Posted: Sun Nov 29, 2009 10:15 am Post subject: minus273's Languages and Linguistics log
I'm now hanging around with the wonderful people at CRLAO. Linguistics is really interesting and maybe I should really spend some years doing that.
December is coming so some of the goals here:
French: (I now live with a very very friendly French propriétaire, which might help my conversation, though I need to learn the formal written language and write, write, write)try finally to keep up with the class progress that I seriously lag behind.
Turkish: try finally to keep up with the class progress that I seriously lag behind.
Ancient Greek: (I'm taking a historical grammar course and an epigraphy for some reading. Epigraphy is definitely easier than normal texts, being formulaic and plagued with infinitives) Not much of the goals, but still I'd really like to reread the epigraphical texts read together in class (my grammar & vocabulary are shoddy).
(I wish to learn some modern Greek too, now having some Greek friends, but concentrate! concentrate!)
Amdo Tibetan: start to work with my instructor Sonam.
Japhug rGyalrong: finish my conjugator and make an online drill to train myself. Finally read a ****ing text!!!
Linguistics (@INALCO): make a first draft of vocabulary comparison Tibetan - rGyalrong - nDrapa. _________________ No saves, Antonio, loke es morirse en su lingua. Es komo kedarse soliko en el silensyo kada dya ke Dyo da, komo ser sikileoso sin saver porke.
Joined: 24 Oct 2009 Posts: 1556 Speaks: English & Français Learns: Español
Location: Paris, France
Posted: Sun Nov 29, 2009 1:31 pm Post subject: Re: minus273's Languages and Linguistics log
minus273 wrote:
French: (I now live with a very very friendly French propriétaire, which might help my conversation, though I need to learn the formal written language and write, write, write)try finally to keep up with the class progress that I seriously lag behind.
Get on Lang8 and get posting then. There's plenty of french people online to check what you write. I usually get corrected in like 10 minutes. _________________ Extralean - En, Fr, Es.
Posted: Sun Nov 29, 2009 2:30 pm Post subject: Re: minus273's Languages and Linguistics log
ExtraLean wrote:
Get on Lang8 and get posting then. There's plenty of french people online to check what you write. I usually get corrected in like 10 minutes.
Thanks for the tip! I registered on Lang-8 and it's a great concept. We all love to correct other people... _________________ No saves, Antonio, loke es morirse en su lingua. Es komo kedarse soliko en el silensyo kada dya ke Dyo da, komo ser sikileoso sin saver porke.
Last edited by minus273 on Sun Nov 29, 2009 3:44 pm; edited 1 time in total
Posted: Sun Nov 29, 2009 3:48 pm Post subject: Re: minus273's Languages and Linguistics log
Lundgren wrote:
Feel free to add me Minus (see signature) I'd like to watch your progress.
Totally!
What a great site it is! I didn't wait long before my French and Japanese got corrected. I didn't intend to practice my Japanese over there, but I tried to write for fun and I got surprisingly few corrections. I didn't learn Japanese formally but I did extensive reading in that language, cheating on the meaning using characters as guides. Japanese ego-boom. Maybe I should say that I write intermediate Japanese with a dictionary (does this category exist?). _________________ No saves, Antonio, loke es morirse en su lingua. Es komo kedarse soliko en el silensyo kada dya ke Dyo da, komo ser sikileoso sin saver porke.
Posted: Sun Nov 29, 2009 3:54 pm Post subject: Re: minus273's Languages and Linguistics log
minus273 wrote:
Lundgren wrote:
Feel free to add me Minus (see signature) I'd like to watch your progress.
Totally!
What a great site it is! I didn't wait long before my French and Japanese got corrected. I didn't intend to practice my Japanese over there, but I tried to write for fun and I got surprisingly few corrections. I didn't learn Japanese formally but I did extensive reading in that language, cheating on the meaning using characters as guides. Japanese ego-boom. Maybe I should say that I write intermediate Japanese with a dictionary (does this category exist?).
Yeh the site is Japanese so it isn't uncommon that one gets up to 15 corrections in Japanese. _________________
Done two lang-8 posts. The Japanese one is shorter, an introduction to the rGyalrong language I'm studying. The French one didn't work. Yesterday I was intrigued by a problem, and I failed to describe it clearly. _________________ No saves, Antonio, loke es morirse en su lingua. Es komo kedarse soliko en el silensyo kada dya ke Dyo da, komo ser sikileoso sin saver porke.
Done two lang-8 posts. The Japanese one is shorter, an introduction to the rGyalrong language I'm studying. The French one didn't work. Yesterday I was intrigued by a problem, and I failed to describe it clearly. :(
I read the French entry. I understood most of it, however the subject was a bit too advanced for me, your writing looks very good however. :) _________________
Procrastinated for three months and I'm back again!
I began to read Essentials of Modern Literary Tibetan yesterday. When I mentioned I was going to do that to my linguistics professor weeks ago. He said: "Why won't you just read mi ro rtse sgrung?" It's a bilingual storybook in Written Tibetan and French that I bought months ago. Well, I started grokking it today, somewhat over-enthusiastically. I prepared it in 3-line interlinear format: I copied the Tibetan text to an A4 paper (1st line), glossed each syllable, and, if possible, word in Chinese (2nd line), and copied the free translation in French, occasionally adjusting the phrase order, trying to roughly match with the Tibetan text (3rd line). Despite the recommendation of my prof, the book is no bloody beginnerish. The author once spelt a word based on the colloquial pronunciation. (chur "cheese", correctly phyur, homophonous in most of the dialects) I got stuck on some of the harder sentences, and sorta explained them, thanks to the wonderful explanations in Essentials. Anyway, I did a full A4 sheet, corresponding to 3/4 of a page in the original book. I made a list of all the words/morphemes I didn't know (except for one that I judge may be hapax in the book) and memorized them by Iversen's method. As now I have a better knowledge of the structure of Tibetan, I tried to write a post on lang-8, with the help of Goldstein's English-Tibetan dictionary and the bilingual bod rgya tshig mdzod chen mo (Great Tibetan-Chinese Dictionary). Hope that some speakers over there would be so kind to correct my horrendous newbie language.
As it's only 01:34, I reckon it's good time to continue my language journey today, and do some Essentials and, hopefully, rGyalrong and Greek. _________________ No saves, Antonio, loke es morirse en su lingua. Es komo kedarse soliko en el silensyo kada dya ke Dyo da, komo ser sikileoso sin saver porke.
Well, I procrastinated for a while that night, and met my linguistics prof over the 'Net. He sent me a new collection of rGyalrong folk tales, glossed and translated in French. I determined to translate all this thing to Chinese, and I will append a nice grammatical sketch to make a good introduction (of the old grammar-cum-chrestomathy type) to the rGyalrong language, but struggled overnight with Chinese-language typesetting in XeLaTeX. While XeTeX had made it trivial to typeset high-quality multilingual text with OpenType, the quirks of CJK typography required me to use tailored macro packages, which required fonts et cetera. Anyway, when the dawn is about to come, I got reasonable-quality Chinese text and snoozed. I'd make the translation later.
Didn't do anything of value Thursday, save for reading leisurely the Great Tibetan-Chinese Dictionary. This has a little purpose apart from reviewing words I know: as this is a dictionary with explanations in Chinese AND Tibetan, I can familiarize myself with Tibetan grammatical terms (present, past ...) and "scholarly" expressions ("is the same as", "etc.", "vide"...).
Friday I waked up early but had not got out of my bed. Instead, I browsed the Tibetan-Chinese Dictionary, tried to read a little of the rGyalrong texts and listened to Lesson 3 of an Amdo dialect primer. It's something produced in the 50s by the Communists, so they've got there a high-pitched, majestic voice reminiscent of broadcasts stereotypically belonging to the Cultural Revolution period. It's pretty dull as lessons, consisting mainly of spelling aloud:
ka kɯɣɯ kɯ!
ka + i (gi-gu) = ki
ཀ + ཨི = ཀི
ka ɕamtɕɨ kɯ!
ka + u (zhabs-kyu) = ku
ཀ + ཨུ = ཀུ
ka ⁿɖɤŋɣi ki!
ka + e ('greng-bu) = ke
ཀ + ཨེ = ཀེ
ka narʊ kʊ!
ka + o (na-ro) = ko
ཀ + ཨོ = ཀོ
Note that in Amdo dialect, Written Tibetan "i" and "u" are pronounced alike, as [ɯ], while "e" and "o" are closed to [i] and [u] (actually somewhat like [e] and [o]).
I went to CRLAO the afternoon to read some linguistic things, not actually learning any language.
Post about today later, see you. _________________ No saves, Antonio, loke es morirse en su lingua. Es komo kedarse soliko en el silensyo kada dya ke Dyo da, komo ser sikileoso sin saver porke.
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