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A dead languages challenge? | ||
Tags: Dead Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4678 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 17 of 75 13 February 2014 at 4:22am | IP Logged | |||||
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I'd be in, depending on how long we would have to complete the challenge. A short
challenge (summer-long) and Old or Middle (if that counts) English would be fun. A longer challenge (to the end of the year) and I'll try Homeric Greek. Again. 100 lines = three to four pages sounds right for Greek. Book 1 of the Iliad is 610 lines, and my hard copy has 30 lines per page. ____________________________________________________________ __ For other potential Greeklings out there: Perseus has the Iliad, Odyssey, and other texts online. There's a lot of Latin texts, too. It's a fantastic resource: click on a word, and it gives you its grammatical breakdown. μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος μῆνιν.....wrath.....noun sg fem acc ἄειδε.....sing......verb 2nd sg pres imperat act θεά.......goddess...noun sg fem voc and so on. It ain't easy. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 Jiwon Triglot Moderator Korea, South Joined 6225 days ago 1417 posts - 1500 votes Speaks: EnglishC2, Korean*, GermanC1 Studies: Hindi, Spanish Personal Language Map | Message 18 of 75 13 February 2014 at 5:52am | IP Logged | |||||
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I would really like to read in Classical Chinese(Gu Wen) but my limited knowledge of
Chinese characters would prevent me from taking part in any serious challenge.. Plus, if I ever were to join the challenge with Gu Wen, I would have a hard time choosing which version of reading I would want to use - should I read in Korean or Chinese styles Of course, I don't have to be able to "read" characters out loud to understand the text.. I would like to know how this turns out. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| akkadboy Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5197 days ago 264 posts - 497 votes Speaks: French*, English, Yiddish Studies: Latin, Ancient Egyptian, Welsh | Message 19 of 75 13 February 2014 at 1:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I might use this challenge as an springboard to bring my Classical Tibetan up to a decent level...
Generally speaking I prefer short time goals so 100 pages seems quite good. As for (Middle) Egyptian resources do not forget the Urkunden. There's quite a few interesting historical documents there, like the autobiography of Ahmes the son of Abana for instance of Thutmosis III's stela from the Gebel Barkal. Maybe it would be a good idea to start a thread about Middle Egyptian literature. edit. Here's a good start (Old, Middle and Late Egyptian texts). Edited by akkadboy on 13 February 2014 at 5:20pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4698 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 20 of 75 13 February 2014 at 2:05pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'd definitely like to sign up for this one, studying some Koine Greek, which is
roughly speaking between the classical period and post-New Testament Greek... In other words anything from about 300 to 300. What sort of time-frame are we talking about? I'm interested in the question of living v dead for some languages. Is spoken Sanskrit really the same as classical Sanskrit? Is the language of the Vedas even the same as the Gita? Isn't Latin spoken in the Vatican? I have heard it argued that Classical Greek and Modern Greek are the same language. Another question which I am sure will come up, is the comparison between languages which will be easy to read and languages with difficult scripts. I am not offering any solution at this point, but it will be much harder (in most cases) for someone doing Akkadian or Egyptian than for someone doing Latin or Greek. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Lykeio Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4033 days ago 120 posts - 357 votes | Message 21 of 75 13 February 2014 at 2:54pm | IP Logged | |||||
All these are complex questions but I hope I can content you with some brief answers. [1] The language of the Vedas is much older than Classical Sanskrit and contains several phonological quirks and even possesses differing verb forms. Classical Sanskrit usually = Paninian. Originally his grammar was descriptive of the north West (Punjab etc) but it acquired descriptive force and thence classical status. However dramatic and collegiate writes depart from him frequently and then there are spatial and temporal dialectical differences. That said unlike Latin or Greek we possess near the full range of several periods of Sanskrit. It's not dead like Latin or Greek are. [2] The Vatican speaks a Latin. Certainly not a form any native (Roman) speaker would have recognised. There are some odd ideas surrounding this... [3] Define same language. As I've said before on this forum the similarity is so heavily overemphasised and the debate so politicised you can't have a real debate. They're the same language in the broadest sense of the term, yes, but extreme innovation has taken place phonologically, morphologically and especially lexically and syntactically. Anyone saying otherwise is a complete moron. However if you kill the myriad subtleties of the old language and treat it as modern Greek you can get a reading speed rather quickly. But you're not really "reading". It's....yeah just screw it.
So you clearly got the meaning of the line, right? "sing goddess of the wrath of Peleus' son Achilles" Now if I told you that μῆνις (menis) is a vested word related to mania and thus distinct from, say, χωλός (kholos) and that θεά (thea) would be an aberration in speech of the time. That it's purely literary and Greeks would have used ἡ θεός (he theos) and that quantitive metathesis has played a game with the genitives there for metrical reasons....well then you see how the Iliad gets hard. But in order to just sort of "read" it. Well, not really. That's the amazing thing. You can just coast through with a dictionary feeling a champion or you can try to read it in context with your philological toolbox and tear your hair out. Just got for it. It's not difficult. If you want my god's honest advice I'd recommend supplement reading the Iliad with selections from Hesiod, the Hymns and Herodotus. Trust me, it seems counter productive at first but your speed will jump up. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5321 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 22 of 75 13 February 2014 at 3:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Wow! Thank you everybody, for being so interested in a dead language challenge. I'd respond to you all individually, but if I did, I'd be here all day.
Some thoughts based on the discussion so far: Size and duration. I want this challenge to be accessible to people who are at low levels in unfamiliar languages with complicated scripts. Not necessarily easy for them, but accessible. It's going to take me a while to finish 100 pages of hieroglyphs, for example. So at a minimum, this challenge will run several months. If that's not challenging enough for you, we'll offer extra glory to people who read more than 100 pages. :-) Languages. I really want to include Sanskrit, even though a few thousand people still speak it at some level (including a revival movement). So let's make this a "dead and classic languages" challenge. For the purposes of this challenge: 1. A language is alive is you can find a playground full of children who speak it to each other. 2. A language is dead if it once qualified as alive, but now does not. 3. A language is classic if it was ever a major language of scholarship and writing, but it's now either dead or awfully close. So both dead and classic languages are good. 7 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4698 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 23 of 75 13 February 2014 at 4:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Sounds great, emk. I would suggest three months as a good, round figure for a challenge
such as this. That would equate to just over a page a day. As I mentioned, I would definitely be up for reading Greek for this challenge. I'd also consider this as an interesting way to start Sanskrit. Which leads me to my next question: What would you think about someone using an Assimil textbook for their reading material, and counting the lines? Thank you for your response, Lykeio. I found your responses interesting to read. My questions actually were more hypothetical than actual, just to point out the difficulty of defining a dead language. Emk gave me the answer I was looking for. EDIT: thinking a bit further about the idea of using textbook texts... Since we are dealing with classic and dead languages, you may want to make a rule about only using classic texts (e.g. not simplified for students). So, for example, if I wanted to use the Reading Greek textbook, I would have to skip the first half of the book, and start where the texts are fully original (not simplified). As to whether Assimil Sanskrit has any "real" texts, I have no idea. Unfortunately, that would also rule out things like Peter Rabbit, so I'm guessing you'd rather not have that as a rule. I thought I'd mention the possibility anyway. Again, just trying to consider all the possibilities. Edited by Jeffers on 13 February 2014 at 4:59pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6386 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 24 of 75 13 February 2014 at 6:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
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As far as I know, the whole point of the Sanskrit thing is that there are a few villages where adult try to pass it on to their children. So there are some playgrounds where kids speak it, without even understanding that they are preserving an amazing language.
On the other hand I have no clue if Karelian has those playgrounds - maybe in some remote villages, but probably less than even Sanskrit. Googling made me quite sad though :( No clear answer, but apparently some Finnish attempts of assistance are viewed as intervention, wtf. So, I hate to be the one hijacking all the challenges, but how about including endangered languages? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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