and Thai I would think "well, in Japanese the alternate use of three scripts makes it easy to parse sentences even without spaces. I don't know about Thai, but I'm sure that the fact that most native words are monosyllabic makes it easy to parse". Oh how naive I was As it turns out, even seeing syllable boundaries is often a non-trivial task, considering the presence of closed syllables, initial consonant clusters, unmarked vowels, and even cases where a single consonant letter represents simultaneously the final consonant of one syllable and the initial consonant of the following one. I used to think that the Thai script not having consonant ligatures like the other Brahmic scripts do was a good thing, but now I kind of think that they might have made consonant cluster recognition easier And that's not getting into the whole issue of determining tones based on the combination of tone marks, class of the initial consonant, length of the vowel and/or the presence or absence of final consonants. And even then there's a few words that straight up break the rules and are normally pronounced contrary to the tones indicated in their spelling. At one point I thought that it might be better to just give up on trying to see patterns and just learn each word as its own thing But now I think I'm actually getting a bit better at recognizing certain tones in writing, so maybe there's still hope for me.

Turoyo: probably the slowest moving out of my current projects, as I'm still on lesson 4. It really isn't an exaggeration that the Modern Aramaic languages are grammatically quite different from Middle Aramaic ones like Syriac. The most curious thing to me is the evolution of the article system. In Old Aramaic the role of the definite article was played by the so-called "emphatic state", essentially adding the ending -ā to masculine nouns and -tā to feminine ones (with some exceptions). By Middle Aramaic those endings lost all implications of definiteness, instead becoming the default noun endings. Turoyo has retained those endings, only shifting the pronunciation of ā to [ɒ], but also developed a new system of definite articles that come before the nouns, like they do in Hebrew and Arabic: u for masculine nouns and i for feminine ones; plural nouns of either gender get the article an, but if the noun starts with a consonant the -n is replaced with that consonant. Those articles are also used with people's names, like in Modern Greek, Portuguese and some southern German varieties (something that the German textbook naturally points out).

Polish: a new addition due to the upcoming Polyglot Gathering in Poland. For this I'm using small doses of Assimil's pocket textbook, Le Polonai de poche, Pimsleur's Polish I course, an Ilya Frank reader of Joanna Chmielewska's novel Wszystko czerwone and uTalk lessons. But the tool I'm using most consistently is a new one to me - Duolingo. I've also checked out the Duolingo courses for some of the other languages, and unlike them the Polish one doesn't have the pronunciation tasks, so I guess I have to use Pimsleur and uTalk for that. Not that I'm too worried about my pronunciation. For me the biggest problems are the grammar (at least the bits that differ between Polish and Russian) and listening comprehension, which I've been trying to boost by following a number of Polish YouTube channels.

There's also a few other languages that I'm dabbling in a bit less consistently. As a result of a complicated sequence of events my relatives ended up giving me a whole bunch of books in Spanish for my birthday, so now I'm reading one of them (an apparently somewhat streamlined version of Vicente Blasco Ibáñez's Sangre y Arena). I'm still doing small chunks of the Babylonian textbook, usually while watching the anime Fate/Grand Order - Absolute Demonic Front: Babylonia. Still doing those Memrize courses for Setswana, for some reason And finally, while I stopped doing courses for Afrikaans, this week I tried starting to watch the Afrikaans dub of the classical anime series Heidi, Girl of the Alps (which is apparently available on YouTube in its entirety), while at times pausing to compare it with the original track and pick out things I don't quite understand. Not sure how much I can learn this way, but it is an interesting activity to try doing for a while.

[tuckamore]

Thai: I remember back when I wasn't yet learning Thai, whenever I heard people complain about the lack of spaces in Japanese and Thai I would think "well, in Japanese the alternate use of three scripts makes it easy to parse sentences even without spaces. I don't know about Thai, but I'm sure that the fact that most native words are monosyllabic makes it easy to parse". Oh how naive I was As it turns out, even seeing syllable boundaries is often a non-trivial task, considering the presence of closed syllables, initial consonant clusters, unmarked vowels, and even cases where a single consonant letter represents simultaneously the final consonant of one syllable and the initial consonant of the following one.

This! At the beginning I was intimidated by the Thai writing system and I reassured myself by telling myself, somewhat flippantly, that if I could learn to read Japanese (and English), then I can do so in Thai, too. I believed with a little dab of exposure that Thai had to be on par with, if not easier than, Japanese. Well, that mantra soon became an empty shell as Thai is loads harder than Japanese for all the reasons you mention. The main difficulty for me comes down to identifying syllable boundaries. If this were more straightforward, then the lack of spaces between words would be less of a pain.

It does become easier with exposure. The tones, as revealed by the relevant consonant classes, open vs closed syllables, long vs short vowels, and tone marks, are almost instinctual for me now (finally!).

I found this article (http://www.thai-language.com/id/830222) to be a great help for breaking down consonant clusters. Tones in words that had a silent -ะ in the first syllable, like the word ถนน, seemed arbitrary to me. But, this article explains that this is actually a consonant cluster and that there is a relatively global pattern among all types of consonant clusters. After reading this article, I was guessing less at what I should be doing.

The two parts that still trick me up the most are unusual spellings, (I'm weary of anything with 'ร'), and when the final consonant of one syllable is also the first consonant of the second syllable.

[vonPeterhof]

Thanks for the link, tuckamore! I'll be sure to read it later.

I believed with a little dab of exposure that Thai had to be on par with, if not easier than, Japanese. Well, that mantra soon became an empty shell as Thai is loads harder than Japanese for all the reasons you mention.

I forgot to mention it my previous post, but some of my issues with Thai orthography remind me a lot of pre-reform kana orthography, in how the number of kana characters isn't a reliable predictor of morae, or how some vowels and consonants change their pronunciation based on their surroundings, except when they don't. I would imagine that learning it from scratch, without having first acquired a large enough Japanese vocabulary, would have been just as frustrating as learning Thai orthography, and more frustrating than learning kanji

[vonPeterhof]

I found this article (http://www.thai-language.com/id/830222) to be a great help for breaking down consonant clusters. Tones in words that had a silent -ะ in the first syllable, like the word ถนน, seemed arbitrary to me. But, this article explains that this is actually a consonant cluster and that there is a relatively global pattern among all types of consonant clusters. After reading this article, I was guessing less at what I should be doing.

I checked out the article now, and most of the things in there were actually covered by my textbook from the Japanese ニューエクスプレス＋ series. In fact it's those enepenthetic clusters that my book refers to as "false consonant clusters" rather than the ones with a silent ร. This sort of syllable structure is apparently a common feature of Austroasiatic languages (although pretty much entirely absent from the by far largest one, Vietnamese), so it's unsurprising that Thai has it in Khmer loanwords like ถนน.

[tuckamore]

This sort of syllable structure is apparently a common feature of Austroasiatic languages (although pretty much entirely absent from the by far largest one, Vietnamese), so it's unsurprising that Thai has it in Khmer loanwords like ถนน.

Very cool. I’ll be prepared if I ever decided to learn an Austroasiatic language.

I’ll add one last comment on the virtues of Japanese. Another perk of the triple writing system that I miss with Thai is the usefulness of katakana, (and I’m not even a very fluent katakana reader). I hadn’t realized how much I take katakana for granted. It’s a huge flag for me to pause and figure out if there is a word of English origin buried within it somewhere. More often than not, there is. In reading Thai, these sorts of loan words are my bane.

I cannot wait for the day when I look back and laugh at how elementary these so-called troubles seem.

[vonPeterhof]

Time sure flies, huh. [...] Maybe writing brief activity reports every day will be easier than trying to summarize everything each week..

Well so much for that. To say that lots of things happened in the almost three years that passed since I last updated this log is to say nothing. There's a number of reasons why I haven't been able to pick this log back up, but perhaps the biggest one was that on the occasions when I did consider writing something I'd either get overwhelmed by the amount of things I'd have to recap, or think that things are too much in flux at the moment and that it might be better to wait for them to calm down a little. Not that it's become clear that "calm" isn't really a thing anymore, might as well write a little update.

I guess as far as life in general goes I'm doing... surprisingly fine, all things considered. Still somehow working the same job, albeit 100% remotely for now. My language learning has gone through too many phases to summarize efficiently, but I guess the key points I can bring up are me getting hooked on multilanguage learning apps (and currently trying to keep it under control by limiting my daily routine to just three of them, namely Duolingo, Clozemaster and Memrise, not counting Anki which I had been doing for ages already) and bringing some consistency and grounding to my learning process by participating in this forum's 365 Day Challenge.

As for the initial main focus of this log, namely my Classical languages challenge, suffice it to say that I burned myself out on it during the Sanskrit leg of the journey, only to slightly later find the opportunity to push the reset button on it by discovering the textbook Lingua Latina per se Illustrata. I'm currently about a third of my way through the first book (including the workbook Exertitia Latina which I'm doing in parallel) and I already feel both my passive and active skills in the language to be leagues better than they ever were during my first foray into the language. The improvement became marked after I stopped doing the book my usual way (basically skim-reading and sentence-mining for Anki) and actually started going through each lesson several times and writing out the less transparent sentences scriptorium-style. Not sure if I'll do this with any other Classical languages I've tried learning or thought of learning before, but for now I'm genuinely enjoying Latin and would like to finish the whole book.

As for other languages, let's just say that due to a certain change in my living situation Kazakh has shot up in my list of priority languages. I started refreshing my grammar knowledge using the website soyle.kz (its placement test put me in B1, so that's the course I'm doing) while trying to incorporate more Kazakh-language media into my daily routine (mostly YouTube-based podcasts like Dope Soz and Зamandas), and I've also been able to attend meetings of a Kazakh conversational club, which has been a great help in developing my active skills.

I guess I could also talk about two languages I started learning thanks to my newly found obsession with vtubers, namely Indonesian and Hmong, but my family's New Year's dinner is about to start, so I guess I'll end it here for now.

[vonPeterhof]

Update: I've decided to stop learning Latin for now, and since I'm not currently studying any other language that can be referred to as "Classical" I guess that means that my Classical languages challenge is also on hiatus. There are two reasons for this, one internal and one external, in relation to my Latin studies.

The internal one is that I've run into... if not "burnout", then at least something of a slump in going through Lingua Latina per se Illustrata. One criticism of the book I've encountered a while ago is the unevenness of its introduction of verb tenses, basically spending a third of the book operating on nothing but the present tense and then switching to introducing a new tense every other lesson, hardly giving the time to fully internalize previous knowledge. Knowing of this in advance didn't do much to prevent me from feeling overwhelmed. After getting to lesson 26 and realizing that I was barely distinguishing any of the non-present tenses from one another, I tried restarting the middle section while paying closer attention to verb forms and starting to add sentences to Anki again. This process was going pretty well, but as I was getting closer to catching up to the point where I had stopped I realized that I wasn't really looking forward to continuing from there as I had no idea if I wanted to do things the old way from there on, or do the more labor-intensive task of a combination of scriptorium and Anki.

The external reason is that, having now spent half a year back in Kazakhstan, I've realized that I'm really not satisfied with my progress in Kazakh. Not that there isn't any; I feel like my conversational ability and reading comprehension are better than they had ever been. Yet I still don't feel confident initiating conversations in Kazakh, and getting approached in Kazakh still catches me off guard by showing just how poorly equipped I still am to comprehend everyday speech at natural speeds. I feel like I need to be dedicating a lot more time each day to studying Kazakh and increasing my exposure to the language in all forms. While I'm not quite ready to suspend any and all learning or sustaining activities for other languages, Latin seems like the most obvious candidate for elimination for the time being. If I write another update after this, unless I drastically change my mind once again it will probably be in a new log.

[siberiano]

Салам брат! Сен қайда, Алматыда ба, Астанада ба?