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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| akkadboy Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5400 days ago 264 posts - 497 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Yiddish Studies: Latin, Ancient Egyptian, Welsh | Message 953 of 1317 27 February 2014 at 2:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Yes, exactly.
The Egyptian relative pronoun is very different from its English/French counterpart(s). Being inflected for gender, number and having a negative form it gives a different set of informations. But the information about who's doing what "has to" be given elswhere in the sentence. This also applies to verb-based relative clauses like the one quoted by emk, where there's no relative pronoun but a special verbal form is introducing the relative clause (something like "a god existing his fear throughout..."). Edited by akkadboy on 27 February 2014 at 2:52pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5524 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 954 of 1317 27 February 2014 at 5:54pm | IP Logged | |||||
Here's the passage from Allen's Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs. Even if this passage is a bit opaque, the book in general is absolutely top notch, and I recommend it to anybody who's interested in Egyptian. Please forgive the Kindle's attempt to handle transliteration characters.  
For a detailed gloss of the first example, see my post. Yes, the example that I found puzzling is exactly the one Allen used in the textbook! That's one of the saving graces of Middle Egyptian; the canon is small enough that most of the really interesting ltierary texts are read by everybody.
Nice translation. "A god, existing his fear throughout..." fits quite well here. ... I picked Egyptian because I wanted a toy language to goof around with. My criteria for picking a toy language were: 1. It should not be an Indo-European language. 2. It should not use an alphabetic script. 3. It should be dead, because that will help keep my wanderlust under control. 4. It should be cool. 5. It should be a good excuse to use my French. 6. It should be strange enough to be challenging, without being gratuitously difficult. Egyptian satisfies (6) nicely: - The writing system is fun, but it only has ~200 core signs, as opposed to 1000+. - The grammar is definitely unfamiliar, but there are no cases, the inflections are simple and there are only a few irregular verbs. So that's Egyptian: ancient, challenging, but regular enough to be pleasant. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5524 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 955 of 1317 27 February 2014 at 9:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I started coding just before 5am this morning. I worked almost non-stop, except for food and for a couple of 5-minute breaks that I used to write the post above. It is now 3:45pm. My brain is fried.
I need TO WATCH GIANT ROBOTS BLOW STUFF UP ON TV! This is one of the great secrets of language learning: When my brain is too fried to do anything productive, there are always giant robots. And trashy websites. And all this stuff gradually wears ever deeper paths into my brain, even while I'm slacking... 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4901 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 956 of 1317 28 February 2014 at 12:39am | IP Logged | |||||
Curse you for bringing that series up again! I think I'm going to have to order it before the SC starts..... (Maybe I meant bless you... I dunno... but I keep wanting to buy things that will be useful for the SC!) EDIT: I may have asked this before, but as there exist versions with French audio and versions with English audio, does anyone know of a version of the Evangelion DVD's that have both French and English audio, as well as French subs? Or failing that, do you know of another reasonably priced anime set that has them? I could justify the purchase more easily if my sons could watch it in English. It might even end up being a "birthday present" for one of them. ;) Edited by Jeffers on 28 February 2014 at 1:04am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5383 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 957 of 1317 28 February 2014 at 12:57am | IP Logged | |||||
There's also some trashy reality TV for these moments...
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4525 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 958 of 1317 28 February 2014 at 1:57am | IP Logged | |||||
Glad you are getting into the series. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5524 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 959 of 1317 01 March 2014 at 1:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Ahh, giant robots. Explosions. And Le Monde emergé, which really is a fine example of YA fantasy. I've been working right up to my daily brain fry limit, and a little slacking off afterwards in French really helps.
Thank you, everybody, for your moral support. :-) As of episode 17 or so, Neon Genesis Evangelion is becoming more and more interesting. The character relationships are becoming much clearer, and oh my, does this team have some issues. And that's not to mention all the secrets, which are becoming increasingly disturbing. On a related note, I'd like to thank geoffw once again for finding Izneo. Did you know that every week, they provide a free, 10-day "rental" of tome 1 in a different series? This week is Carthago. 
If you sign up for an Izneo account, they'll spam your email address. But they're spam it with free weekly BD offers, and pictures of cool things to read, so that's OK. :-) I'm currently only doing about 20 Anki reviews per day. This will soon increase again, as my next Assimil Egyptian lesson comes due. As I mentioned earlier, this is a bit of an experiment: I'm doing a single Assimil lesson per week, and I'm making cloze-deletion cards from each lesson. Thanks to Anki, I can make progress even with such a slow pace, and not forget everything I've learned. The biggest danger is that it's really easy to drop from "one lesson per week" to "no lessons per week". And that's where Beeminder comes in: 
For more about using Beeminder, see my earlier post. Yes, if I miss my weekly Egyptian goal once, I will need to put $5 on the line! That's why they call it "goal tracking with a sting!" If you look on the right, you'll see something called the "Akrasia horizon." Conceptually, this is a period of time which is far enough in the future that I can reason about my desires without giving into the temptation to slack. So I can change my future goals any time I want, but only after the current Akrasia horizon. So in essence, the job of Beekeeper is to make sure I stay above that yellow line, which represents my one lesson per week goal. If I study several lessons quickly, I'm allowed to slack for a while—but sooner or later I need to start working again. Mind you, this only works thanks to Anki and MCDs. Otherwise I'd forget everything I learned in between lessons. So this is an example of using modern technology to learn an ancient language very slowly. :-) Edited by emk on 01 March 2014 at 1:13pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5524 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 960 of 1317 03 March 2014 at 11:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
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After several weeks of total blah, I've finally started firing on all cylinders again. Despite being really busy with work, I got in a fair bit of language time last week:
1. I read book one of Le Monde emergé, a good ~350 pages of French. I'll talk more about this later. As I mentioned above, it's a great YA fantasy novel. 2. I watched 8 episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion. This gets really good in the second half. It's starting to systematically disassemble the whole "giant robots" genre, and to put things together in really disturbing ways. I love seeing genre conventions subverted. I've been leaving French subs at the bottom of the screen for this one, and glancing at them occasionally to clarify things, but I'm trying to wean myself off them. Even though the subs have little relation to the actual audio, they've helped me with some tricky stuff. Still, I want them gone, as much as possible. 3. I got three more Assimil L'Égyptien lessons in the can, to my great pleasure. My current approach is to go through each lesson, making cloze cards using the Anki Image Occlusion plugin, and then listen to the audio, trying to either shadow while reading along, or repeat shortly after the original. Then I listen blind several times, trying to understand at least 80%. But I change my Assimil approach every few lessons. Anyway, there's lots of good, meaty stuff lately: imperatives, the first hints of the subjunctive, narrative conventions, and so on. Assimil crams a lot into each lesson. 4. I read the BD mentioned above, plus a whole ton of Topito and programmer stuff in French. My favorite: a very colorful introduction to some advanced 'git' features. 5. Last night, my wife and I watched season 2, episode 1 of Le Trône de fer. I used subs for the first half, because this is another deeply complicated series and I haven't watched it for a couple of months, but I killed the subs about half way through. In general, I find that the hardest TV series are those with complex, nuanced plots, where a single line of dialog will often make you say, "Oh, wow!" These series are hard to follow even with 80% comprehension. These are also the series where I'm still likely to leave subs on. Anyway, it's amazing how much French I can consume, even during a busy week, if I eliminate all my English distractions. And it's also amazing how much a steady diet of French does for my language quality. I'm looking forward to trying out a week or two of the IMX French "immersion innundator" starting this Wednesday. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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