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La troisième croisade (FR/IT/EO) TAC ’15 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| renaissancemedi Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Greece Joined 4348 days ago 941 posts - 1309 votes  Speaks: Greek*, Ancient Greek*, EnglishC2 Studies: French, Russian, Turkish, Modern Hebrew | Message 9 of 92 27 March 2014 at 8:45am | IP Logged |
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I beleve we have a new team mate :)
Nahuatl is a language I never knew before, so this is a log I will be following with interest. I have the same issues with time management, but you will receive some good advice from other members. Your method of dealing with it is what I do as well, but that doesn't mean I don't have my doubts, lazy days and life that upsets my languages! As I said, you'll find great support from many, and Luso in particular has a very clear head about such things. Welcome and good luck! Edited by renaissancemedi on 29 March 2014 at 9:52am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Lakeseayesno Tetraglot Senior Member Mexico thepolyglotist.com Joined 4324 days ago 280 posts - 488 votes Speaks: English, Spanish*, Japanese, Italian Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 10 of 92 31 March 2014 at 8:08am | IP Logged |
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Thank you, renaissancemedi! I hope not to bore you with this log's contents.
Yesterday I made a fun discovery about "tlapoalli" (numbers). Just for the sake of increasing my vocabulary I've been doing the one and only Nahuatl course available in Memrise, and while I was making my way through numbers, I kept finding numbers with one interesting characteristic: two words separated by "(i)huan" (and). As I still don't know the origin of many words, I didn't know why, until I realized the numeration in the Memrise lesson was all wonky, missing numbers and whatnot, so I investigated. A few hours later I had an eureka moment: Nahuatl numeration is vigesimal in nature! (This was later confirmed by a rather obscure website that explains how this works in detail.) From where I see it, only ten numbers (and zero) have "original" names. I see a relation between one to four and six to nine (in that six to nine have "one, two, three", etc, at the end of the word), but I don't know what the root chic- means yet. NUMBERS 1-10 Zero: Xictli One: Ce Two: Ome Three: Yei Four: Nahui Five: Macuilli Six: Chicuace Seven: Chicome Eight: Chicueyi Nine: Chicnahui Ten: Mahtlactli After that, "eleven" is "mahtlactli huan ce", twelve is "mahtlactli huan ome", and so on until fifteen, where it changes again. Then at twenty, then at forty, sixty, etc. To illustrate how it goes up: 11: Mahtlactli huan ce 12: Mahtlactli huan ome ... 15: Caxtolli 16: Caxtolli huan ce 17: Caxtolli huan ome ... 20: Cempohualli 21: Cempohualli huan ce 22: Cempohualli huan ome ... 30: Cempohualli huan mahtlactli (20+10) 31: Cempohualli huan mahtlactli huan ce (20+10+1) ... 35: Cempohualli huan caxtolli (20+15) ... 40: Ompohualli ... 50: Ompohualli huan mahtlactli (40+10) ... 60: Yeipohualli ... (by this point I guess you get the idea) 80: Nauhpohualli After 100 the logic behind the numbers starts getting really complicated for those of us not mathematically gifted. One hundred is "macuipohualli" (macuilli+cempohualli = 5x20), two hundred is "mahtlacpohualli" (mahtlactli+cempohualli = 10x20), and so on. There are no new units until "cen-tzontli" (400) and "cen-xiquipilli" (8000), due to the fact that all units before these numbers can be recombined into HUGE ENDLESS LINES OF LETTERS REPRESENTING A NUMBER. *huff huff* The nice (albeit, maybe only to me) part of these units which start in seemingly arbitrary numbers is that they evoke images that are really easy to remember: -pohualli: one full count (of a human being's twenty fingers and toes) -tzontli: one full count (of the hair on a person's head. Hey, they liked their hair cropped close back then) -xiquipilli: one full count (of the grains contained in a sack for bargaining) 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Lakeseayesno Tetraglot Senior Member Mexico thepolyglotist.com Joined 4324 days ago 280 posts - 488 votes Speaks: English, Spanish*, Japanese, Italian Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 11 of 92 04 April 2014 at 8:37am | IP Logged |
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Just a short update this time.
Taking advantage of a free day from work (they don't come often), I made a trip to the Vasconcelos Library, the biggest one in my city. I'd heard they have a considerable languages section and I'd been wanting to visit it too, so it was killing two birds with one stone. The results were pretty positive. I found several Nahuatl self-teaching books (including some for kids, which made me wonder why I've never seen these in a school...), and brought one home that includes dialogues and grammatical explanations included in every chapter. It seems really complete but not overly academic, but I guess I won't know until I start using it. More on that in some time. The other book I brought home is a contemporary short-story collection written in Nahuatl, with a Spanish translation included after. Once I get the grasp of word inflections, I intend to use it for translation exercises one or twice a week (I'll copy a line or two, translate it with my dictionary and check against the Spanish translation). Wish me luck! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5855 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 12 of 92 05 April 2014 at 4:13am | IP Logged |
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I'd be interested in hearing about those books, especially if you think they'd be good resources for actually learning the language.
The Basque number system is also vigesimal, 35 is "20 and 10", 50 is "2-20 and 10", etc. It stops at 100, though (there's no 5-20). It's really interesting to hear that Nahuatl continues with the 20 system even after 100. Chinese is a bit weird, as they have a single digit, tens, hundreds, thousands, and ten thousands unit. So 10,000 is literally one ten-thousand and 20,000 is 2 ten-thousands. The next unit is 100 million. To say one million, you literally say "one hundred ten thousands". I can imagine reading large Latin numbers would be a bit of a pain in Nahuatl, at least at first. Is there another system, perhaps a base 20 system similar to the base 16 hexadecimal system, for writing numbers? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Lakeseayesno Tetraglot Senior Member Mexico thepolyglotist.com Joined 4324 days ago 280 posts - 488 votes Speaks: English, Spanish*, Japanese, Italian Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 13 of 92 14 April 2014 at 6:51am | IP Logged |
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Hi, Crush! Sorry for the delay in replying, been a busy few days.
No, regretfully there isn't a way to escape large quantities; on the plus side, it really gives your brain a workout whenever you have to. Both of the books I got are REALLY rare, but here are the titles. 1. Ma'titla'tocan Nahualla'tolli: Hablemos Nahuatl! (by Jose Concepción Flores Arce "Xochime", no ISBN) 2. Narrativa Nahuatl Contemporánea: Antologia (no author, ISBN 968-29-4600-X) I'm currently on a city-wide second-hand bookstore hunt for the first one because it is a very good resource, and as such, it seems it's very much out of print too. My tutor friend has told me it has a few words that are very local to the Milpa Alta region, but other than that, it's got both practical dialogue AND grammatical explanations, so its the full package). If you manage a miracle and get your hands on a new copy that should be even better because it comes with two CDs with audio recordings of the dialogues. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Lakeseayesno Tetraglot Senior Member Mexico thepolyglotist.com Joined 4324 days ago 280 posts - 488 votes Speaks: English, Spanish*, Japanese, Italian Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 14 of 92 14 April 2014 at 8:03am | IP Logged |
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Well, today was my first tutoring session, and a productive one it was!
I still am not at a point where I can make sentences on my own, but I'm starting to understand the rules in regards to putting them together. What I need now is to put new vocabulary to use so I'll start Today, we particularly focused on pronouns (concretely speaking, personal, reflexive and preffix pronouns). It was fun, but I also realized Nahuatl's grammar works in a reiterative manner that I actually try to avoid in Spanish. I guess that's something to keep in mind as I learn. It's funny, but as I start comprehending the grammar, the tongue-twister-quality long words start to seem less scary... 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5855 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 15 of 92 14 April 2014 at 10:52pm | IP Logged |
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It seems someone uploaded the audio to the first lesson here:
http://comoespinademaguey.tumblr.com/ I found a PDF of the course itself online, and i dunno if this site actually still has the book/CDs in stock (the latest stuff seems to be from 2006) but you might be able to get in touch with them still. They also say that their books are available in these locations, it might be dated but perhaps it's worth checking out. Actually, i just found the audio online, too, so even if you can't find the CDs you won't have to do without them. ;) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Lakeseayesno Tetraglot Senior Member Mexico thepolyglotist.com Joined 4324 days ago 280 posts - 488 votes Speaks: English, Spanish*, Japanese, Italian Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 16 of 92 15 April 2014 at 2:37am | IP Logged |
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Small minds think alike, haha. :P Yeah, I'd actually already gone through the list of distributors before I posted what I did last night (most of them are out of business, and the ones still in business don't distribute it anymore). That's why I said it was so damned rare, although I didn't know then that the course's content was online.
I got in contact with the publishers this morning and they gave me the contact information of one of the few places that still has copies of the book (by the way, this one isn't mentioned in the Ce-Acatl site, which hasn't been updated in years). I'm going to pick a copy for myself. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but when it comes to courses, I prefer to have the physical book to work on, rather than having it electronically. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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