ALTVM VIDETVR

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vonPeterhof
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Re: ALTVM VIDETVR

Postby vonPeterhof » Sun Oct 16, 2016 4:50 pm

Gonna be travelling again tonight, so a very brief update:

-Turns out they were saving the season's best anime language-wise for last: 舟を編む a.k.a. The Great Passage, a noitaminA adaptation of a novel about compiling and editing a Japanese dictionary. In addition to the expected linguistic nerddom and the relative freshness of an anime featuring working adults rather than high school students, it's also supported by very strong visuals. This scene in particular is totally my aesthetic.

-Latin: decided to switch from the Hobbit to Caesar's Gallic War, as that seems like a more level-appropriate choice after all.

-Georgian: just one more lesson in the book left, hopefully will get it done next week.

-OCS: reached the biggest part of the morphology section: the verbs. The reduction in the number of tenses and overall verb forms is probably the most important grammatical difference between Russian and OCS (to some extent also applicable to modern Bulgarian and Macedonian).

-Might finish reading the third book 響け! ユーフォニアム tonight. Might...
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vonPeterhof
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Re: ALTVM VIDETVR

Postby vonPeterhof » Mon Oct 24, 2016 10:19 am

I got another Monday off this time, so another slightly belated update.

In Old Church Slavonic I'm still getting through the parts dealing with verbal morphology. I found it curious that the past tense form that was used very rarely in OCS original literature, the perfect, is the one that ended up the one best preserved in modern Slavic languages. While I still intend to dabble in Polish once I'm done with the introduction to OCS, I can't help but feel very much tempted by Bulgarian and its fascinating mix of features both conservative (the full OCS tense system, ъ as a separate vowel phoneme, the first person pronoun аз, the lack of /je/; there are apparently dialects in northern Greece where they've even preserved the nasal vowels, like in Polish) and innovative (the near-complete collapse of noun declension, the disappearance of the infinitive, the definite article, the yat reflexes).

In Georgian I've completed the lessons in M. Akobia's book, but there are still a few classes left in the corresponding writing workbook, Я пишу и читаю по-грузински, so I'm technically not done yet. The verbal system is apparently the biggest challenge in Georgian grammar, and the introductory format of the textbook unfortunately only allows for a very cursory treatment of that subject. Still, I think I now have a good idea of the phonology and noun declensions and may pick the language back up at a later date. Meanwhile, I've found a useful resource for both Georgian and Abkhaz - the official website of the Government of the Autonomous Republic of Abkhazia (Abkhazia's Georgian loyalist "government in exile" that appears to function as the Georgian government's official agency for the affairs of the internally displaced persons who had fled/were expelled from Abkhazia during the wars). The site semi-regularly reports on the Government's activities, posting versions of the same article in Georgian, Abkhaz, English and Russian, which is very useful for parallel reading.

Once I'm done with the Georgian exercises I'll focus my modern language efforts on a última flor do Lácio, but in the meantime I've been able to step up adding sentences due to the appearance of several large articles relating to Portugal and East Timor on the Portuguese edition of Global Voices. Normally I probably would have put them off until I'm done with the course, but upon noticing the links to those articles on Twitter I couldn't resist jumping into bilingually available native material that I can be more or less sure isn't Brazilian Portuguese ("You non-native Brazilian Portuguese speakers don't know how good you've got it.." ;) ).

And in Japanese, I've finally completed the third book of 響け! ユーフォニアム. While there is a fourth book which I do own and a spinoff series (立華高校マーチングバンドへようこそ) which I don't, the former is more of a short story collection than a novel and the latter stars a whole other set of characters in a different setting, so I can say that I'm done with the main series. The fact that it took me more than a year should be a warning sign for me to work on fixing my inability to focus on one book at a time.
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vonPeterhof
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Re: ALTVM VIDETVR

Postby vonPeterhof » Sun Oct 30, 2016 10:28 pm

Done with the Georgian books, so that language is on hold for me for now. I'm definitely still interested in it (as well as in the languages of the Caucasus in general), so I'll probably get back to it at some point. Meanwhile I'll be raising the frequency of Portuguese Pimsleur lessons to one per day. I'm also thinking of doing the GLOSS lessons before moving on to the next language, since there's only six of them in total for European Portuguese.

In OCS I'm done with the section on verb morphology, and all that's remaining is a very brief section on certain aspects of syntax, so I guess I'll be done next week. For my reading in this language I think that instead of choosing a specific text I'll just finish reading the annotated excerpts from various texts given in the appendix to the textbook. And after that - onwards to Old Norse!
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vonPeterhof
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Re: ALTVM VIDETVR

Postby vonPeterhof » Sun Nov 06, 2016 11:05 pm

Started on Old Norse, just as planned. Four lessons into Old Norse for Beginners it's all fairly straightforward, especially with my experience in German and Norwegian. I wouldn't be me if I didn't find a way to overcomplicate everything though :D Just like with Old Church Slavonic I decided to use an obsolete script for the default displaying of sentences in Anki. However, the problem of there not being a 100% match between Cyrillic and Glagolitic is amplified several times in the case of the standard Old Norse Latin orthography and runes. The original runic script for Old Norse, the Younger Futhark, is extremely unphonemic - not because of adherence to outdated orthographic conventions, but simply due to not having enough symbols to represent all phonemes. Weirdly enough its ancestor script, the Elder Futhark, had more symbols, even though the language it was used for, Proto-Norse, had fewer phonemes than its descendant. Medieval runes are easier to map to the standard academic (Old Icelandic-based) orthography, seeing as how they were heavily influenced by the contemporary Latin script, but even they aren't a perfect fit - you have to cheat a little to represent the difference between œ and ǫ/ą (by using ᚯ for the former and its YF variant ᚬ for the latter), and cheat a lot if you want to represent the difference between i and j (by going all the way back to EF and taking ᛃ, or borrowing ᛄ from Old English Futhorc).

I'm pretty I've spent more time investigating all this than I did learning the actual language so far, and I'm still not sure I've made the right decision. On the one hand, modern study of ancient languages nearly always involves simplified or otherwise altered representation - Plato didn't write Greek in polytonic notation, Murasaki Shikibu's hiragana contained way more than 50 symbols, and in a lot of older languages spacing and punctuation marks were still foreign concepts. On the other hand, mixing and matching characters from various eras to produce a written representation that neither the original writers nor modern era academics have ever used feels a little wrong (自由すぎる, as they would say in Japan). Maybe I'll start adding sentences in full on YF and see whether or not that impedes comprehension too much.

Not much else to report in other languages, other than perhaps that I've started reading Joanna Chmielewska's "Wszystko czerwone" in Polish and resumed reading Knut Hamsun's "Pan" in Norwegian - both in the form of Ilya Frank's bilingual readers. My intensified studies of Portuguese have also produced an unexpected result in that I finally understand why the circumflex accent is used the way it is in the Vietnamese alphabet. I was aware that chữ Quốc ngữ was largely derived from the Portuguese alphabet, but since I wasn't aware of the roles of accents in Portuguese I couldn't see how that was also reflected in Vietnamese. I was particularly confused as to why ô was used for /o/ while an unaccented o represented /ɔ/; now that I can mentally link the Vietnamese pronunciations of â, ê and ô to their Portuguese equivalents, remembering the distinctions in pronunciation between the various Vietnamese vowels should become much easier. Now if only there were a similar trick to remember the vowel shifts in diphthongs and triphthongs...
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vonPeterhof
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Re: ALTVM VIDETVR

Postby vonPeterhof » Sun Nov 13, 2016 11:22 pm

And just like that - I'm done with the Old Norse course! Yeah, either it was meant only as a very brief introduction, or its creators never managed to finish it, but either way there are no lessons left. The nine lessons the course does have are packed with useful information and example sentences, but there are plenty of points it covered just barely (conjugation of feminine and neuter nouns) or hardly at all (tenses other than the present). It's probably still better than diving into Gordon's "Introduction to Old Norse" with no grammatical preparation whatsoever. I guess I'll switch to that book now. Since it apparently counts as more of a reader than a course textbook I may as well count this as moving on to the reading stage, which means I can now take up Estonian in modern languages and Quranic Arabic in classical ones. For the former I'll be using the textbook "E nagu Eesti", and for the latter I'll probably go with Madinah Arabic.

Before proceeding with "Wszystko czerwone" in Polish I decided to read up a bit more on Polish phonology to make sure I'm sounding things out more or less right in my head, and I was surprised to discover that the two nasal vowels in Polish don't correspond precisely to their equivalents in Old Church Slavonic. Both of these languages have two nasal vowel phonemes, one front (ę and ѧ) and one back (ą and ѫ, usually transliterated as ǫ), so I was assuming they would be distributed similarly in cognates. It turns out that the two Proto-Slavic nasals actually merged in Old Polish, while also developing a length distinction like in other West Slavic languages (depending on whether or not the following consonant had originally been part of a syllable with an ultrashort vowel ъ or ь). As Polish lost vowel length the long nasal became back (ą) and the short one became front (ę). That explains the apparent mismatches with historical front and back vowels in other Slavic languages, like Polish ręka vs. Czech ruka, or Polish trząść vs. Slovene tresti.

Oh, and a weird thing happened at work this past week - I spontaneously referred to myself with the first person pronoun 僕 when speaking Japanese. It probably doesn't seem like a big deal, but I was actually quite surprised when I realized that I did it, because I had assumed that the word just wasn't part of my vocabulary. Normally I use わたし when talking to most people, including everyone at work, while I use 俺 when thinking in Japanese, as well as when talking to a few friends I made in Japan. I have previously tried using 僕 when talking informally to people older than me, but I always felt awkward doing that, even though I do know that a lot of guys use that pronoun rather than 俺. But this time it just flew out of my mouth like it was nothing. Might have something to do with the fact that the person I was talking to uses 僕 most of the time and is generally quite easygoing compared to most of our colleagues, or with the fact that I've been hearing that particular pronoun a lot lately. Not sure if I should count this as an achievement or not, but I guess it's nice to have some middle ground between "polite/professional" and "familiar/casual" modes of communication. Now if I could just figure out when to use ごめんなさい instead of すみません...
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vonPeterhof
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Re: ALTVM VIDETVR

Postby vonPeterhof » Wed Nov 23, 2016 4:38 pm

Didn't have time to update last weekend, but I'm taking another day off right now, so might as well do it. Last week I started on Arabic with the Madinah Arabic course. The site has quite a few errors, but overall the course is pretty easy to follow and understand, and the sound samples on everything are quite helpful. The written examples, outside of a few exercises, are given with the vowel markings, so I have to remove them for the front of my Anki cards every time I add sentences. When I originally created my Arabic deck during my first attempt I used fully vowel-marked sentences, with the justification that most modern editions of the Quran are published that way. This time I decided to only use the vowel-marked variants on the back of the cards, because A) it's better to get used to reading without vowel marking, and B) that way it's closer to the way the language was written originally. Of course, if I used the language the way it was used back when Islam just started I would have had to remove not just the vowel marks, but all the dots as well, meaning that in many cases there would be no way to distinguish between f and q, or n, t and th. Kinda similar to Younger Futhark in Old Norse, now that I think of it (forgot to mention last time that I did eventually decide to add most of the remaining sentences from the course in that language in YF; as for Gordon's book, I've yet to finish reading the introduction). Also speaking of the Arabic script, I recently discovered that TRT, Turkey's national public broadcaster, offers news in Arabic-scripted Azerbaijani, Uzbek and Turkmen (the former two also have separate Twitter accounts). This should provide some interesting reading exercises, after I've expanded my Arabic and Persian vocabulary a bit more.

I've also embarked upon Estonian with E Nagu Eesti. It's been a while since I've used an almost entirely monolingual resource (all it has is a glossary at the end with Russian, English, German and Finnish translations for the words appearing in the lesson). Not getting explicit explanations can be a bit frustrating sometimes - like in the first lesson there's a long list of sentences saying "X lives in Y" with some nouns getting the ending -l and others -s, and I have no way of knowing if there's a principle behind this or if this is an arbitrary distinction that I just need to memorize. I do like having to think a little about the meanings of the sentences since there are no translations for each of them. I also made an interesting discovery when I found out that the Estonian for "friend" is "sõber", which reminded me a lot of the Belarusian "сябар". I couldn't find an etymology for the latter on Wiktionary, but the former is supposed to be of a Baltic origin, so I guess it's safe to assume that the Belarusian word is also from a Baltic language, most likely Lithuanian.

Today I also finished the Pimsleur course for European Portuguese. The course is somewhat different from the other Pimsleur courses I've done before, in that it goes into a lot of culinary detail. In most courses you'll find out the words for tea, coffee, beer and red & white wine, but this one gets into the distinctions between galão and meia de leite, introduces Portuguese specialities like vinhho verde and pastel-de-nata, and even mentions regional variance, like espresso being called "bica" specifically in Lisbon. Plus, the awkward "pickup conversation" from lesson nine isn't there. But then I don't know, maybe all of the more recent Pimsleur courses are more like this?
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Naktis
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Re: ALTVM VIDETVR

Postby Naktis » Wed Nov 23, 2016 5:46 pm

vonPeterhof wrote:I also made an interesting discovery when I found out that the Estonian for "friend" is "sõber", which reminded me a lot of the Belarusian "сябар". I couldn't find an etymology for the latter on Wiktionary, but the former is supposed to be of a Baltic origin, so I guess it's safe to assume that the Belarusian word is also from a Baltic language, most likely Lithuanian.


According to this etymological database (http://etimologija.baltnexus.lt/?w=s%C4%97bras), the Lithuanian word sė̃bras was borrowed from the Old Slavic 'СѦБАРЪ'. Thus, it seemingly went from there into Lithuanian, not the other way round.
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Re: ALTVM VIDETVR

Postby Serpent » Wed Nov 23, 2016 8:20 pm

vonPeterhof wrote: Not getting explicit explanations can be a bit frustrating sometimes - like in the first lesson there's a long list of sentences saying "X lives in Y" with some nouns getting the ending -l and others -s, and I have no way of knowing if there's a principle behind this or if this is an arbitrary distinction that I just need to memorize.
In Finnish there are just certain proper names that are associated with being "on" something rather than "in" it. Generally they are towns named after rivers/rapids, like Imatra or Tampere. (of course they have no idea that Moskova, Vitsebsk or Volgograd are named after rivers :D) Some water-related roots also do it, but for example Joensuu literally means River Mouth yet the -s (generally ssa/ssä) form is used.
I obviously don't know what kind of distinctions Estonian has though :?

Awww cool about сябар :) and hilarious that it looks so much like sober :lol:
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vonPeterhof
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Re: ALTVM VIDETVR

Postby vonPeterhof » Wed Nov 23, 2016 9:21 pm

Naktis wrote:
vonPeterhof wrote:I also made an interesting discovery when I found out that the Estonian for "friend" is "sõber", which reminded me a lot of the Belarusian "сябар". I couldn't find an etymology for the latter on Wiktionary, but the former is supposed to be of a Baltic origin, so I guess it's safe to assume that the Belarusian word is also from a Baltic language, most likely Lithuanian.


According to this etymological database (http://etimologija.baltnexus.lt/?w=s%C4%97bras), the Lithuanian word sė̃bras was borrowed from the Old Slavic 'СѦБАРЪ'. Thus, it seemingly went from there into Lithuanian, not the other way round.

Yeah, now that I've looked around, apparently Russian language sources say the same.

Serpent wrote:In Finnish there are just certain proper names that are associated with being "on" something rather than "in" it. Generally they are towns named after rivers/rapids, like Imatra or Tampere. (of course they have no idea that Moskova, Vitsebsk or Volgograd are named after rivers :D) Some water-related roots also do it, but for example Joensuu literally means River Mouth yet the -s (generally ssa/ssä) form is used.

That seems to explain it - having looked through conjugation tables I see that -s is the inessive form, while -l is the adessive one. The placenames in the list that use the adessive form happen to contain words for features of the landscape: Saaremaa and Hiiumaa have "maa" (land), Kohtla-Järve has "järv" (lake) and Sillamäe has a form of "mägi" (hill); Jõgeva doesn't seem to have a universally agreed upon etymology, but apparently all of the theories revolve around rivers. I guess it makes sense for people to live "on" rather than "in" those things. I'd also question why Muhu takes the inessive even though it's an island, but that must be my native language bias speaking :)
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Re: ALTVM VIDETVR

Postby Soffía » Thu Nov 24, 2016 6:53 pm

vonPeterhof wrote:And just like that - I'm done with the Old Norse course! Yeah, either it was meant only as a very brief introduction, or its creators never managed to finish it, but either way there are no lessons left. The nine lessons the course does have are packed with useful information and example sentences, but there are plenty of points it covered just barely (conjugation of feminine and neuter nouns) or hardly at all (tenses other than the present). It's probably still better than diving into Gordon's "Introduction to Old Norse" with no grammatical preparation whatsoever. I guess I'll switch to that book now. Since it apparently counts as more of a reader than a course textbook I may as well count this as moving on to the reading stage...


If you're looking for another textbook, you can download the New Introduction to Old Norse from the Viking Society here: http://vsnrweb-publications.org.uk

I've never used it (my route to Old Norse has been through Modern Icelandic), but it looks good and I gather it's more user-friendly than Gordon.

I keep meaning to read Gísla saga Súrssonar so if you're looking for an Old Norse reading companion, do let me know!
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