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Trivial Pursuits => Arts & Entertainment => Topic started by: Bobby Isosceles on August 18, 2008, 11:38:20 pm
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Full course including how to decipher the cuneiform. (http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~iranian/OldPersian/opcomplete.pdf)
From there it is a hop, skip and a jump to Avestan. (http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~iranian/OldAvestan/oldavestanprimer.pdf)
From there it should be trivial to learn Sanskrit.
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How's it going?
Friend of mine has been trying to bite on some Sanskrit, and the analogy he used was "the brain equivalent of kidney stones". Good luck you, and post about your progress, but try not to be scary about it (if I read something like "They have 77 vowels!!" coupled with your avatar's expression, I might run and cry).
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the text is written in the style of most manuals on learning an ancient language. By that i mean the mechanical translation and glossary method that is seen in many Greek and Latin texts.
I did something like this when I started learning Hindi. No way around writing it a lot to get a grip on the symbols.
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persian is attractive to me in that apparently it is like a slightly easier Arabic, and I quit Arabic because it was too much work.
but at this point I need to focus on learning Spanish.
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I try to learn languages on my own sometimes. It never works. The only foreign language I can speak with any proficiency is French, of which I had three years of formal schooling. So I guess the lesson is, I am not self-sufficient? Maybe I should read Walden.
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How's it going?
Friend of mine has been trying to bite on some Sanskrit, and the analogy he used was "the brain equivalent of kidney stones". Good luck you, and post about your progress, but try not to be scary about it (if I read something like "They have 77 vowels!!" coupled with your avatar's expression, I might run and cry).
The fact that I know modern Farsi makes it a hell of a lot easier, plus leads to some interesting surprises (two words with slightly different connotations for "good" are actually the same word in Old Persian, but with different endings based on gender/declension)
Things that are NOT good:
- six cases
- three genders
- a good number of declensions
So it feels like learning Classical Latin, only more so.
Thankfully, Wikipedia helps, although very sporadically in its quality (e.g., the wiki page for thematic vowels was academic gobbledygook but a very simple explanation was given on the page for athematic vowels)
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the text is written in the style of most manuals on learning an ancient language. By that i mean the mechanical translation and glossary method that is seen in many Greek and Latin texts.
I did something like this when I started learning Hindi. No way around writing it a lot to get a grip on the symbols.
Indeed, rather than just do the exercises I am actually taking all of the various sentences that I've come across (i'm in Lesson 3) and am manually transcribing them to cuneiform so that I can memorize them. I think I've got about a third of the symbols committed to memory.
One thing that's interesting about Old Persian rather than modern Farsi is that rather than a dearth of vowels (thanks to most semitic scripts) that one has to piece in by context, there is a surfeit of vowels, as each letter is for the most part a syllable. Yet the spoken word often doesn't have the vowel, so you need to know when to omit rather than insert.
It's kind of a pain in the ass but I learned some pretty neat stuff so far -- apparently old Indo-Iranian languages use "R" as a vowel. The closest analog is if a cockney were to say "pr'haps" to mean "perhaps". I've often seen the Rig Veda translated as the Rg Veda -- I wonder if that means the R is a vowel there too.
As I said, I want this under my belt and then I'm going on to the Sanskrit.
I wouldn't call it brain kidney stones, I'd call it a brain pregnancy. The pain is roughly equivalent but at the end there's something worthwhile. And if not, I can dump all my Sanskrit and Old Persian lessons in a garbage bag behind a Taco Bell and no one will arrest me.
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persian is attractive to me in that apparently it is like a slightly easier Arabic, and I quit Arabic because it was too much work.
but at this point I need to focus on learning Spanish.
It's slightly easier to speak because it is an inflected Indo-European language much like Spanish, French, Russian, Greek, etc. As an English speaker and someoen who is learning spanish it is easy.
As a written language it is a nightmare because it has inherited a script which does not fit it well. Semitic languages tend to omit vowels because the structure of the vowels can be easily gleaned from context in the word. For example, "bin" means son of and "banu" means "sons of." I think there is a similar one for "book" and anything pertaining to books, with the consonant cluster K-T-B: ketab means book, kotob means books, maktab means library/school.
Thus there is really no need to write the vowels since everyone knows where they'd go and what they'd be based on the structure of the sentence. As plurals, adjectives etc are handled entirely differently in an Indo-European inflected language, all that goes out the window; as a result, you literally have to know how every word is spelled to be literate.
Pain in the ass.
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Bobby Isoglosses?
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nervous dot breakdown dot org
an irregularly updated blog of my findings
note: extremely boring