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A dead languages challenge? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5530 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 1 of 75 12 February 2014 at 10:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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Anyone up for 100 pages (or more) in a dead language?
For living languages, we have Solfrid's Super Challenge, and it did really amazing things for my French. But dead languages don't have 100 movies, and they don't all have 5,000 pages of interesting literature. But still, it would be really fun to do extensive reading in a dead language. Here I look at some questions we'd have to answer. Counting pages. The first problem is how to count. According to various sources, a US mass-market paperback typically runs between 250 and 350 words per page, with a bit under 10 words per page and up to about 36 lines. Egyptian texts are usually counted in lines. For example, the Egyptian text The Eloquent Peasant is about 400 lines long with 8 to 14 words per line. Peter Rabbit is just over 1,000 words in English, and 160 short lines in Egyptian. So for the sake of discussion, we can assume that 100 lines equals 3 or 4 pages. Total volume of text available. Miriam Lichtheim's Ancient Egyptian Literature: Volume I: The Old and Middle Kingdoms contains most of the classics of Ancient and Middle Egyptian. It runs 300 pages in English translation, including front matter and introductions to the various texts. There are, of course, plenty of tombs, letters and administrative documents that aren't in her book, but I imagine these get old after a while, and it's hard to find good sources for the more obscure works. Few modern texts have been translated to ancient Egyptian (I know of Peter Rabbit). As with the Super Challenge, re-reading should count. Challenge size. Given the limited literature available in many of these languages, and the limited amount of time that most of us can dedicate to a dead language, I feel like we should be looking at around 100 pages or 25,000 words. This is definitely too small to achieve true reading fluency. It's not even enough to get over the initial "hump" in a Romance language (which is probably at least 250 pages for a lot of people). But it's a significant fraction of the available texts for those of us learning really dead languages. On the other hand, I suspect that many students of Latin would like a bigger challenge. I'm open to suggestions here. So, is anybody feeling crazy enough to join me in a dead languages challenge? What languages would you like to try? Do you have any ideas about how to make this awesome? :-) 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4252 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 2 of 75 12 February 2014 at 10:37pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'd love to study some Latin or Old Church Slavonic somewhere down the road after I'm comfortable in 2 or 3 other languages in the same family. But that's probably years away for me, so I'll just watch this challenge with interest for now. Edited by YnEoS on 12 February 2014 at 11:41pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4842 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 3 of 75 12 February 2014 at 10:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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Wow, this sounds really interesting! I might take part with Latin or Old Norse. There's plenty of literature available in both languages.
It would also be interesting to create something like the 6WC for dead languages, so I could finally dive into Old English, Ancient Greek, or Old Irish. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Tollpatchig Senior Member United States Joined 4005 days ago 161 posts - 210 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Maltese | Message 4 of 75 12 February 2014 at 10:50pm | IP Logged | ||
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I don't know if I can handle a challenge but I'd like to learn Gothic as its a very old
Germanic language. I probably wouldnt even be able to find anything in learning it the language but hey you never know and it'll be totally awesome to learn an old language. Wow, I'd never thought in a million years that I'd be eager to learn a dead language. Edited by Tollpatchig on 12 February 2014 at 10:57pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 meramarina Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5965 days ago 1341 posts - 2303 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: German, Italian, French Personal Language Map | Message 5 of 75 12 February 2014 at 11:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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I like this idea! What books would you recommend for Ancient Egyptian? (besides the one you mentioned)
Do you know of any in the public domain online? I have two books I can use, someplace, but these are English with transcriptions so there is not much to read. I'll have to see if the library has anything to use. I need a project to work on since I've not been very active on the forum lately. I'm not sure if I'll do this yet but I'm interested in it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5530 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 75 12 February 2014 at 11:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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Ah, cool, Josquin, I knew that we had some crazy people here who might into something like this. :-) I love HTLAL. Does 100 pages sound like a good size to you? If you want more, we can figure something out.
YnEoS, Old Church Salvonic sounds pretty awesome, in an intense sort of way. Tollpatchig, I think the only reading material in Gothic is the Codex Argenteus, which uses Gothic words with Greek word order. If you want to stay in the Germanic family, you might have more luck with Old Norse, which gets you everything from sagas to rune stones to some classic Germanic-style verse. Or check out Old English and Its Closest Relatives: A Survey of the Earliest Germanic Languages, which includes sample texts in about 10 languages, with short grammars and glossaries so you can read them.
The book I mentioned is just an English translation, and you'll have to look elsewhere for the Egyptian originals. But it's a great sampler, and it includes pretty much all of the literary classics, plus a nice selection of tomb inscriptions, spells, decrees and so on. For free interlinear texts, I recommend the St. Andrews Corpus. (And avoid anything by Budge, whose interlinear translations are apparently a joke.) For a course and grammar reference, I recommend Allen's Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs, which is really quite good. If you read French, there's also a very nice Assimil course, which should also come out in English in 2015 if they don't delay it again. For other resources, see the Team Egyptian thread. Egyptian is a generally awesome language, similar to Arabic but without cases. The writing system is surprisingly reasonable: it's substantially phonetic, with determinative signs to clarify meanings, and you can do pretty well with only ~200 signs. The grammar is delightfully weird, but pleasantly regular. If you're looking for a nice side project, it's a fine choice. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| MakiMaki Triglot Newbie Poland Joined 4275 days ago 11 posts - 16 votes Speaks: Polish*, Spanish, English Studies: German | Message 7 of 75 12 February 2014 at 11:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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Sounds great! I'd love to learn Old English. I'm just wondering if I will have hard time
collecting literature. I suggest that the number of pages should be between 100 and 150, and the amount of time should be around 6 weeks long. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6595 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 8 of 75 13 February 2014 at 12:15am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm definitely in with Latin! Despite having tons of options but I'm very happy with a small challenge. We should keep in mind that veeeery few don't study one or more living languages along with a dead one.
1 person has voted this message useful |
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