Confessions of a language addict's Blog

The Joys of the eReader

G Barto — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 00:39:21 +0000

In the past, I’ve written about using your MP3 player for listening to lots of content and shuffling it around. But the longer I use my Nook, the more convinced that there’s something new and even more incredible out there. I’m not referring to the apps that you can get, either. Rather, it’s that an eReader provides an especially nice way of shuffling written content.

I’ve long advocated using multiple texts or study tools in learning a language. But in the old days, this meant a stack of books with bookmarks and a notebook to the side. With the eReader/tablet, though, your reader will remember where you left off with regular books while PDF apps like ezPDF will remember where you were in your PDF file, which you can read through just like a book.

There’s one other nifty thing out there these days: PrintToPDF. I use Firefox, and so have installed the PrintToPDF plugin, though comparable options exist for most browsers. The neat thing about this is that it allows you to go to a set of web lessons, print them to PDF and dump them on your eReader, thus providing that content when you’re not on wifi and remembering where you were reading the next time you pull it up.

If you’re looking for you next investment for language learning, I’d suggest the Nook Tablet or the Kindle Fire. This will enable you to carry around several books for your study and keep track of how far you’ve gotten with them for little effort beyond the occasional printing and syncing of files.

Start learning Babylonian Now!

G Barto — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 03:34:32 +0000

I’ve written a little bit on this page about the East Semitic languages of Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian. There are some wonderful books out there to start learning for around $20 or $30, notably Marcus and Caplice (and Worthington, if the grammar is your interest). But you might want to start for free. In which case, I recommend the Akkadian Lessons at Knowledge and Power’s Cuneiform Revealed website. The lessons are short and simple, and there are sample texts to work through on your own as you work through the lessons. Two warnings: The free lessons require you to work through them with less hand-holding than you get from Caplice. And they are in an older font, not the carefully worked version of Neo-Assyrian that predominates in academic publishing. (You will need to download the display font; instructions are at the website.) That said, transitioning between Babylonian and Assyrian fonts is not as difficult as some make it out to be and this is a great way to be able to say that you read a bit of Hammurabi’s Code without an excess of effort or a large investment.

Where writing fails

G Barto — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 01:06:21 +0000

I wrote earlier about the problems of deciphering Akkadian, going from transliteration to normalization to translation. And you run into similar problems with Sumerian. Of course, if you want to capture the sound of Mandarin, you are left with pin yin, which fails to distinguish homophones that are clearly marked in the hanzi. Finally, there’s the perennial problem of bough, cough and enough. But even in a language with regular phonetic spelling like Spanish, problems arise. And with good reason. How we make language and how we interpret it differs.

In his Manual of Sumerian, Hayes talks about the difference between phonetic and morphological transcription. That is, when turning the Sumerian characters into a Latinized notation for the sake of organizing your thoughts on what represents what, is it better to capture the morphemes – the units of meaning – or the phonemes – the units of sound? Is a compromise possible? And if so, what?

To turn the question into English, let’s take a phrase:

I am going to go to the zoo tomorrow.

I’m gonna go to the zoo tomorrow.

Aym guhnuh gohtuhthuh zoo t’morrah.

The first of these is a morphological transcription: It captures the elements of meaning. The last is a phonetic transcription of what was said. The middle is a compromise: It clearly breaks out most of the morphemes and the one place where it runs things together is sort of an official misspelling. Which is best? Unless you like to read aloud, the first or second is far more convenient. It means that you can see what units are being put together and it assures that people with different accents will write the same thing. This makes writing a trusty way of communicating meaning, but not a trusty way of communicating speech.

There is something useful to be gleaned here: What makes the Cuneiform languages so hard to decipher is that there’s not a good balance between their representation of morphemes and phonemes. But though they are an extreme, they point to a problem even with a language like Spanish: To truly understand the spoken tongue and produce it requires a sort of normalization where sounds run together in order to figure out where one word ends and the next begins and just what the endings and beginnings of those words are. Getting at home with your language, then, is going to require going beyond text and trying to get a sense of how your language sounds in your head and coming off your tongue if you truly want a feel for the language you’re learning.

Listening to the dead; talking to computers

G Barto — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 22:00:49 +0000

In the past few months, I’ve taken an interest in early Semitic languages, mentioned in the post below. One of the most interesting aspects of studying languages like Babylonian is the concept of normalization. What this means is that after you get done transliterating the phonetic syllables, you start figuring out how the transliteration corresponds to a standardized reading of the language. Take the word “nertam,” the accusative of “nertum” (murder). In the first law from the Code of Hammurabi, it is written ne-er-ut, with ut having an alternative reading “tam.” So a polished transliteration is ne-er-tam. You still have to run this together, though, to get “nertam,” which is the way you write the form in a normalized transcription.

I find a peculiar relationship between normalizing Babylonian and writing computer code. In both cases, you’re taking an imperfect human notation and converting it to something standardized. It’s just that with normalization, you’re making something more readable for people, starting with you so that you can do the translation!

Incidentally, the post title mentions listening to the dead. Pretty spooky, I know! Actually, though, there’s a site where you can listen to and follow along with a selection of hymns, excerpts from Gilgamesh and more, read by Assyriologists taking their best shot at what the language sounded like. I recommend Doris Prechel’s reading of the Hymn to Ishtar. Here is a link for the recordings.

Stumbling into the Semitic languages

G Barto — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 21:25:57 +0000

In the past few months, worn out on old language paths, I’ve experimented with some new ones. I’ve learned a little bit of Vietnamese – mostly enough to apologize for not understanding, but also to order a beer – and have played a bit with Hochdeutsch (standard German) and Swiss German, following on Alsatian. And then, having searched for a few things for reasons I don’t recall, I received an Amazon recommendation for Teach Yourself Complete Babylonian. The whole idea was just so weird I had to find out more. And in the past few months I have.

One of the strange things about taking up the ancient Eastern Semitic languages is how resources run together. Teach Yourself Complete Babylonian, for example, covers not only Old and Standard Babylonian, but gives hints on how to use what you’ve learned to work through Assyrian texts. And as you start looking into it more, you find out that if you really want to learn about Old Babylonian, you go for things like the Manual of Akkadian, the Introduction to Akkadian and the Handbook of Akkadian. The oldest form of the language, you see, was Akkadian, which yielded Babylonian and Assyrian, but there’s not a lot of Akkadian left so all these books actually cover Old Babylonian and Standard Babylonian. Babylonian was, by the way, the language of the Code of Hammurabi, the first written law code, as well as an early version of the epic of Gilgamesh, with a flood story preceding the Bible’s by centuries.

Part of studying Babylonian is learning the cuneiform, the funny wedge writing you sometimes see on old clay tablets. It’s horrible to read, but it may well be the origin of most modern alphabets. Even if not, it’s how the Sumerians, who developed it, wrote things down, including the oldest Gilgamesh epic. It was used by the Akkadians, thereafter. And eventually, it was picked up by the Hittites. This makes it the oldest writing system of which we have evidence, the oldest writing system for Semitic languages of which we have evidence and the oldest writing system for Indoeuropean languages of which we have evidence!

A few tips on learning the Akkadian and related Eastern Semitic languages (which are now extinct): 1) Don’t. 2) If you must, start with the first 6 chapters of Teach Yourself Babylonian so that when you get into transliterating and making sense of cuneiform texts, you know what is going on. 3) If you make it through the first 6 chapters of Teach Yourself Babylonian, take a shot at Marcus’ Manual of Akkadian, where you’ll dive headfirst into Old Babylonian texts.

One of the things that has most surprised me in this latest pursuit is how much my pitiful store of Arabic has helped. I would not have expected, after a week or two of Babylonian, to find myself staring at a vocabulary list and thinking that the Arabic maliki yom ad-din (King of the day of Judgement) could probably be sharru sha umm dinim (with the last two elements being the same). And of course there are the obvious ones like bitum (house – Arabic bayt, Hebrew beth) and kalbum (dog – Arabic kalb, Hebrew kelev).

I don’t have any plans to become a scholar of the Eastern Semitic languages, but it’s been an interesting detour that’s give some measure of insight into what was being written about, and how it was written about, in the cradle of civilization. Fun stuff.

Heading toward a new year, with new addictions

G Barto — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 21:00:15 +0000

As I mentioned some time ago, the ability to update to my home site from blogger went away. Since then, I’d been updating by hand. But the updates have fallen by the wayside since I don’t often find the patience to post there. So this is where new Confessions posts will be found.