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Ancient languages (the old ones) | ||
Tags: Dead Languages | Writing System | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| ' Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5940 days ago 120 posts - 120 votes  Speaks: English*, Hungarian* | Message 1 of 24 24 August 2008 at 8:58am | IP Logged | ||
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I did an archaeology course a while ago which got me interested in the really old languages:
Egyptian (Afro-asiatic) Sumerian (Isolate) Hittite (I-E) Akkadian (East Semitic) Aramaic (Northwest Semitic) etc They are very hard to find good sources on, however. Anyone got some good resources for the spelling, grammar, vocabulary, etc of these languages? because they'd be awesome to learn. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Karakorum Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6569 days ago 201 posts - 232 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written)* Studies: French, German | Message 2 of 24 24 August 2008 at 2:38pm | IP Logged | ||
I have been self-studying ancient Egyptian from Middle Egyptian by James P. Allen. The book is really great and covers a lot more than I'd ever imagined. The grammar is quite comprehensive, and it introduces a lot of vocabulary in the exercises. The writing system is introduced in a few lessons, then you practice it consistently throughout. He also makes a good (although by no means comprehensive) effort to put things in context: To explain the historical drift in writing conventions, possible reconstructed vowels of some words, influences from other languages, etc.. I am half way through and I can already read some lines on papyri and can certainly read a lot of names and expressions on artifacts. The language itself is just amazing. The writing system is nothing I imagined it to be, it is way easier than it's made to be, and in a crazy sort of way it soon starts to seem logical. Because you will never use the language actively, it is easier to acquire grammar and get the basics of vocabulary than it is for a living language. Of course the main annoying part is you can't really know how the words were actually pronounced, but I like to pretend I do by using Arabic vowel patterns, it's really dumb but fun :p Definitely give it a shot. It's a real good feeling being able to make sense of all the pretty drawings. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ' Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5940 days ago 120 posts - 120 votes Speaks: English*, Hungarian* | Message 3 of 24 25 August 2008 at 2:36am | IP Logged | ||
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How's your cuneiform?
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 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 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 4 of 24 25 August 2008 at 5:45am | IP Logged | ||
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It is fairly easy to find something simple about Egyptian hieroglyphs, because Teach your self has produced a book about them. The rest of those scripts haven't got as much public appeal and you may have to settle for more scholarly and dusty sources. But tell us if you find something simple and entertaining.
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| JS-1 Diglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 5983 days ago 144 posts - 166 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Arabic (Egyptian), German, Japanese, Ancient Egyptian, Arabic (Written) | Message 5 of 24 25 August 2008 at 6:12am | IP Logged | ||
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A Grammar of Akkadian by John Huehnergard is a very good introduction to both the language and its writing system..
A Manual of Sumerian Grammar and Texts by John L. Hayes is another great book. While many books on the language require some knowledge of linguistics, Hayes makes it very accessible. While Cuneiform is a vast and complex subject, both of these books provide a very good overview of the way these languages were written. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| ' Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5940 days ago 120 posts - 120 votes Speaks: English*, Hungarian* | Message 6 of 24 25 August 2008 at 7:01am | IP Logged | ||
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Lovely, I'll have to see if the ANU library has even heard of these books, and if they have, we're in luck.
Does ASCII code for cuneiform and Hieroglyphs? To the Egyptian scholars among us, roughly how many Hieroglyphs are needed to read and write Egyptian? Does it regularly use a logographic writing (like chinese...kinda) or is it just syllibiary, or even abjad? Edit: ok turns out the Menzies library has both. Nice. Edited by ' on 25 August 2008 at 7:08am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6439 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 7 of 24 25 August 2008 at 7:20am | IP Logged | ||
Absolutely not; ASCII is a rather small standard, with only 128 values, many of which aren't characters in any writing system. I think you meant Unicode. If so, the answer is yes (since 2006) and no (though there are draft proposals), respectively. Egyptologists apparently usually transliterate into ASCII (aka, the alphabet we're currently exchanging messages with, to oversimplify matters). It looks messy at a glance. Wikipedia's coverage of the transliteration of ancient Egyptian may be of interest to you, as may a page on Unicode fonts for ancient scripts. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Karakorum Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6569 days ago 201 posts - 232 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written)* Studies: French, German | Message 8 of 24 25 August 2008 at 9:05am | IP Logged | ||
It is a complex writing system. It has logographs, ideographs, monoconsonants, biconsonants, and triconsonants. The logographs are fairly limited in number and you will learn them very quickly. The ideographs are the classifiers that often but not always come at the end of a word to indicate its category. They are essentially meant for disambiguation, but you will also find yourself using them to separate words, we are talking around 100 here. The phonetic component is by far the largest and most commonly used. Most words are composed of biconsonant glyphs used in rebus in long words (although honestly words with more than one biconsonant glyph seem to be rare). There are also some very common triconsonant symbols. The abjad component (which later became proto-Sinite and Wadi El-Hol) is used to spell, but most of them time it is used to give you a hint about the multi-consonant glyph by telling you explicitly what the last or first letter (or both are). So for example the word for ear is msdr it is written as: ms (biconsonant glyph) s (Used to help you figure out the first one) dr (biconsonant glyph) r (Used to help you figure out the dr) ear glyph (used to classify the word and diambiguate) The word for Orion (the star) is s'H: s (note here two phonetic aids are given for one glyph) s' ' H star (used to classify the word and diambiguate) And so on. There are no rules on when you use one, two, or no phonetic aids, when to use alternative equivalent combos, etc.. But there are consistent rules in reading, for example any consonant sound that is repeated only once by a consonant around a multi-consonant symbol is always counted as a phonetic aid. If it is part of the word it will be repeated twice. There are inconsistencies that you will see with spellings as time goes and words changed. Also they sometimes switched the order of symbols, sometimes in predictable patterns (honorific exchange), or just to arrange symbols in a neat pattern. But overall, the system seems to be consistent and obsessive compulsive. You will probably have some trouble reading Old Egyptian, not because of the writing which didn't seem to change a lot, but because vocabulary changed a lot. You will also not be able to know what's happening with Ptolemaic texts because the writing system went insane in that period. There're about 28 symbols in the abjad component. The common two consonant symbols are in the (very) low hundreds. Even less for the three consonants. There's probably around a hundred or so classifiers, and maybe tens of logographs. I would guess with a few (maybe 3) hundred Hieroglyphs overall you'd be able to read fairly well (need a dictionary every once in a while). Edited by Karakorum on 25 August 2008 at 10:35am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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