Every script in the world challenge

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seito
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Re: Every script in the world challenge

Postby seito » Wed Oct 27, 2021 2:22 am

Deinonysus wrote:[*]No alternative scripts: There are many new scripts that have been proposed for spoken languages (such as Quickscript for English), but including such scripts would make it impossible to have a closed set, so I am sticking to widely adopted, conventional scripts.


I guess that means you're not going to learn the major shorthand systems? :D

As part of the Latin alphabet, will you be learning all the variant characters used for some languages (e.g., Vietnamese)? What about official romanization systems (e.g., pinyin, nihonshiki, etc.)?
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Re: Every script in the world challenge

Postby Deinonysus » Wed Oct 27, 2021 3:08 am

David27 wrote:Interesting project. I love different writing systems, and recently have been reviewing the Arabic script (my personal favorite from a subjective aesthetic point of view) and Bengali (which I also like a lot). But I also hope to someday put more time into those languages.
I agree, Arabic is a beautiful script! Bengali script seems cool too. I haven't taken much of a look at it but at first glance it looks like Devanagari but pointier.

seito wrote:
Deinonysus wrote:[*]No alternative scripts: There are many new scripts that have been proposed for spoken languages (such as Quickscript for English), but including such scripts would make it impossible to have a closed set, so I am sticking to widely adopted, conventional scripts.


I guess that means you're not going to learn the major shorthand systems? :D

As part of the Latin alphabet, will you be learning all the variant characters used for some languages (e.g., Vietnamese)? What about official romanization systems (e.g., pinyin, nihonshiki, etc.)?

Good questions! I do think shorthand systems are interesting and I might learn one someday, but not for this particular project.

I'm considering each script learned when I am familiar with one variation (so for example, I "know" the Arabic script even if I don't know every letter that's used in Pashto or Urdu). There are probably thousands of languages that use the Latin script; it would be impossible to learn every variation. But I do happen to be familiar with a lot of them because I have created a custom multilingual keyboard layout and I wanted it to be able to type as many languages as possible. It can even type Vietnamese, but not very fast! I also try to learn at least one Romanization system for any language I learn that doesn't use the Latin script.
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Re: Every script in the world challenge

Postby Axon » Wed Oct 27, 2021 6:46 am

Fascinating idea! I've often had similar goals of "covering my bases" with the world's languages.

You're quite right that the Javanese script is rarely used in real life today, though of course a ton of inscriptions, books, letters, and magazines in it still exist from earlier eras. When I was living in Yogyakarta, considered one of the centers of Javanese culture, I saw only a handful of signs in Javanese script that didn't have any Latin-based Indonesian translation. My Javanese teacher told me that a lot of ornamental Javanese written by non-experts in the script has mistakes. If you do end up tackling it, try looking around for various fonts to practice with, since when we learned in class we used large, clear, and bold letters instead of the small, cramped, and thin letters used by computer fonts.

I wonder if, after all this, your ability to pick up Chinese characters will actually improve due to the practice you'll get at carefully distinguishing similar shapes in so many alphabets?
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Re: Every script in the world challenge

Postby Deinonysus » Wed Oct 27, 2021 10:57 am

Axon wrote:Fascinating idea! I've often had similar goals of "covering my bases" with the world's languages.

You're quite right that the Javanese script is rarely used in real life today, though of course a ton of inscriptions, books, letters, and magazines in it still exist from earlier eras. When I was living in Yogyakarta, considered one of the centers of Javanese culture, I saw only a handful of signs in Javanese script that didn't have any Latin-based Indonesian translation. My Javanese teacher told me that a lot of ornamental Javanese written by non-experts in the script has mistakes. If you do end up tackling it, try looking around for various fonts to practice with, since when we learned in class we used large, clear, and bold letters instead of the small, cramped, and thin letters used by computer fonts.

I wonder if, after all this, your ability to pick up Chinese characters will actually improve due to the practice you'll get at carefully distinguishing similar shapes in so many alphabets?

Interesting information, thanks! I love gamelan music so I may want to put some time into learning Javanese at some point (of course, I have some reason or another to want to learn every language but a lifetime is only so long...). Javanese script might be one of my favorite Brahmic scripts, I love the three-story-tall letters!

I'm not sure how much help general script learning experience will have. For example, I'm struggling a lot with the Armenian alphabet because it looks so different from any other alphabet I know. But I have learned about two hundred Chinese characters in the past and knowing the kana was a slight help. For example, the Kanji 刀 for "sword" (of course, katana in Japanese) looks almost identical to the katakana syllable カ (ka), so it is easy to remember the shape. But I don't think a knowledge of unrelated scripts is that helpful.
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Re: Every script in the world challenge

Postby Deinonysus » Sat Oct 30, 2021 5:43 pm

Հայերեն

Armenian is one of those languages that I was vaguely aware of but never had any plans to learn. I am a lifelong fan of System of a Down since hearing their very first single ("Sugar") on Boston's sadly defunct hard rock radio station WAAF when I was in middle school, but although they are famously Armenian-American, I do not believe they have ever released anything in the Armenian language so they were not a source of inspiration for me to learn the language. However, Serj Tankian (the lead singer) has recorded a few things in Armenian, including this great duet with his father in Armenian:


Despite my previous lack of commitment to Armenian, once I started doing a bit of basic research I ended up falling in love with the language. Pimsleur has 10-lesson courses on both Western and Eastern Armenian, but I have chosen the Eastern dialect which is spoken in the country of Armenia (the Western dialect is spoken in neighboring countries and by the diaspora). The Eastern dialect also preserves the same three-way distinction in stops as Ancient Greek: voiced, voiceless unaspirated, and voiceless aspirated. I think Eastern Armenian may be the only Indo-European language to preserve this distinction for its entire written history. Western Armenian's voiceless unaspirated stops became voiced, Ancient Greek's voiceless aspirated stops became fricatives, and I believe some Indo-Aryan languages (such as Punjabi) have gained a three-way contrast by dropping the voiced aspirated stops from Sanskrit, which had a four-way contrast. Also, I have heard that Eastern Armenian is much more phonetic because it has had a spelling reform and Western Armenian hasn't.

Assimil had an Armenian course with a French base, but it sadly seems to be abandoned and is no longer available for purchase. I was able to find a PDF file but I won't post a link because it's still technically under copyright. I was also able to find a PDF for the Tamil course which is in a similar state. Sadly I couldn't find the audio. Assimil's Armenian course was based on the Eastern dialect as well, so that seals the deal.

Assimil's Armenian course has an introduction by one of my favorite French singers, the legendary Charles Aznavour, whose Armenian parents emigrated to France before he was born. Here is a video of him singing a duet in Armenian:


Like a few other Indo-European languages, such as neighboring Persian, Armenian does not have grammatical gender. However, one tidbit from Wikipedia is that there is some distinction between animate and inanimate nouns. This caught my attention because this is also a trait of the Anatolian languages such as Hittite. I was able to find one paper from the 1940s suggesting that Armenian is an Anatolian language:
Armenian, like Hittite, Luwian, and Lycian, retains the third laryngeal initially, and has no inherited long vowels, no palatal-velar distinction, and no feminine gender. These and other archaisms lead to the conclusion that Armenian is an Anatolian language and can be compared to more advantage with Lycian and Hittite than with the IE languages proper.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/409074


However, I haven't found much else in support of this theory and I doubt it's widely accepted these days.

I've done the first lesson of Pimsleur Armenian twice and part of the second, but I think I'll need to repeat that one too. I'm pleasantly surprised with how well I'm able to distinguish between the voiced, voiceless unaspirated, and voiceless aspirated stops. I'm sure my brief time with Hindi was a big help with that. Hindi also helped with Armenian syntax which seems very similar. In both languages, "I understand English" would translate word for word as "I English understanding am". However, Armenian seems to have a negative form of "to be", so "I don't understand English" would be "I English ain't understanding" while if I remember correctly it would be "I English not understanding am" in Hindi.

I find a great Memrise deck for the Eastern Armenian alphabet. It's called "! Armenian Alphabet ♬ IPA". I'm about halfway through learning the lowercase letters.

Despite being a nominally Greek-derived alphabet, the Armenian script has been pretty tough to learn. It bears little resemblance to any other alphabet I know and the letters are very samey. It looks like it ought to be featural like hangul, but while I have found a couple of scattered patterns (for instance, voiced stops have a horizontal line to the right about a third of the way from the bottom, and the nasals look like a modified u), the shapes are disappointingly random.

Other languages

I've been meaning some decent progress in Arabic. I only have six skills left in Duolingo that I haven't started yet. I haven't been doing as much Assimil as I'd like but I did do one lesson last night. It was a review of a lesson I had done a few days ago that didn't sink in. Slow and steady wins the race, I guess! Although I'm more of a hare than a tortoise.

My wife picked up some Korean instant noodles at an Asian market and that was good practice for refreshing my Hangul. I'm still planning on going through a little bit of Duolingo Korean after I'm done with the Arabic tree, and maybe a bit of Pimsleur as well.

I've been really into Dune lately after watching the new movie, and in addition to rereading the first book, I've started watching the documentary Jodorowsky's Dune. There's a lot of spoken Spanish and French, and I've been trying to look away from the subtitles as much as I can to see how much I understand without them, I'm getting most of the Spanish and almost all of the French, which is very satisfying!
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Re: Every script in the world challenge

Postby Sonjaconjota » Sun Oct 31, 2021 8:50 am

Deinonysus wrote:However, Serj Tankian (the lead singer) has recorded a few things in Armenian, including this great duet with his father in Armenian:

I just wanted to say thank you for showing us this beautiful song. Internet really is a door to other worlds.
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Re: Every script in the world challenge

Postby Deinonysus » Tue Nov 02, 2021 10:49 am

Հայերեն

My progress has been limited because my daughter's been home sick, but I should finish learning all of the lowercase letters today and I should be able to get back to Pimsleur and redo lesson 2 of 10.

한극어

I've been thinking about Korean a lot lately. I had always Japanese being my first foray into the Sinosphere (considering that I've been into anime for over 20 years), but Korean has been creeping up on me over the years. I followed competitive League of Legends for a while and the Korean teams had always been the best (I even caught some streams in Korean despite not understanding it). I've also recently been getting back into Starcraft, although I haven't had the chance to play it in a week or so, and its competitive scene is also centered on South Korea. In addition, my wife has gotten Korean skin care products for a while, and more recently she's been listening to BTS and picking up Korean instant noodles, so Korean has an increasing presence in our house. And it seems that every year or two for at least the past decade, some new pop cultural phenomenon from South Korea seems to take over the world. So, I think that I will push Hindi off to later in 2022, and Korean will be my next major "cheat language".

Korean seems like the most approachable Sinosphere language for casual dabbling. I feel like with Japanese I would want to go all-in and start by spending months learning the jōyō kanji, and I would also probably obsess over the pitch accent. Vietnamese of course uses the Latin script but I would want to spend a while on phonology drills and there are some big dialectical differences. I have a weirdly easy time with Mandarin tones (I guess they just clicked with me), but you need to know even more characters than with Japanese.

Korean doesn't seem to present any large pronunciation complications. There's a three-way stop contrast, but I've encountered that already in Ancient Greek, Xhosa, Navajo, and now Armenian (plus a four-way contrast in Hindi), so I don't see that being an issue. It also does seem to be spoken quite fast but I'm sure I'll get used to it. I tried to do some googling to see how necessary it is to learn Hanja (Chinese characters), and the consensus seems to be not very. I saw that there are a few that would commonly be used in newspapers, but I actually recognized a bunch of them from my time studying Japanese so that shouldn't be a huge deal.

I have a copy of Billy Go's Korean Made Simple, but I think I do better with Assimil's format, so I ordered a copy of Le Coréen. It should arrive that the end of the month and I think I'll start it as my reward for finishing L'arabe (just the sans peine book, not perfectionnement). I have 7 more weeks of lessons so I could theoretically start the Korean book before the new year, although I have been struggling to finish a lesson a night and lately I've been lucky to finish a couple lessons a week.

The "legendary" level is now available on the web version of Duolingo, so once I finish getting the Arabic tree to level 5, I can start getting it to level 6, which should keep me occupied until I'm ready to start Korean.

As always, I'm easily distracted, so any plans I make for months ahead are to be taken with a grain of salt.

Others

Pronunciator has a Georgian course but honestly I dislike Pronunciator. Its format is boring and it forces you to do speaking drills with its frustratingly bad voice recognition software. So I got a copy of Elementary Georgian by Ani Mdivani-Morrow. It seems pretty nice and comes with online audio.

Georgian grammar is very complex, but the pronunciation shouldn't present me with any challenges (since I'm already familiar with ejectives and uvular consonants), and the script seems easier than Armenian since there are no uppercase letters.

After getting more familiar with Korean and dabbling in Armenian and Georgian, I might spend some time away from this project to focus on Arabic before getting back to the other scripts that I foresee being easy for me, such as the Syriac script.
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Re: Every script in the world challenge

Postby Deinonysus » Sun Nov 07, 2021 8:02 pm

Հայերեն

I've finished learning the lowercase letters (although I still struggle with a lot of them) and moved on to the uppercases letters. I feel like it's going to be katakana all over again: the katakana letters are so samey that I've had to relearn them half a dozen times, and each time I forget them again after a few months. I don't think I'll ever know them permanently until I finally spend a significant amount of time learning Japanese and reading a lot of katakana. So I think for Armenian, I'll have to spend a bit longer than I was anticipating studying the language or else I will forget half the alphabet by the spring. Thankfully it's a fun language and I don't mind spending some extra time on it, although I do worry a bit that it's taking time away from higher priority languages.

I'm half-way through Pimsleur Eastern Armenian. I've been needing to do each lesson twice which is pretty common for languages outside of the Romance and Germanic branches. I should finish it in about two weeks, then it's back to Pimsleur MSA.

عربي

I keep thinking I'm about to finish Duolingo Arabic, and then I keep not finishing it! I'm about 80% of the way to having crown level 5 in every skill. After another day or two of leveling up known skills, I'll be ready to tackle some new skills (of which six remain).

Diné bizaad

I'm getting a bit of a hankering to work on Navajo a bit. It isn't a high priority language, nor is it a part of this project since Navajo uses the Latin alphabet, but I do have a few bilingual English-Navajo board books that I like to read to my daughter and I'd like to be more confident in my pronunciation so that she's exposed to a more accurate representation of the language. I've been a bit hung up on trying to understand the verb structure completely before actually studying the language, but I think I should try spending time with Dine Bizaad: Speak, Read, Write Navajo, which is a really excellent course with dialogues, grammar explanations, 6 audio CDs, and lots of spoken drills. I would probably have to drop either Armenian or Arabic in order to work on Navajo, though. I could barely study three languages at once before I had a toddler; it's hopeless now.

A third dub for a major film has come out in Navajo: A Fist Full of Dollars. The film is currently streaming on HBO Max but I have no idea whether they are planning on adding the Navajo dub to their service, as Disney+ has done for Star Wars and Finding Nemo.
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Re: Every script in the world challenge

Postby Deinonysus » Sat Nov 13, 2021 7:07 pm

Հայէրէն

I've finished learning the uppercase letters. The next section is matching the uppercase and lowercase letters together. I'm not 100% on the letters but I'm getting there. My biggest struggle is with the four letters that look like some variation on the letter ð.

I think what will cement the alphabet is reading practice. I'm subscribed to r/Armenia on Reddit and I try to sound out at least one word from every Armenian-language post title or flair that shows up in my feed. Assimil will also help a bit but unfortunately they have a very obnoxious interlinear transliteration that makes it hard to be sure that you're reading the Armenian letters themselves. I wish they had a solid block of just native script, like in the Hebrew and Arabic courses. I did manage to track down the audio for the Armenian and Tamil courses. Unfortunate I have only been able to finish the first Armenian lesson and take a quick look at the second. Hopefully I will be able to make more progress over the next couple of weeks.

My kid seems to come down with a new cold every time she goes back into daycare after recovering from the last one. She was out of daycare all of this past week so I wasn't able to make any progress on Pimsleur Eastern Armenian.

عربي

I've been better about doing an Assimil lesson most nights. I just finished lesson 29. It didn't seem like much but I'm actually more than a third of the way through the book! In nine more lessons I'll be half-way through the book. I'm hoping I can keep it up! It's very dense in vocabulary and actually introduces about 2,500 new words so I think if I can absorb the material well I will be able to start enjoying native materials, which is an exciting prospect!

Other Languages

This project has gotten me back into typing, and I've been practicing a lot with my custom multilingual layout. My wpm is into the 60s, so I'm getting close to my QWERTY speed which is about 70 WPM. I've been wanting to practice typing in Turkish with my layout so that makes it a strong prospect. I've heard that Turkish has very similar grammar and syntax to Japanese and Korean, so it will make them a bit more intuitive to learn down the road. I do have a copy Assimil Le turc so I could potentially start working on that after I finish L'arabe.

I do have half a mind to try to drop any side languages and focus exclusively on Arabic, but I think that if I do work on another language that has a Duolingo course that can help motivate me to keep refreshing my Duolingo Arabic skills as they break after I have finished the course. I think that after finishing Assimil, Pimsleur, and Duolingo Arabic I might want to get started on DLI Basic Arabic. I'm not sure how much other work I'll be able to do alongside it because it seems pretty intensive. If I want to be able to work on my textbook alongside DLI I might have to quit my side dabbles for a while.

I had been planning on learning MSA, then Biblical Hebrew, and finally Modern Hebrew, but actually now I'm thinking it might be best to study Modern Hebrew before Biblical so I have an easier time thinking in it. Arabic should give me enough of a spelling advantage that I don't get too confused spelling Modern Hebrew words despite the large number of consonant mergers.
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