- 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:
- A Google Books Avestan dictionary;
- A consonantal sandhi chart;
- Declension charts for Avestan, OP, Sanskrit;
- 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.
