Sorely delayed post

I really need to get in the habit of taking the pen and paper notes and getting stuff on-line.

Old Persian is finished and as far as I'm concerned, if I can read the Bisotun inscription, I'm good.

Old Persian has been a remarkable resource in helping with Avestan and Sanskrit. Sanskrit has taken priority over Avestan because it is easier to start with the highly regularized Classical Sanskrit and move backwards to Vedic, rather than start with Avestan and move forward in time.

Chapter 8 of Teach Yourself Sanskrit has been done, as well as chapters 1-2 of the Vedic Reader.

Avestan has been relegated to "during conference calls" reading, but is still on the horizon.

Attic Greek has been done to chapter 3. Wheelock's Latin has been done to chapter 2. Old English to chapter 4.

It's amazing how the languages all converge the farther back in time you go.

I have two volumes of a Middle Persian course, but Pahlavi is a pain in the ass orthographically and the language is similar enough to Modern Persian that I don't want to bother with it right now.

Speaking of Modern Persian, I highly recommend Lambton over Thackston because Lambton has a key. This, despite the fact that the book is pretty damn out of date.

The old 1950's Teach Yourself Greek book is better than the modern one because of its "Adventures with a Lion" comic.

Non-IE languages: Xhosa is on the back burner and Ancient Sumerian is up to chapter 11 (very nice go-to-bed reading). Memorizing the glyphs is hard but the grammar itself is trivially easy.

status

I'm terrible about updating this blog (not as terrible as some), but here is a quick status:

• Old Persian has been completed to lesson 13 (out of 20; the last few "lessons" are just texts to translate) and temporarily paused. We have covered everything except the aorist or the perfect (though the perfect is easily deducible from Farsi and Sanskrit), but can do most if not all of the Bisotun inscription. We'll be picking up Old Persian at the next meeting to compare to Avestan.

• Young Avestan has been done to lesson 10. This one is very painful because of the incredibly variant orthography and various morpho/phonological changes. Two weeks ago, we decided to put that on hold and start Old (Gathic) Avestan, because it's more regular with the spelling. We're using the Young Avestan lesson guide as a supplement to the Old Avestan lessons, and will tackle it afterward.[*]

• Old Avestan has been significantly easier. We are on lesson 2, which covers stuff we haven't even got to yet in Old Avestan (such as instrumental and ablative cases and prosody), and are chugging along fairly well. It is slow going as the Gathic Avestan lessons are transcribed, and we are converting it back to the Avestan script. My comprehension of Gathic Avestan has been helped incredibly by the ...

• Sanskrit that I've been doing in my spare time. Here, the issues of prosody and word order have been better understood because the Sanskrit course explains why they are the way they are, and what circumstances justify fronting in a sentence. It also explains the origin of the split ergativity in Hindi/Punjabi as being a remnant of the instrumental case: rather than saying "Rama did X", one would say "By Rama X was done." What this means is that in modern Hindi/Punjabi, the verb in a past tense statement agrees with the object rather than the subject, making it behave in an ergative-absolutive manner. Speaking of ergative-absolutive languages, I've been reading ...

• Sumerian before bed every night (believe me, it's a great way to knock yourself out). It's slow going to recognize the symbols, so in terms of reading Sumerian in cuneiform, I know maybe twenty words, but in terms of crafting sentences and such in Roman script, I'm on lesson four (vocabulary of maybe eighty to a hundred words).

Things that remain on the horizon:

I am currently brushing up on my Modern Persian (for unrelated reasons). I figured it would be a good opportunity to pick up Middle Persian, which is much closer to the modern than the old form. Thanks to Google Books, I found a couple books and printed them out, only to find out that there are two ways to write Middle Persian:

• Pahlavi, which is the most godawfully insufficient script in the history of mankind;
• Pazend, which is basically the Avestan script plus an "L".

Unfortunately, the book is primarily Pahlavi, which makes it something I'm not going to study until I knock out the other languages. Here, the language itself is simple, but the orthography is a nightmare. Note the overlaps in sounds for each letter. This doesn't even factor in the ligatures and the fact that a lot of words are spelled in their Aramaic equivalent but pronounced in their Persian form (for example, we write "i.e." for "id est" but say "that is")

In addition, I've got a copy of Wheelock's Latin and a borrowed Greek textbook. The Greek will be tacked on to the end of every Avestan study lesson, so we expect slow going; the plus is that Greek is much easier than a lot of the other languages (and the tonality of Greek is very similar to the tonality of Avestan and Sanskrit). The Latin is at present bathroom reading, and I don't expect much to come of it; but my knowledge of Greco-Latin roots and derivates, as well as a working knowledge of Spanish and the languages mentioned above, will make it easier.

Old English and German are a natural pairing to learn together, and they're both at lesson 4 - that is something I've been reading when sick of the other languages. I want to knock the Indo-Iranian languages out of the ballpark before I try the Germanic ones.

Xhosa and Zulu have been skimmed through for the first few lessons. The Zulu CDs are helpful in the pronunciation of aspirate versus nonaspirate stops - useful for Sanskrit, but the structure of the language is so alien to an Indo-European speaker that I'm waiting to finish most of the Indo-European languages before I try this. Or, I can alternate one of these languages with Sumerian as a before-bedtime reading.

Things this blog is owed:

1. A Google Books Avestan dictionary;
2. A consonantal sandhi chart;
3. Declension charts for Avestan, OP, Sanskrit;
4. homework answers that aren't in the Skjaervo answer key?
   

[*] really, as courses go, the Old Avestan should be given first due to its incredible similarity to Sanskrit. A student can study Sanskrit, then Old Avestan, then Young Avestan, then Old Persian, and get a clearer understanding of the continuum. From Old Persian one can derive cognates with Greek, Latin, etc.

checksumerian

The Sumerian language is rather interesting. It has a high number of homophones (as deduced by co-translations with Akkadian), and one of the suspicions is that it was at least partially a tonal language like Chinese.

Another interesting feature of Sumerian is that it is an ergative-absolutive languages. That is to say that the subject of an intransitive verb (i.e., "Bob sleeps") and the object of a transitive verb ("Bob kisses Jane") are treated the same, as they are not the agent of an action. subject of a transitive verb ("Bob kisses Jane") is marked with the ergative case. This is different from most languages, called nominative-accusative language, where Bob is treated the same because he is the subject of both sentences.

But the thing about Sumerian that I find the most interesting is that it appears to have a checksum at the end of each sentence. Here is generally how the language is structured:

[Noun Phrase].[case marker] ... [Noun Phrase].[case marker] ... (etc) ... [Verb Phrase]

A Noun Phrase is a noun and its qualifiers (adjectives, possessives, etc.) For example, "my green house" is a noun phrase. Cases in general can be dative ("for X"), ablative ("from X"), locative ("at X"), terminative ("to X"), ergative ("agent of X") etc.

What is the interesting part is the verb phrase. The verb phrase consists of the following particles, in this order:

- a term that indicates the general mood of the sentence (indicative, subjunctive, optative)
- another term that people aren't entirely sure about. One theory is that it has something to do with deixis (near/far in space, near/far in time, near/far in social stature, etc.) It isn't translated, usually, because no one knows what it exactly means.
- Another set of terms that is a cross-reference the previous cases. It is wholly redundant and always occurs in a certain order (e.g., dative first). It essentially serves as a checksum for the previous noun phrases.
- Another term that indicates the relationship of the agent (causer of action) to the patient (the recipient of the action): animate/inanimate, 1st/2nd/3rd person, etc.
- The verb.

This checksum interests me, because I have a personal hunch that it be related to the number of homophones in the language. For example, "e" means "Palace" and "e" also is the marker of the ergative case. So the phrase lugal-e e mu-un-du means "The king built the palace". (mu-un-du is the verb phrase.)

The two "e" in a row can be problematic without a checksum at the end ("the "un"). It could be a tonal difference, or it could be resolved with a checksum to say "yes, there was a palace, and it also was the recipient of an action of being built."

I wonder if any other languages have similar checksums.

an interesting observation about ergativity

Ergative languages like Sumerian, if translated as literally into English as possible, would sound much like Bizarro from Superman.