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Middle Egyptian via French & English? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| akkadboy Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5409 days ago 264 posts - 497 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Yiddish Studies: Latin, Ancient Egyptian, Welsh | Message 17 of 35 22 June 2012 at 6:32pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I learnt them all before I knew any words so I suppose you could do the same.
Having a description of what the sign is may be helpful. The only "trick" I used was to learn them by groups of signs ending with the same letter. It breaks the list into small groups and maybe it works on a mnemotechnical level, I don't know, but it has been useful to me. The other thing was that I made cards (sign on one side/transliteration on the other) which I carried with me everywhere and used to learn a new group of signs and quizz myself everytime I could. edit : you should definitely learn the transliteration along with the signs. The translation of the signs having some ideogrammatic value isn't that much useful. Better to learn the actual words when you'll encounter them. Edited by akkadboy on 22 June 2012 at 6:42pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 18 of 35 26 June 2012 at 12:34am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I've currently built an Anki deck with the following:
1. The uniliterals. 2. The standard biliterals. 3. The triliterals from here, which is much shorter than the Omniglot list. I hope it covers most of the essentials. I think I'll go ahead and add the determinitives from the same site. And a note for Francophones: S'il y a des francophones qui veulent apprendre le moyen égyptien, je peut vous envoyer ce « paquet » de cartes pour que vous puissiez les utiliser avec Anki. Certes, il y a encore des petites fautes par-ci par-là, malheureusement, mais j'essaye de faire un paquet très professionnel — des modèles avec plusieurs champs, des images créées avec JSesh, etc. Une fois quelques étudiants auront révisé ce paquet, je le téléchargerai sur AnkiWeb pour d'autres personnes. Vous pouvez m'envoyer un PM si vous êtes intéressé. If you're an English speaker, and you'd like to replace (or ignore) the French descriptions, please send me a PM and I'll let you know when it's ready. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 19 of 35 20 July 2012 at 5:01pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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During the weekends, I've been building tools to make learning Egyptian easier. Here's
what I currently have: - An Anki 2 deck « Le Moyen Égyptien : Signes de base », with 204 common signs and notes in French. I'm working on another deck for the Assimil course. - I have an experimental Anki 2 plugin which allows me to type MdC codes, run them through HieroTeX, and automatically insert the result in my cards. There's also a special mode for compatibility with AnkiDroid. - For Linux users, I have a UIM input manager plugin which allows you to type transliteration characters and hieroglyphs. There's probably a small chance that this could be made to work on the Mac. (Why UIM and not ibus? Well, ibus may be the future of Gnome input methods, but right now it breaks the Compose key, which makes it impossible to type European languages.) In other words, I'm slowly building tools to make AJATT-style input-based learning a bit less awkward. If you want to test any of these, please let me know. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4679 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 20 of 35 20 July 2012 at 11:01pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Actually, I could be interested, some day. I've followed your log about Egyptian and along with some previous visits to museums and various posts, it really got me intrigued. At the moment, I don't have enough time, but I have two main questions:
-what does Anki 2 bring over Anki 1 that you would consider interesting? Haven't tried it, but the fact that it claims to merge all the decks in one is a bit frightening to me (who always have problem with Ankidroid...) -did you buy the Assimil book along with the cd? If yes, what value does it bring to you? I'd be very happy to get some answer for these two questions :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 21 of 35 21 July 2012 at 12:31am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Cool! It seems like a very interesting language so far, and the writing system is actually pretty sane—I can already recognize 80% of the hieroglyphs in many inscriptions. If you apply a Hesig/AJATT/Anki sort of strategy, the way some people do for Japanese, you'll chew through the basic signs in no time. I have all these crazy mnemonics using the 1-consonant signs as mnemonics for the 2- consonant signs. It's fun making up stories about owls, garden ponds, snakes, vultures, cups, water, and cow stomachs. The mix of phonetic and semantic characters seems well thought-out, at least so far. For the handful of words that I've seen, you'll often get a moderately distinctive biliteral or trileral, followed by uniliteral characters to help you read it, and often a determinitive to give you some sense of what it means. Conceptually, it's really similar to what I've read about Chinese characters, except that you don't need to dig quite so deep to figure out the radicals. And, well, it's a bit more free-form in practice. The Assimil course starts slowly, but it really takes the time to build up vocabulary and grammar from scratch. Each lesson adds a few new words and a few new points of grammar, and recombines material from previous lessons. By the end of the active wave, you're expected to be able to sight-read some moderately complicated texts. I'm getting pretty enthusiastic about this project, as you can probably tell. Middle Egyptian is old, older than biblical Hebrew. But it seems to have lots of good resources, a fairly large and interesting literature, and now an Assimil course. I'm sure there's some bad news lurking here, as Hampie suggested upthread. Dead languages, even Latin, have their own special challenges. But so far, it seems like a pretty interesting project.
Synchronization with AnkiDroid is massively better, and clozes have been updated significantly. You can nest related decks, now, too. Plus, it just looks better.
My copy is way overdue, so I haven't heard the CDs yet. But I've been able to look at a copy of the book for a while and make some Anki cards. I think the principal purpose of the CDs is to help link the pronunciation with the hieroglyphs, so that you can learn to sight-read a bit better. Without the recording, I think I might tend to read many words visually, without fully hooking up the pronunciation. But this is speculation. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5557 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 22 of 35 24 July 2012 at 12:02am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Oops...that's exactly what I'm doing at the moment. Assimil's "L'Égyptien hiéroglyphique" has become my new literary bedside companion. Wish me luck, sounds like I'll need it! :) Edited by Teango on 24 July 2012 at 12:02am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Hampie Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6660 days ago 625 posts - 1009 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Latin, German, Mandarin | Message 23 of 35 24 July 2012 at 12:43am | IP Logged | ||||||||
A well edited learning book is a totally different thing from the scraps of what was the egyptian literature we have left. To be frank most of the stuff we can read in ancient languages are pretty dull. I wish annals and the stuff ancient cultures though important enough to grave into stone: but most often it's just names and years, more names and more years. The thrill that you're reading something really old is what makes it so fun – though the vocabulary you need is often more than what you can expect yourself to actually know. As said, the time span is huge and therefore the vocabulary changes even though the grammar of the language is frozen (though scribes made mistakes...). How many hapax legomedas are worth learning? A hapax is a word occurring only once in a given corpus. Then there are the ones that we have maybe there instances of. And then there's all these words whose meaning are lost. In Akkadian there's also forms of words whose semantic value are not entirely known. I don't want to make you think that it's a dead end: it's soo f**king darn cool to read something aloud you know someone actually though, like really, more than 4000 years ago. But it's not really great literature until after the bronze age collapse. And the easier texts are very often the more boring ones. For some, to me unbeknown, reason the use of neo-made-up texts of dead languages are quite frowned upon. Occasionally they're used but always with an excuse and a promise that unaltered text will soon be used in their place. Which is sad, and perhaps Assimil has solved this in a good way, but I seriously doubt one will be able to read middle egyptian as leisure reading before bedtime after finishing Assimil. But, oh, please prove me wrong! I do believe that one can achieve reading fluency in Latin, so, maybe we can get fluent in Middle Egyptian? I'd love to go to a meet-up and speak dead tongues with other people, or to read a news paper in sumerian ;). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 24 of 35 24 July 2012 at 3:33am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Well, Latin suffers from many of the same problems. If you've ever tried to read actual Roman tombstones using schoolbook Latin, you'll quickly realize that they can only be deciphered as specialists, and even then, they're really boring. Half the letters are missing, common phrases are abbreviated ruthlessly, and the letters are all jammed together with no spaces and little forethought. Latin manuscripts from the Middle Ages aren't a lot better. There are hundreds of specialized scribal abbreviations and ligatures. But we have academic specialists who can decipher this stuff and produce clean, normalized texts. And I was perfectly happy to read those normalized texts, back when I knew a little Latin. I have no problem with doing the same in Egyptian. There's definitely some interesting-sounding literature in Middle Egyptian: * Story of Sinuhe. An adventure story, and by all accounts a popular one. The Assimil course actually has quite a few excerpts. * Sebayt. Moral and practical advice, of the sort that you find in the Poetic Edda. (Or, more notoriously, from Polonius in Hamlet.) I actually find this sort of thing fascinating—what did elderly Egyptians lecture their grandchildren about? * The Book of the Dead existed in the Middle Kingdom, but I have no idea whether it's actually readable. And of course, there's always funeral carvings and other spectacular museum stuff. I've heard that a lot of this uses specialized and repetitive formulas that you need to learn specifically. Again, the Assimil course covers a few examples, and there's always Collier, et al., which would probably be pretty easy after Assimil.
Well, Assimil New French with Ease doesn't exactly produce fluent reading, either. But it does allow you to read French slowly with a dictionary. Presumably the Egyptian course doesn't make it quite as far, but still, it looks like a fun experiment. And within the limits of the carefully-chosen beginner texts, the Assimil course is clearly designed to encourage sight-reading, that is, "hearing" and understanding the standard transliteration when you look at the signs. If nothing else, we'll enjoy ourselves, learn a smattering of Egyptian, and figure out how effective Assimil really is. :-) Edited by emk on 24 July 2012 at 3:35am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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