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Less commonly studied dead languages? | ||
Tags: Rare Languages | Dead Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| rippletoad Newbie United States Joined 4862 days ago 5 posts - 8 votes | Message 1 of 10 12 December 2011 at 9:59pm | IP Logged | ||
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What are some less commonly studied dead languages with a good enough body of information to learn from, and a fairly interesting history?
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| Shunsen Triglot Newbie Croatia Joined 4737 days ago 3 posts - 3 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, German Studies: Russian, Dutch, Ukrainian, French | Message 2 of 10 12 December 2011 at 11:34pm | IP Logged | ||
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Coptic isn't completely dead (according to Wikipedia about 300 native speakers), but it is used for liturgical
purposes only and it's history is definitely interesting. I'm not sure about learning material though, but Gothic or Phoenician sound very intriguing to me. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| zyz Newbie United States Joined 5336 days ago 19 posts - 28 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Latin, Ancient Greek, Sanskrit | Message 3 of 10 12 December 2011 at 11:50pm | IP Logged | ||
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Classical Nahuatl (language of the Aztecs) has a decently sized literary corpus. There are even some surviving pre-Columbian codices. I know there's at least one introductory book in English, probably more material in Spanish.
The extant body of works in Classical Chinese is gargantuan and spans a huge period of time and many regions. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cabaire Senior Member Germany Joined 5599 days ago 725 posts - 1352 votes  | Message 4 of 10 13 December 2011 at 12:23am | IP Logged | ||
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I have studied Latin, Ancient Greek, Biblical Hebrew and Sanskrit, which are certainly no "less commonly studied".
In my personal library are also many books about Sengoidelc (Old Irish), Syriac (an Aramaic language) and Egyptian Hieroglyphics, to all of whom I would like to dedicate myself when the time comes. These may be called "less commonly studied". 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Hampie Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6659 days ago 625 posts - 1009 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Latin, German, Mandarin | Message 5 of 10 13 December 2011 at 12:52am | IP Logged | ||
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Shame be it spoke I not of Akkadian, a language that was spoken and written over a time period of roughly 2000
years; it is the oldest attested semitic language and morphologically somewhat conservative albeit phonetically very, very dumbed down due to a Sprachbund with Sumerian. Thus it has lost many of the hard-to-make throat sounds merely keeping a pair of three emphatic consonants. Q, ṣ and ṭ, of those I’d say that the ṭ is the hardest one to make. There consonants were probably ejectives [k’], [s’], &c. &c. but many scholars now day pronounce them as in Arabic, that is a far back velar k, and pharyngalized ts for ṣ and t for ṭ. Some people pronounce them k, ts and t. The corpus of Akkadian texts is huge and vast, and due to the durable material the scribes in Mesopotamia chose to write on much of it is actually still surviving into this very day, buried in the sand of Iraq or taken to European museums. There are all kinds of literature, hymns, epics, scientific, letters, endless bookkeeping records, contracts, &c. &c. you name it. For Akkadian there are plenty of material, nowhere anywhere near Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Sanskrit or Arabic — but mores than many other dead languages. Recently a dictionary project called the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary was completed and that thing is huge, 21 volumes and they’re big as atlases all of them. The book that I’ve heard the best about and personally likes most is Huenergard’s Grammar of Akkadian, which is a fat green book (and an accompanying key sold separately) that has everything you need to begin your studies, including Akkadian-English vocabulary, sign list, paradigms and a funny English-Akkadian vocabulary. Other books are Teach Yourself Complete Babylonian, though it’s entirely in latin letters, and Introduction to Akkadian which has a pretty thing format and very shallow grammatical explanations. A Manual of Akkadian is a book that uses an inductive method and throws you right into the first paragraph of Hammurabi though I would not suggest using that as a sole book for self learning because it has no key and unless you can get help from somewhere it will make you totally lost in space. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| fiziwig Senior Member United States Joined 4865 days ago 297 posts - 618 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 6 of 10 13 December 2011 at 12:53am | IP Logged | ||
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There's a lot of material and textbooks for Pali, compared to most of the other obscure dead languages anyway. Plus there's the advantage that all the material is all in the Roman alphabet.
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| rippletoad Newbie United States Joined 4862 days ago 5 posts - 8 votes | Message 7 of 10 13 December 2011 at 2:45am | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks. The more obscure ones seem like they don't have much corpus at all. I don't know if I want to try tackling any of those yet because I'm rather busy, but when time comes I'll try.
For some reason, I've always found the Indo-European languages with sigmatic nominatives (that is, the languages that have a lot of nominatives that end with -s, -as, -is, -us, etc) pretty cool. I think they are, for the lack of a better word, badass. Does anyone else feel that way? Too bad not a lot of them are around anymore. Edited by rippletoad on 13 December 2011 at 2:47am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7156 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 8 of 10 13 December 2011 at 3:27am | IP Logged | ||
No. Don't know what you're talking about. :-P On a related note, it seems that you would love using Latvian and Lithuanian. Their not being dead would disqualify them from your consideration but at the least they aren't frequently studied by outsiders. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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