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What I like about hieroglyphs

Postby emk » Sun Aug 16, 2015 1:40 pm

[I'm going to overuse the new "mdc" tag in this post, because I want to actually explain how hieroglyphs work, and that means examples.]

Believe it our not, hieroglyphs are a surprisingly nice writing system. During Middle Egyptian times, there were approximately 900 to 1,000 total signs in use, out of which maybe 200 make up the core writing system. Signs fall into a few main categories:

  1. Uniliterals. Each of these stands for one consonant.
  2. Biliterals and triliterals. These stand for two or three consonants, respectively.
  3. Determinatives. These are used sort of like written-only "semantic classifiers", to disambiguate words.
There's some overlap between the last two groups.

Uniliterals

This is the core "alphabet" of hieroglyphs, capable of representing any word in the language:

AiyawbpfmnrhHxXzsSqkgtTdD
AiyawbpfmnrhHxXzsSqkgtTdD

So the Egyptians were perfectly aware of alphabets, but they still chose to add a couple hundred extra signs, probably because it made things easier for them to read.

Biliterals and triliterals

Courtesy of Wikipedia, here's one of the most commonly-carved names in all of Egypt, the "son of Ra" name of Ramesses II. As Wikipedia puts it, "He is often regarded as the greatest, most celebrated, and most powerful pharaoh of the Egyptian Empire." And in all likelihood, it was either him or his son who faced off against Moses.

Here's his name, which I looked up on Wikipedia. Note that parts of his name are written out of order to (a) make a pleasing cartouche and (b) honor the gods by writing their names before any related words.

zA&ra-<-i-mn:n:N36-ra:1-ms-s-sw->
sA ra ra-ms-sw mry-imn
"Son of Ra, Ramesses Meryamun"

Here, let's look at the name of the god imn "Amun", embedded in Ramesses' name:

i-mn:n

This is written as three signs: a uniliteral for i, a biliteral for mn, and finally (on the bottom right) the unliteral for n. The sign for mn gives this a certain visual distinctiveness that makes it just jump off the page, even in the absence of spaces between the words. The extra n is redundant, but very commonly written. Realistically, you need to know perhaps 60 common biliterals to make your life easy.

Determinatives

Like many Afroasiatic languages, Egyptian features "triconsonantal roots," where the consonants stay the same when a word is inflected, but the vowels in between the consonants change. Wikipedia gives the example of "k-t-b", which is used for many words related to writing:

kataḇכתב"he wrote"
miḵtaḇמכתב"letter"

Here, you can see that in both Hebrew words, the stem is written as כתב without any vowels.

The Egyptians, on the other, were kind enough to disambiguate. Take the stem sS, which is used for words related to writing, and notice how the Egyptians used a silent "determinative" sign to make it clear:

zS-Y1v
sS + the determinative for "abstract idea, writing"
"to write", "document"

zS-A1
sS + the determinative for "man"
"scribe"

Another lovely example is the word r(m)T "people", which is written with a compound determinative, and without the inconveniently large sign for m:

r:T-A1*B1:Z2
r(m)T + "man" + "woman" + "plural"

The Egyptian language is actually surprisingly egalitarian about plurals compared to the Romance languages: The plural pronouns are all neuter, and words like "people" typically include both men and women.

A large fraction of the ~900 signs in Middle Egyptian are rare determinatives. But these are surprisingly easy to learn, because many of them are self explanatory. For example, here are the determinatives for "sandal" and "crocodile":

S33-I3

You don't need to make Anki cards with Hesig-style mnemonics to learn those!

Comparing Egyptian hieroglyphs to modern writing systems

Let's look at some places where Egyptian shines:

  1. Middle Egyptian has far fewer signs to learn than Chinese or Japanese.
  2. Unlike Hebrew and Arabic, the Egyptians actually draw little pictures to clarify ambiguous words. Nice!
  3. The writing system is well-matched to the needs of the language, and native speakers would have automatically known the sounds for many biliterals and triliterals.
The language itself is pretty reasonable, provided you don't try to diagram how Egyptian verb clauses work grammatically. There's been an academic brawl about Egyptian verbs going on for a couple of generations now, and students should probably not worry too much about whose theory is right.

But apart from that, the language is simple: The conjugation charts for the entire language fit on two pages, gender is usually clear from the spelling of the word, and—unlike classical Arabic—there are no cases. And there are truly excellent learning resources available. If you want a fairly exotic language with a minimum number of tables to memorize, and no pressure to produce output, it's a fun choice. :-) Plus, it's pretty cool to actually look at pictures or exhibits of ancient carvings and sometimes be able to read them.
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Re: What I like about hieroglyphs

Postby astromule » Sun Aug 16, 2015 5:57 pm

emk wrote:and no pressure to produce output, it's a fun choice. :-) Plus, it's pretty cool to actually look at pictures or exhibits of ancient carvings and sometimes be able to read them.

But you're leaving out two very possible scenarios:
1. Time travelling.
2. A Stargate type scenario.

Very good post, emk (or should I say Mr. Data?), as always. :)
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Prepping to discuss Docker in French

Postby emk » Wed Aug 19, 2015 4:34 pm

astromule wrote:2. A Stargate type scenario.

One of these days I'll repost my transcription of the hieroglyphs from the "Daniel at the blackboard" scene from the original Stargate movie. :-)

Today's lunchtime watching

I'm planning on helping one of the developers here get set up with a development copy of the forum software. This is going to involve a bunch of specialized command-line troubleshooting, and it will involve vocabulary that I've never used before in French.

So I went on YouTube and found this:



...as well as this:



This way, I'll know that the relevant bits of jargon are construction d'une image et un conteneur, for example. Without looking, I might have guessed un recipient. Then I would have told myself, "That can't be right, can it?", and spent 5 seconds flailing around.

At least in Romance language, pretty much any time after reaching a solid B1, it's possible to cram on certain subjects and carry on a mostly coherent conversation. Sometimes, just knowing 10 key vocabulary words in advance can make a huge difference. So when I know that I need to talk about an unfamiliar subject in French for the first time, I go look up a YouTube video, or I buy a truly excellent instructional BD about whitewater kayaking, or whatever. The funny thing is that I now know a few key whitewater terms in French, but can never remember the English ones. Which means that sometimes I need to flip through the original English version of the same book to avoid sounding clueless in English. :-)
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Re: French: Fresh, fun native media at my fingertips

Postby getreallanguage » Wed Aug 19, 2015 5:04 pm

As a newcomer to your blog I have two things to say. First of all, your blog is awesome. Your method is pretty similar to Khatzumoto's, but you sum everything up very neatly and in a well summarized package. I think I might start directing some of the people I tutor to your blog.

Second, your post about hieroglyphs was so fascinating I'm actually considering studying them!
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Detecting my errors by recording a real conversation

Postby emk » Thu Aug 20, 2015 2:03 pm

getreallanguage wrote:Your method is pretty similar to Khatzumoto's, but you sum everything up very neatly and in a well summarized package. I think I might start directing some of the people I tutor to your blog.

Thank you for the kind words! You are certainly welcome to point people here if they might find it useful.

And yes, I have a huge amount of respect for Khatzumoto (and his main sources of inspiration, who were antimoon and the researcher Krashen). I do, however, believe that not everybody can learn to speak just by getting lots of input—many people also seem to need a certain amount of real-world speaking practice, and perhaps other things as well. I've seen too many heritage learners who've learned to understand a parent's language just fine without being able to speak it, despite years of heavy exposure.

getreallanguage wrote:Second, your post about hieroglyphs was so fascinating I'm actually considering studying them!

Seriously, for a "just for fun" language, Middle Egyptian is a great choice. There are good resources, it's easier than it looks if you tackle it right, and it's fun to read texts from 2,000 BCE. I do have an Anki deck somewhere with the 200 most useful signs plus examples of how they're used, and I ought to repost it.

A long conversation in French

zenmonkey was kind enough to help me get a development copy of the forum software running on his Mac. This took about 90 minutes, and it involved me saying a lot of not-so-polite things like merdique and complètement foutu more often than I really should. But once we figured out what was broken with Docker volumes on the Mac, I was able to find a fix which should make it much easier for the next victim volunteer who wants to hack on the site.

Even better, zenmonkey was kind enough to allow me to record the conversation, and he gave me permission to post short snippets in my log. This is great, because it meant that I could hear what my French really sounded like, in the middle of a long, real-world conversation at the end of a long day.

This idea was inspired by a really great polyglot named Idahosa Ness. He's a musician, and a hardcore one, like those piano teachers who make you play something a zillion times and pick at every little detail until it's perfect. He writes a lot about the importance of actually recording yourself in a foreign language:

Idahosa Ness wrote:Why You Should Be Recording Yourself Speaking Your Target Language All the Time

Remember your shock and self-disgust the first time you heard your voice on an answering machine “Oh my God, that’s how I sound?” Personally, I felt betrayed. Here I was, spending my entire life calling all these people around me “Friends” and “loved ones”, yet apparently none of them ever cared about me enough to let me know that I sounded like a complete goober moron.

Of course, this is a normal reaction. We hear our own voices differently from others due to the fact that our ears and vocal chords are attached to the same physical body. Also, our thoughts are always clearer inside of our own heads than they are when we voice them to the outside, hence the existence of speech impediments like mumbling and slurring.

This being the case, you cannot trust your own sense of hearing for feedback on your language ability.

His article describes a great technique for getting feedback online from a language partner or tutor. It's based on the fact that SoundCloud allows people to quickly add comments at specific points of time in a recording.

So here's a clip of me speaking spontaneous, off-the-cuff French in a real conversation. Sometimes, I think people wrongly assume that my French output is actually quite good (just because I'm a forum know-it-all who enjoys giving random advice to intermediate students :lol: ), despite all those messages I post about being stuck on a speaking plateau. In reality, I can generally communicate what I need to communicate, but not necessarily with any clarity, grace or style.

Anyway, here goes:


emk wrote:Mon autre théorie sur l'apprentissage des langues, c'est que… c'est… les enfants peuvent le faire très facilement, parce que les parents répètent les mêmes trois cents choses tou(te)s les deux minutes. Ouais. Et ça aide beaucoup ! Ouais, mais non, il y a…

My other theory about learning languages, it's that… it's… children can do it very easily, because parents repeat the same 300 things every two minutes. Yeah. And that helps a lot! Yeah, but no, there's…

Do you see the little icons of faces below the track? Those are comments describing errors or other interesting details. If you log into SoundCloud, you can add more comments on how I could improve, which I assure you is eagerly welcome. :-)

I learned a huge number of useful things doing this:

  • I often revert to an English-like intonation whenever I have to self-correct a grammar error on the fly (and in other contexts, too).
  • I often mumble and speak faster than my accent really permits.
  • My verbal filler words are fairly French-sounding, but my sub-verbal, "Please go on noises" noises are still blatantly English-like. Now I need to listen to conversations between natives, figure out what noises they make, and fix that.
  • My French u is still inconsistent. (But I already knew that.)
  • My accent is—entirely predictably—much more American than anybody was telling me.
Amusingly, there's a surprising fix for some of these errors, as suggested in this brilliant Itchy Feet comic: just try to immitate a really stereotypical, exaggerated speaker of your target language, and see if that works any better.

Idahosa Ness actually uses this technique to tutor a unusually large number of paying students. He has written up very detailed (and excellent) multimedia guides to correcting specific errors, and then he just works through a long list of student recordings relatively quickly, identifying sounds they should work on and pointing them to the appropriate guides.

If you do this exercise yourself, please keep two things in mind to avoid stressing yourself out too much:

  1. Almost everybody hates recordings of their own voice.
  2. Conversational speech, even in your native language, is full of hesitations and filler and self-corrections.
Also, your ability to identify errors in your own recordings will be better if you've heard a lot of native content. (Gee, do I have a pet theory? Yup. :-) )
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Re: Detecting my errors by recording a real conversation

Postby zenmonkey » Thu Aug 20, 2015 3:08 pm

emk wrote:If you do this exercise yourself, please keep two things in mind to avoid stressing yourself out too much:

  1. Almost everybody hates recordings of their own voice.
  2. Conversational speech, even in your native language, is full of hesitations and filler and self-corrections.
Also, your ability to identify errors in your own recordings will be better if you've heard a lot of native content. (Gee, do I have a pet theory? Yup. :-) )


It was great fun -- I can even here myself trying to get a word in... :lol:

More seriously - I'd add a few elements to your list for the idea of what to look for and what not to judge too harshly with recording oneself.

  • - Casual conversation is significantly different then a set reading - depends on audience, subject, etc. Do not judge short cuts, meta-signaling as errors in fluidity. Saying 'occupe toi du truc' or 'il est ou le bidule' might seem mentally deficient, uneducated, or just poor French but it speaks volumes in a private convo with my father and have huge subtexts. For example, the second recognises that we both have a great love of a family joke and respect for my mother (the source of 'bidule' in all conversation for us.)
  • - Know what you can work on and what is huge waste of time. I could spend days correcting my pronunciation of 'ich' in German to match that of the region where I now live and achieve a western Hessen - 'ich' - to what purpose - I learned my base German in Munich, my 'ich' is neutral. Some errors deserve time, some do not.
  • - Know to move on - After twenty years of speaking French on the daily I still massacre the gender of a few words or fall into the trap of feminizing adjectives before vowels. (nouvel - comes out nouvelle) and since this can hardly be heard, it isn't (in my mind) that important. If I focus on that, I fail to notice that the real issue is my abuse of indefinite articles (un nouvel vs une novel).

Reading text (yes, I feel I sound awful and even though it is much more controlled environment, it is still full of errors...)
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emk
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Re: Detecting my errors by recording a real conversation

Postby emk » Fri Aug 21, 2015 7:34 pm

zenmonkey wrote:
  • Know what you can work on and what is huge waste of time. I could spend days correcting my pronunciation of 'ich' in German to match that of the region where I now live and achieve a western Hessen - 'ich' - to what purpose - I learned my base German in Munich, my 'ich' is neutral. Some errors deserve time, some do not.

Yes, this is an excellent point. In particular, one of the most important services provided by a good tutor is something I think of as "error triage." Once upon a time, I heard some emergency medicine folks explain that after a major disaster, patients would be sorted into three groups: (1) patients who were going to survive on their own, (2) patients who would only survive if they received immediate help, and (3) patients who weren't going to survive even with help. Apparently, the goal is to focus the scarce medical resources on patients in group (2).

With errors, I think you need to do something similar. (1) Some errors will go away on their own if we just get more input and more speaking practice. For example, I naturally developed an unaspirated /t/ when speaking French without giving it the slightest thought. (2) Other errors will benefit from direct attention, such as my unfortunate habit of using /ɾ/ instead of /ʁ/. (3) Some errors (at least at any given point in time) are best just ignored completely or left for another day, or else we'll become so keen on correcting ourselves that we'll barely be able to speak.

When I listened to the recording of our talk, I identified all sorts of great ideas for improvement. But the next day, I could barely carry on a conversation in French! So I'm going to just keep those issues in the back of my mind, and not worry about them too much, and work on them now and then. After all, it took me a few months to finally fix my /ɾ/.

And this is why I like a good tutor: They can pick a few important problems, and encourage me to focus my efforts on those.

(This post brought to you by the Unilang IPA virtual keyboard, which rocks. If anybody wants to more about the IPA symbols used in this post, try fooling around with this interactive chart and then looking up any unfamiliar terminology on Wikipedia.)
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Re: French: Fresh, fun native media at my fingertips

Postby Jar-Ptitsa » Fri Aug 21, 2015 7:38 pm

getreallanguage wrote:
Second, your post about hieroglyphs was so fascinating I'm actually considering studying them!


Yes, me too :)
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An epic Anki disaster

Postby emk » Fri Aug 21, 2015 8:21 pm

There's a famous piece of advice which says, "Don't compare your insides to somebody else's outsides." In other words, don't look at all your personal insecurities and private failures, and then compare them to the carefully edited versions of your friends' lives that you see on Facebook. If you do, you'll just get depressed.

One of the things I enjoy about this log is being able to share the frustrations and the bumps. And with that in mind, wow, do I have a great catastrophe to share with you all today. :-)

For almost 3 years, I was an Anki-drilling machine. I did something like 35,000 reps spread across my three languages. And I really loved my deck, because my deck was freakin' awesome:

  1. I had quotes from all sorts of fun French books, each illustrating an interesting vocabulary word or bit of grammar. Re-reading these cards always filled me with happy memories of my favorite books.
  2. I had several episodes of Avatar in Spanish, imported using subs2srs. Reviewing these cards is more fun than half the video games I've ever played.
  3. I had hundreds of cards with hieroglyphics that I entered from Assimil. This was a bit drier than the rest of my deck, but still cool, because it used Khatzumoto's MCD format, which only requires me to fill in a word, or maybe just a syllable.
  4. If I ever didn't enjoy a card, I just deleted it.
Note that I tried to never type in cards. If I couldn't copy-and-paste it, or hit a button in subs2srs, it probably wasn't going to happen.

Anyway, this was a rough winter. I had a lot going on—several stomach bugs, a bit of influenza (despite the vaccine), you name it—and I just needed more time to rest. So I made the conscious decision to set down Anki and just get better. But now I have a lovely, lovely Anki disaster to show you:

terrifying-ankiweb-backlog.png

I hope that makes somebody feel better about their own study habits. :-) That's an Anki backlog of 2,030 reps.

Happily, it's not as bad as it looks. The French and Egyptian cards mostly have intervals measured in years, so there's a good chance I won't have forgotten them totally. The Spanish cards are all subs2srs earworms, and I'm actually eager to see what I've forgotten after ~60 hours of study and 8 months of nothing at all. My prediction: A lot of the Spanish should come back, even though a language at that level really shouldn't after so much time, because the subs2srs cards are almost creepy in how they crawl into my brain.

Anyway, I know a few tricks for saving old decks:

  1. Flip through the source material a bit for review, when possible.
  2. At least in the beginning, the Fail button is off-limits. I either need to mark cards Difficult, or just delete 'em outright. Because my decks contain mostly native materials, this is fine—if I don't review a card again soon enough, I'll just learn the same stuff elsewhere. But I don't want a huge, depressing backlog of failed cards!
  3. Don't stress out about daily reps. Configure Anki to show me some reasonable maximum number of cards.
The first priority is saving the Spanish deck, so I can inflict some total n00b Spanish on the people that send me chat requests on HelloTalk. :-) And it will take a while to bring stuff back. But there's no rush, and no need to stress or feel guilty about it.
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Re: An epic Anki disaster

Postby arthaey » Sat Aug 29, 2015 4:54 am

emk wrote:terrifying-ankiweb-backlog.png

If ever there was an appropriately-named file... ;)
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