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TAC 2014 - Rare Languages Team Thread | ||
Tags: Nahuatl | Armenian | Team Thread | Sanskrit | Georgian | Indonesian | Rare Languages | Hebrew | Arabic | Total Annihilation Challenge (TAC) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Luso Hexaglot Senior Member Portugal Joined 5851 days ago 819 posts - 1812 votes  Speaks: Portuguese*, French, EnglishC2, GermanB1, Italian, Spanish Studies: Sanskrit, Arabic (classical) | Message 137 of 223 20 April 2014 at 6:40am | IP Logged | ||
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For my april challenge, I also thought of addressing gender and number, for both Arabic and Sanskrit. I could have started at an earlier point, that is, with alphabets, abjads and abugidas, but I think that would be a bit boring. Anyway, this is the kind of stuff we all can look up easily, so I'll skip it.
Another feature of my presentation is the parallel I'll be making between these two classic and sacred languages. It should be interesting. So, getting to business, Arabic is a Semitic language and Sanskrit is an Indo-European one. Both have very clear grammatical rules, defined many centuries ago. I may get back to demographics later, but for now it should suffice. The concepts of gender and number are conventional ones. Most of us live in a world of masculine/feminine and singular/plural, never realising how arbitrary they are. Even more familiar languages like German, who have a "neutral" gender, use it arbitrarily. Let's see: man is masculine and woman is feminine, right? That's the way things are. We also have to differentiate between one and many, right? Well... no! Wrong. There are languages with lots of genders, and the ones that use "just" two or three have lots of irregularities. For instance, why should a young woman be "neutral" in German? Why is "masculinity" a feminine word in Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Russian, Hindi, ...? Why do we assign a random gender to inanimate objects? Strange stuff, no? I promised not to be boring, and here I am, talking about strange concepts. Ok, that's over. No more. Promise. But hopefully, I got your attention. At least, you won't take these things for granted anymore. So, Arabic has two genders (masculine and feminine) and three numbers (singular, dual and plural). Sanskrit is a bit more complicated, having three genders (masculine, feminine and neuter) and three numbers (singular, dual and plural). Dual is a grammatical number you use for two entities. English words like "both", "either" and "neither" refer to instances of two entities. It may come in handy, since so many times we use a plural referring to just two (persons, animals, groups, etc.). Bear with me: I'm almost over. For this month, at least. I'll just give you a few more practical consequences of these. What are the practical consequences? You must be thinking: grammar must be hell. Well... it is! And then some. I still haven't addressed cases, remember? In terms of verb conjugation, we are used to a six-deep list (eu-tu-ele-nós-vós-eles, I-you-he-we-you-they, and so on). A conjugation list in Arabic is like a scroll from an exploration movie (it's fourteen-deep, since there's just one form for "we", whether it's dual or plural). Sanskrit is a lot simpler, because conjugation is not gender dependent. So, "he goes" and "she goes" are alike. But it's still a 3x3 matrix (there's dual, remember?). Well, that's enough for now. Now that the idea of learning an exotic language you've been entertaining for so long has been removed forever from your mind, my work here is done. Until next month, at least. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Penelope Diglot Senior Member Greece Joined 3659 days ago 110 posts - 155 votes Speaks: English, French Studies: Russian, Turkish, Modern Hebrew | Message 138 of 223 23 April 2014 at 2:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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And here I was complaining about hebrew!
Very nice post Luso :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Penelope Diglot Senior Member Greece Joined 3659 days ago 110 posts - 155 votes Speaks: English, French Studies: Russian, Turkish, Modern Hebrew | Message 139 of 223 23 April 2014 at 3:38pm | IP Logged | ||
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Our long running, cultural challenge
The revival of the Hebrew language. A very interesting fact about Hebrew, is that for about 1.700 years it wasn't being spoken. It was alive as a written language, but the Jews all over the world were using other languages for their actual conversations and everyday life. During the 19th c., influenced by several european independence movements, a man called Eliezer Ben-Yehuda decided that Hebrew should be spoken by the Jews. He made it his life's purpose to revive it as a spoken, everyday language. Even before he arrived to Palestine he already knew a lot. Upon his arrival there, he was ecstatic when he was able to have simple conversations with other Jews, even with mistakes from both sides. (I can understand his enthusiasm). He believed in total immersion, and he was so keen on speaking only hebrew in his home, that an ugly yelling scene against his wife (who absent-mindedly sang lullabies to the child in her native Russian) remained in the child's memory forever. Anyway, I stop here because, as is often the case, language and politics are very much connected in this story. We'll stick to the language. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda's ideas, efforts, writings and actions were a seed that led to a complete revival. Of course, modern and traditional hebrew are not quite the same. However, a country, Israel, has modern hebrew as its official language, and today people are born with it as their mother tongue. I find this worthy of mention. On a more personal note, and because there are several texts that I keep returning to, George Seferis has written a wonderful poem about Jerusalem. Ο Στράτης Θαλασσινός στη Νεκρή Θάλασσα, Stratis Thalassinos (one of his personas) in the Dead Sea. One phrase from the poem, Ιερουσαλήμ, ακυβέρνητη πολιτεία, Jerusalem, ungovernable city, gave the title to a three-part novel called Ακυβέρνητες Πολιτείες (by Στρατής Τσίρκας), Ungovernable cities, which in its turn became a TV series (the first part only), free on youtube. It is set in Jerusalem during wwii, and you get to hear greek, french, German, English, a bit of hebrew and a bit of arabic. Very cosmopolitan and very political series.  Edited by Penelope on 23 April 2014 at 3:46pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Hekje Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4493 days ago 842 posts - 1330 votes Speaks: English*, Dutch Studies: French, Indonesian | Message 140 of 223 23 April 2014 at 10:56pm | IP Logged | ||
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For our April challenge, I'd like to talk a little about loanwords in Indonesian.
Indonesian has about 12,000 loanwords. The vast majority of these are Dutch, which makes sense because the Netherlands occupied Indonesia for about 300 years. Dutch loanwords tend to have something to do with technology or bureaucracy. For example, kantor (office), polisi (police), and korupsi (corruption) are all derived from Dutch (kantoor, politie, and corruptie respectively). Which, you know... says something about the colonial legacy there. However, I will note that Dutch's influence on Indonesian is actually quite limited given how long the Dutch were there. This is because Dutch was a language reserved for the Dutch educated elite - not taught in government schools, nor made an official language of the colony. On the other hand, there are many Arabic loanwords because of the strong influence of Islam in Indonesia. About 87% of Indonesians are Muslim. Arabic has particularly influenced greetings in Indonesian. For example, selamat (safe, good, lucky) - as in selamat pagi (good morning), selamat siang (good afternoon), and selamat sore (good evening) - comes from the Arabic salaam, meaning "peace". Of course, religious terms are largely loaned from Arabic as well. Even the Christian Bible is called Alkitab (from Arabic kitab, meaning book), and the Christian God is called Allah. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Lakeseayesno Tetraglot Senior Member Mexico thepolyglotist.com Joined 4124 days ago 280 posts - 488 votes Speaks: English, Spanish*, Japanese, Italian Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 141 of 223 24 April 2014 at 3:52am | IP Logged | ||
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For the April challenge, I'll write a bit about Nahuatl neologisms, but I think that before going on to that, I must clarify that Nahuatl is an agglutinative language (like German or Japanese), which means that words are "glued" together to make new terms.
Up until very recently, Nahuatl was considered a language that belonged only in either classical Mexican literature classrooms or small villages cut off from modern civilization, but as of late it's starting to find its second wind thanks to the people who will actively write, compose music, blog, speak and in general "produce" the language's development. This community of learners considers that in order for this language to become part of modernity, it must learn to express modern terms in its own vocabulary. This is because, rather than create new words, the few native speakers that do talk it among their families and friends have loaned words from Spanish and English to make up for the missing words. In some cases, this has proved useful for everyday living (as in the case of the days, since the Aztec way of counting time is way different to the gregorian calendar: most people use the Spanish name of the days and months nowadays), but in others, loanwords are used just been because the word to describe them didn't exist beforehand. Here are some examples of Nahuatl neologisms (including the word "neologism" itself!), and how they're constructed: - Yancuictlahtolli: yancuic (new) + tlahtolli (word) = neologism - Tepozmalacatl: tepoztli (metal) + malacatl (wheel) = car - Tepoztototl: tepoztli (metal) + tototl (bird) = airplane - Tepozcoatl: tepoztli (metal) + coatl (snake) = train - Tepozmoyotl: tepoztli (metal) + moyotl (mosquito) = helicopter (!!!) - Cidicaxitl: Cidi (abbr. of compact disk) + caxitl (container/box) = CD player - Matlatzalantli: matlatl (net) + tzalantli (passageway, 'between') = internet Edited by Lakeseayesno on 24 April 2014 at 3:53am 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Zireael Triglot Senior Member Poland Joined 4441 days ago 518 posts - 636 votes Speaks: Polish*, EnglishB2, Spanish Studies: German, Sign Language, Tok Pisin, Arabic (Yemeni), Old English | Message 142 of 223 24 April 2014 at 4:40pm | IP Logged | ||
This is a picture I linked to a week or so ago in my log. From the mouth until ك ي, that is, /y/ and /k/, there is nothing unusual or difficult. The problems start deeper. The first two are غ خ /x/ and /ɣ/ - while unusual, they are present in certain other languages, such as Polish or Scottish (/x/) and Spanish (/ɣ/). The real challenge is posed by the emphatic consonants such as ط ظ ض ص (the cluster close to the uvula). Even transcribing them into IPA is difficult, since they are usually described as 'retracted tongue root' and therefore can be velarized or pharyngealized, resulting in different symbols. Usually, it's assumed they are pharyngeal, so: /sˤ, dˤ, tˤ, ðˤ/. They are accompanied by ق /q/ (like /k/, but deeper in your mouth). This sounds occurs in various languages around the world, none of them particularly well-known (Arabic, Nahuatl, Uyghur). If that weren't bad, there's the infamous ع (/ʕ/ aka 'that deep in the troat sound'), properly known as glottal stop and present in certain languages, such as English, but in very limited contexts. The other sounds in the throat are أ ه ح /ħ/ /h/ /a/. While /h/ and /a/ are not difficult, the tricky one is /ħ/, pharyngeal just like /ʕ/. It does occur in languages such as Finnish and Brazillian Portuguese, but it's in free variation with the more common /h/ and we're simply not trained to distinguish between the two. The emphatic consonants and /ħ/ are a unique feature of Semitic languages (Arabic, Hebrew). Luso, damn you for jumping on the topic of dual number, I wanted to cover it :D And in case it frightened you away from trying Arabic: if you say /k/ instead of /q/, you'll be perfectly understood in most cases. For the emphatic consonants, you can just try to stress them more and they will come out more or less emphatic. Using /h/ for /ħ/ is just like /k/ for /q/ - that's what most foreigners do anyway. The only real problem left is mastering the glottal stop! 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Luso Hexaglot Senior Member Portugal Joined 5851 days ago 819 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, French, EnglishC2, GermanB1, Italian, Spanish Studies: Sanskrit, Arabic (classical) | Message 143 of 223 25 April 2014 at 2:50am | IP Logged | ||
Yes, but I had a dual reason for doing so. ;) So many nice posts in just two days. I had thought of the cultural presentation as a sort of a wild card, but Penelope decided to make both a feature and the presentation this month. I'm very proud of our newbie. Zireael, I'll try to give you a bit of room with Arabic. But even without the dual, your feature was already a mouthful. :P Hekje, I was a bit surprised when you didn't mention Portuguese as a source of loanwords in Indonesian. I believe there are many, having been a lingua franca in the region for some time. I studied the region's history, and the early Islamisation of the country is tied to the climate: Muslim traders had to wait for appropriate winds to sail there and then back. Therefore, they had around four months over there with nothing to do. They spent part of it spreading their faith, and some married into the community. As the winds were seasonal, they used the Arabic word موسم (mawsim), season. The Portuguese picked it as "monção", and the English called it "monsoon". I updated a few things in the first posts (mainly the challenges), and we still have a week until the end of the month. Edited by Luso on 25 April 2014 at 3:40am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Hekje Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4493 days ago 842 posts - 1330 votes Speaks: English*, Dutch Studies: French, Indonesian | Message 144 of 223 25 April 2014 at 3:51pm | IP Logged | ||
Sure, there are also Chinese and Sanskrit loanwords. I'm not familiar with Portuguese at all though and I didn't just want to regurgitate Wikipedia. :-) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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