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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5530 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 913 of 1317 23 January 2014 at 10:28pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I went downtown for lunch today and took a little leisure reading:
Well, actually, I just flipped through looking for easy pages. This was one of the pages where I got lucky. I was actually able to read the page (while sitting in a coffee shop without a dictionary), and I learned three unknown words from context:
The meanings of these three words should be pretty obvious, especially if you use the translator's note and the picture. :-) This is my main language-learning technique in a nutshell: Find a cool book (or TV series), make sure I have lots of context to give me hints, and just start guessing. Sooner or later, most words will give themselves away quite nicely. Sure, Egyptian requires more elbow grease than a European language. But it's ultimately the same process. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| akkadboy Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5406 days ago 264 posts - 497 votes Speaks: French*, English, Yiddish Studies: Latin, Ancient Egyptian, Welsh | Message 914 of 1317 24 January 2014 at 10:41am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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* wn pw sXa.t nDs.t 4
I dont' really understand this construction. My best guess is that it is a nominal sentence "A pw", "It is A" with wnn "to exist" as first part, litt. "it is/was a matter of existing four little rabbits"... * ir.w rn=sn m XYZ Here ir.w is a passive (as shown by the ending .w), so litt. "their names are/were made as XYZ". * aHa.n TA.n n=s sXa.t iA.t "Then old woman rabbit took for her", the n=s part is not really necessary. The normal word order is modified here because, as a rule, the pronominal dative (n=i/n=k/etc) overruns the nominal subject, so : di.n nTr n rmT "the god gave to the man" (both nominal so subject first) di.n=i n=k "I gave to you" (both pronominal so subject first) di.n=i n nTr "I gave to the god" (subject pronominal and dative nominal so Subject goes first) BUT di.n n=k nTr "the god gave to you" (subject nominal and dative pronominal so the latter goes first). * Sm.n=s Xr nh.wt "She went under the trees", not sure "from" is needed. * in.n=s t 1 pAt m wnS 5 "She brought one bread and five raisin-cakes (litt. pAt m wnS "cake made of raisin"). Edited by akkadboy on 24 January 2014 at 11:12am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| akkadboy Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5406 days ago 264 posts - 497 votes Speaks: French*, English, Yiddish Studies: Latin, Ancient Egyptian, Welsh | Message 915 of 1317 24 January 2014 at 11:36am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I forgot the bit about t and wnS being written with the plural sign.
Some words have it (optionally) even if they are singular, usually these are things that can be understood as being made of multiple parts. "Raisin" is a good example so are words like mSa "army/gang" (singular but made of several men). 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5530 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 916 of 1317 24 January 2014 at 12:49pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Thank you so much for your explanations! I really appreciate them.
One thing I notice is that when you transliterate "NOUN ADJECTIVE NUMBER", you always put NOUN and ADJECTIVE in the singular, even when NUMBER > 1. Is this a general rule? It would certainly explain a few things I've seen. I would have translated  as rn(.w)=sn instead of rn=sn. Am I missing something? I know Assimil often prefers to add in the plural inflections for many cases with  on simple nouns.
My apologies for all the questions. :-) I'm just trying to get some singular/plural stuff sorted out. I really appreciate all your help here! Edited by emk on 24 January 2014 at 12:51pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| akkadboy Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5406 days ago 264 posts - 497 votes Speaks: French*, English, Yiddish Studies: Latin, Ancient Egyptian, Welsh | Message 917 of 1317 24 January 2014 at 1:28pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I'm glad it helps, it is nice to see someone interested in Egyptian :-)
You're right, it should be rn.w=sn, sorry. I've become a bit lazy and don't always type the endings as they should be because in Late Egyptian/Demotic the endings are not used in a very coherent way (due to the presence of articles). And you're also right about the noun remaining singular even when used with a number greater than 1. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5389 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 918 of 1317 24 January 2014 at 10:17pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Hello emk and other BD fanatics! I was watching the JT de 13h and one of the
correspondents mentioned a collection of three large volumes of canon of French/Western literature in BD form. Thought I'd swing by to mention it in case your wallet is burning a hole in your pocket: Le canon graphique 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5530 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 919 of 1317 25 January 2014 at 12:30pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Thank you once again, akkadboy!
Oh, wow. 512 pages of color BD, including lots of classic literature from around the world, all for 39€. Hey, everybody: If that sounds interesting, go click the link and look at the pretty pictures. It's nice stuff with good reviews. Below, I've attached my translation of page 16 of Peter Rabbit. This page is particularly interesting because it includes some tricky subclauses that can't be translated back into English without a complete rewrite—Egyptian just isn't an Indo-European language, and sometimes that really shows through. Oh, and I've stopped using Unicode characters for transliterations, just to help out people who don't have the necessary fonts installed. Page 16 I’ve rewrapped several lines below so that words dont get split in half.  |  |  |  | 
ist | r=f | wn | flopsy | mopsy CONV.PCLE | so | be.PCLE | Flopy | Mopsy So there were Flopsy, Mopsy This part is hard to translate well without rewriting it completely, because the grammar here is very different than anything in English. So I’ve decided to keep most of the structure of the Egyptian at the expense of making the English weird. The original English text reads:
Let me take a shot at lining this all up. Here’s my hypothesis, such as it is: In the Egyptian text, ist is a subordinating particle, and r=f is again a generic “so”-type expression. If we drop r=f and replace ist with the non-subordinating iw, we would get iw wn, which is usually translated “There were/is.”  |  | 
sd-mHw | sXa.wt | nDs.wt linen-tail | hare-FPL | little-FPL Linen-tail, little hares, I should probably move wn down from the first line, and insert it between the names and “little hares.”  |  | 
nfr | biA.t=sn | hA.n=sn good | character-F=3PL | go.down-PRF=3PL their character was good—they went down nfr biA.t=sn is a perfectly normal “adjective noun” clause with the meaning given here. At least I think the sn belongs there, and not at the start of the next clause. And I think that’s the right way to conjugate hAi.  |  |  | |  | 
r | wA.t | tn | r | in.t | bni.wt to | lane-F | DEM.FSG | for | go.get-INF | sweet.fruit-FPL to that lane to go get sweet fruit. The translators say bnriwt is “sweet fruit.” According to Wikipedia:
There seems to be some confusion between bni and bni.t in my dictionaries. The former is usually given as “dates” (at least with the N33 circle determinative), and the latter as “date tree.” EDIT: OK, one more really short page, but only because it's interesting. Page 19  |  |  |  |  | 
iw | ms | ptr | m | bin | wr.t PCLE | however | peter | in.PCLE | bad | very But Peter was very bad;  | |  |  | 
sxs.in=f | r | S | n(y) | sA-grgor ran-then=3MSG | to | gardin | of | son-Gregor he then ran to McGregor's garden Ooh! A sDm.in=f verb. Very cool. This carries a sense of sequencing, hence the “then.” 
Hr-a.wy on-arm-M.DUAL immediately. Edited by emk on 25 January 2014 at 12:48pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5530 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 920 of 1317 30 January 2014 at 3:19am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Statistics and scheduling headaches
Thanks to a nasty stomach bug, I recently lost a full week from my schedule. Between family, work, my statistics class, and Egyptian, I was already pushing my limits before. Now, however, I'm buried, and I need to dig my way out. The statistics class is looking awfully tempting to either drop, or to scale back to the minimum possible workload. The French isn't a problem, and my scores were excellent as of the second quiz, but keeping up with the homework requires 10 to 15 good hours per week, and I'm two weeks behind. (And yes, while I was sick, I wasted a couple of low-quality days writing a tool to format Egyptian hieroglyphs. But that takes way less brain power than either work or statistics, and it distracted me from wanting to get sick. Yes, I have weird distractions.) So basically, at this point, if I'm going to catch up on statistics, I'm going to need to take a week off from client work. I'm reluctant to do this, but the other alternative is to work way too hard for the next month. We'll see. French status For the past couple weeks, I've been feeling like French is less "at my fingertips" than usual, because I've been so busy with other stuff, and I'm reading and watching less than I did during the Super Challenge. So I've been meaning to either finish La main gauche de la nuit or to start Tara Duncan : Les sortceliers, which is sort of the French attempt to create their own version of Harry Potter. The first pages looked OK, so I may give it a shot. Oh, and I just received the French dub of Neon Genesis Evangelion. After watching two episodes, two thoughts: (1) it's possible that this is actually pretty good, but (2) the animation of the various female characters is pretty ridiculous—like a bad comic book. Anyway, this is supposed to be one of the all-time best series of this sort, so I'll give it a few more episodes. iTalki I just tried out iTalki for the first time! My old DELF B2 tutor is amazingly talented, but also sort of expensive, and right now I just want to push myself conversationally a bit. And for that, I basically just need a handful of chatty French speakers. It's possible to find some pretty inexpensive "community tutors" on iTalki, and since I don't need anybody to explain grammar or speak English, my choices are fairly open. Today's conversation started out with typical intermediate subjects (what do you do, where are you from, etc.), but we covered everything from professional topics to politics. And despite my sense earlier today that my French wasn't completely active, I was in really good form. It really amazing—when my French is good, I can barely remember the bad days. And when my French is misfiring, I forget how good I really am when things are going right. I'm at the point where a couple months of 24x7 immersion would make a really big difference. Edited by emk on 30 January 2014 at 4:42am 5 persons have voted this message useful |
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this little 
and sandals to give 
to the black birds.