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A dead languages challenge? | ||
Tags: Dead Languages | ||
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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 41 of 75 14 February 2014 at 9:16pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
OK, two more clarifications. :-) Endangered languages. The spirit of this challenge is to knock the dust off some old tomes and revisit ancient civilizations. But what if you're learning a badly endangered language? Well, there's two ways you can include it: (1) if the language was once used by groups of children (or the ancient equivalent), but if this is no longer the case, then the language is dead enough to qualify. (2) If the language once had a much more robust literary tradition, but now the language is awfully close to dead, then you can slip it in as a "classic" language like Sanskrit. Harry Potter, Asterix and Peter Rabbit. Modern translations into classic languages are totally OK. Some of these translations are quite good, and you need a certain kind of glorious madness to even consider writing one of these things. For example, see this wonderful page by the translator who did the ancient Greek version of Harry Potter. But of course I encourage you to consider reading some actual ancient texts, too. :-) 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4842 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 42 of 75 14 February 2014 at 9:16pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I'm thinking about reading Brennu-Njáls Saga for the challenge, if I decide to do it with Old Norse.
I'm not quite sure what to choose for Latin though. Maybe, I could have another go at Vergil's Aeneid. I tried to read it when I got out of school, but I never got very far. Might be the right thing to restart Latin from where I left it... I still think it would be a great idea if we could also do a beginner's challenge for people who are only learning the basics of a dead language. I don't know how it should be organized though. In any case, that would be the kick I need to take up either Old English or Ancient Greek, both of which I have been wanting to learn for ages. Old Irish can still wait... Edited by Josquin on 14 February 2014 at 9:22pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6595 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 43 of 75 14 February 2014 at 9:25pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Thank you!
I prefer to consider Karelian "undead", haha. It's not really alive but it's not completely dead, and there are definitely old native speakers. It would just be sad to have to declare it completely dead in order to be eligible, when you still have hopes that it can be saved. Seems that much like the other challenge, I'll be participating with two languages, hehe. And I'll read the little of LOTR that has been translated into Latin. Edited by Serpent on 14 February 2014 at 9:25pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4907 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 44 of 75 14 February 2014 at 10:54pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
The translator also began to make detailed notes for the book, which can be found here. Unfortunately, they only go up to chapter 5 (with a single note for chapter 6). I have a feeling he won't be completing it any time soon. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6701 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 45 of 75 14 February 2014 at 11:34pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Oh no, I simply forgot about good Old Norse - mostly because I just see it as the grand-daddy of Icelandic and haven't tried to learn it as an independent language. But of course it is dead now, and even my normal reading habits will automatically take me through a number of dead, undead, semidead languages or old stages of still living ones. It is only when I can't read the stuff that I take it seriously.
By the way I have a book about Egyptian hieroglyphs in my collection, but I haven't tried actually to decipher one single genuine inscription - shame on me. I can see it from where I'm sitting, but I had forgotten about it. And now we are at dead things I had forgotten, I actually read through a sizeable chunk of the Anglo-saxon chronicle not long ago (as mentioned in my log thread) and inspired by this thread I actually have read through a couple of centuries of Anglosaxon history this very evening just for fun. Hopefully that can restore a shimmer of my reputation as a nerdish language learner. But I simply don't know how many pages these more or less random forays into the underworld amount to - in most cases I don't have books with page numbers at my disposal. And I would never do anything to meet a challenge. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4842 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 46 of 75 15 February 2014 at 12:30am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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There is something else we have to decide. What about annotated versions? If we're going to read classical literature and not only Harry Potter, annotations will be useful and helpful. Or are we supposed to figure out everything on our own by parsing sentences with a dictionary and a reference grammar?
Furthermore, I think the original idea was to study languages of classical civilizations and not endangered languages, so I feel a little bit uneasy including the likes of Karelian, Sorbian, Manx, and Scottish Gaelic. We might have two different concepts of what's a "dead language" here. Of course, technically speaking every language that's no longer spoken by native speakers is dead. To my mind, this clearly rules out endangered languages, because there are still native speakers (this is the case for e.g. Scottish Gaelic). But I think a dead language in the sense of this challenge should be an ancient language, which hasn't been spoken for centuries (except as some sort of "classical" language). This would rule out the likes of Manx (but it might include Cornish). When I read about emk's initial idea, I thought of Latin, Ancient Greek, Old Norse, Gothic, Ancient Egyptian, Old English, Old Irish, Akkadian, Sumerian, Classical Chinese, Classical Japanese, and the likes. I think it would be somehow odd to include Karelian, Saami, and Ubykh. These are more like "rare" languages... Does someone else feel this way? 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6595 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 47 of 75 15 February 2014 at 3:11am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Nobody wants me to do any challenge :-(
Haha just kidding. But in fact I suggested something similar in the Super Challenge thread, with Karelian in mind. What emk described - not enough (interesting) content, no movies/audiobooks - applies not just to dead languages. In fact it applies much more to the small languages than to Latin or Greek, which do have both modern literature translations (Harry Potter) and audiobooks, and are really more like Esperanto in this regard. Let's not measure which language is more dead or deserves more to be alive. Let's focus on the fact that a smaller challenge is justified by the lack of resources. (and by the limited usefulness of audiobooks - I think for many they would be input for the sake of input) 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 48 of 75 15 February 2014 at 12:54pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Annotated versions are absolutely allowed. I encourage all forms of artificially-boosted comprehension (aka "cheating to understand"), and I will personally be making extensive use of interlinear translations. However, I will be counting my pages based on the actual amount of Egyptian, not on the amount of transliteration or translation present. So if there's only a few lines of Egyptian per page, I'll count by lines instead of pages.
We've just had a really contentious and unpleasant Super Challenge thread. I do not wish to see that here. So even though I know everybody has the best of intentions, I want this sort of thing to stop now, please. This is a friendly challenge, for fun. Please keep it that way. As for eligible languages, here's what I wrote earlier:
So first of all, this really is a challenge for "dead and classic" languages, not for really tiny languages. I have nothing against really tiny languages; they're just not the goal of this challenge. But since tiny languages are also cool, I want to lend a hand. So when I set up the challenge tracker, I'm willing to make a special, honorary "life-support" category for people who want to study endangered languages. This won't be part of the main challenge, and the "life support" people are welcome to organize however they wish and to make their own rules. This makes sense, because I imagine that studying a language with a minimal written tradition and 5,000 elderly speakers is very different from studying ancient Greek. Edited by emk on 15 February 2014 at 12:55pm 5 persons have voted this message useful |
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