/lit/ - Literature

After I finish up with the standard classical languages and German, maybe French too, I plan to learn Classical Arabic and eventually (much later) Sanskrit. But all that really concerns me there is time investment.

What really tears me up is that I'll almost certainly never learn Classical Chinese. It'st he most inaccessible canon when it comes to translation, and arguably the most expansive, and I'll never be able to even look at it except through five hundred thousand subtle layers of orientalism and similar distortions. I feel like I'll never be able to get rid of that uncanny valley effect that I have when reading East Asian cultural/literary stuff. Plus, ,my long, long, LONG-term research interests are in comparative historiography and philosophy of history, and the Chinese tradition is a major branch. Sucks ass.

>>4822428
You maybe should consider "occitan"

>>4822452
> I'll almost certainly never learn Classical Chinese.

I feel you. At lest langue d'oc is not so different from roman languages.
But I see you're on a laguage-learning streak. Props for that. I'm in a situation where I've lost whatever little Latin I ever knew.

>>4822470
Isn't that one of the language of Oc (cause I heard it is rather like a group of languages) ? Some people still speak it, I think, but centralised education in the nineteenth century made sure it would not survive as a main language. Anyway, I'll consider your suggestion if I ever have time, which is unlikely.

I'm learning Irish right now, I really enjoy it and love the language, but there's a niggling part of me that feels I'm wasting my time.
Feels ambivalent

Old Norse

I've actually started learning it, I'm just waiting for the semester to end before I continue

Langue d'Oc = group of languages from southwestern france

Langue d'oil = from the north, norman, walloon, parisian french

Classical chinese isnt a spoken language, its a written one. Unless you meant old chinese, which precedes middle chinese (300s AD-1000sAD) .

>>4822548
Why ? Ireland has plenty of modern writers who wrote in English (and sometimes French). It's about time the old tradition of Irish songwriting is put back under the spotlight, in the original.

>>4822428

Maltese. It's such a fascinating language with an incredible history.

Closest living relative is Tunisian Arabic. Evolved from Siculo-Arabic. Grammatically and in terms of a good chunk of vocab it is definitely still a Semitic language, although it's now written in a Latin alphabet.

Most of the rest of the vocab is of Italian, and to a lesser extent, English, origin.

I know a lot of French and some basic Modern Standard Arabic, and reading Maltese I could get a general feel for what was going on.

I'd also love to learn an Australian Aboriginal language; one of the ones that still have a decent number of speakers preferably. Maybe one of the Western Desert dialects like Pitjantjatjarra.

I'll have to completely conquer French, Arabic, and Thai, and then move on to Bahasa Indonesia and perhaps Russian before I even consider moving on to these though.

Occitan would be pretty fucking dope to learn. I spent some time in the south of France a few years back and the sense of a distinct culture and pride for it seemed to be waning swiftly.

If you're worried about Occitan not having enough native speakers you could try Catalan? They are closely related (though not mutually intelligible I believe) and there are still millions of native speakers around as far as I know.

inglesh

Pictish

>tfw no attestation
Why ;_;

In terms of attested languages
>Sumerian, Old Egyptian, Akkadian
The only thing that's holding me back from two of these is that I haven't yet found an exhaustive list of cuneiform symbols and their meanings.

>>4823292

Aw yiss

Mother

Fucking

Sumerian.

Do you have an opinion on its classification? I don't buy this language isolate bullshit. It must be related to some extant family, however distantly.

My money is on some sister group to Dravidian.

>>4823302

No idea.
I'm thinking Caucasian, seeing as how that's supposedly where the people themselves came from.

>>4823373

I've never heard that before, interesting. Any links?

>>4822428
Occitan for me as well. Funny...

Maybe Tibetan as well.

>>4823399

John Bengtson has written about this ("Sumerian - A Dene-Caucasian language"), that the Sumerian language may be a relative of the Dene-Caucasian languages, but it's not been totally unchallenged.

Also, kind of unrelated, but there's an idea that the Sumerian flood myth may have come from the fact that the Sumerians were driven off of their land in the Caucasus by the flooding of what's not the Black Sea region.

>>4823428

Has an Urheimat for the Dene-Caucasian family even been guessed at yet? Bengston tentatively placed Sumerian in the macrofamily but I don't remember there being any judgement as to which branch Sumerian was closest to, let alone North Caucasian specifically. I haven't read up on this in a while though, could be wrong.

Couldn't the Sumerian flood myth equally come from the flooding of the Persian Gulf at the end of the last glacial period? Anything specifically tying Sumerian culture to the Black Sea region? Sorry I don't know much about ancient Sumer, I've never had much of a chance to study the ancient Near East past the Natufians sadly.

>>4823478

I'm not sure, man. I just know it's been tenuously placed there because of some similarities. I think Bengtson gives it its own branch.

It could have, yeah. The Mesopotamian rivers were much more volatile to flooding (unlike the Nile or Indus valleys which you could pretty much set your watch to), which had a disastrous effect in an area where the land is in many places below the level of the rivers. I read that the gradient of the alluvial plain is something like 6cm/KM, so basically it's flat as fuck.
Some more simply chalk the flood story up to people saying "hey the flood this year was bad, but once upon a time there was a flood that drowned the whole world!" which grew into its familiar form today.
I think some inspired wit saw Bengtson's classification, and saw the Black Sea deluge hypothesis and made a guess as to their connection.
This is of course assuming that the Sumerians were the first to come up with this myth. They were just the first to put it in writing. For all we know it was already there when they came into the valley.

>>4823525

Thanks for the info dude. I've heard flood myths are nearly universal. I always thought it was linked to the many incidences of permanent inundation globally (e.g. Black Sea littoral, Persian Gulf, Doggerland, Sunda and Sahul shelves) after the end of the last glacial period, with memory of the events passed down orally.

If it is true, it would be pretty cool to have this ancestral knowledge (if garbled over countless retellings) of such an ancient global event passed right down to today. Says something about the staying power of oral traditions.

>>4823556

No problem man.
Yeah, it's pretty cool to think we've got stories from so long ago.

>>4823556
It's interesting for me to imagine how such storytelling has remained through countless retellings.

I am similarly interested in religions in such a lens. Was Abraham trying to remove our animalistic element through ritualistic genital mutilation? I wonder about such things.

English is Sino-Tibetan in origin

>>4823588

Now that is an interesting perspective. Any ideas about why genital mutilation would've been interpreted as expunging something animal in humans?

The Hebrews only practiced male circumcision, right? Is it to do with sex drive being seen as 'base' or animalistic? Perhaps the more obvious differentiation of the scrotum and the penis in other mammals (especially the domesticated mammals they had at the time) compared to humans?

Many disparate groups traditionally practiced male circumcision. It has been a part of many Australian Aboriginal 'coming of age' manhood initiation rituals, so perhaps male circumcision was an incredibly ancient cultural innovation. Or perhaps there's something about it which leads it to develop independently in various otherwise isolated cultures.

I'm making it up as I go here.

>>4823603
i believe you

I want to learn Latin
But is it worth it? I don't want to waste my time learning it and then realising that I can't really use it or that I could read the same in english/german/french

Has anyone experience with this? Should I learn a "dead" language?

>>4823670

>learning languages purely for utility
Stop.

Learn it if you want to.
It's always worth it, bro.
I'm learning it even though I know I'll probably never need/use it outside of reading non-translated Roman literature.

>>4823603

checks out

>>4822548

>Tá a fhios agam go mothú, mo fhear gorm.

In all likelihood, I've probably mangled the above sentence... but I know that feel, Anon.

I've always been keen on the Celtic cultures of late medieval and Early-Modern Britain, on both sides of the Straits of Moyle (esp. the Lordship of the Isles, Catholic recusancy and Jacobitism), and I was really excited at the chance to study Gaelic at university. It wasn't nearly as difficult as I'd anticipated (fuck initial mutations, though), and I really enjoyed myself, but when I started to get deeper into things the diplomatics aspect totally shut me down. The manuscript sources I was keen on (esp. the Book of the Dean of Lismore), the texts I was studying the language with the intention of some-day reading, were brain-throttlingly horrible; not only did you have your usual challenges (chancery-hand, transcription errors, lacunae...) but almost the entire codex was rendered phonetically, by scribes who understood more Scots and Latin than they did Gaelic.

After a year of determined study, I decided that I was simply not cut out to be a Celticist; the ratio of bullshit to reward for the things I was interested in pursuing wasn't tolerable.

I don't regret my time with Irish, as it jump-started my confidence in language-acquisition, but I have no illusions about its utility, even as a hopeful medievalist.

Best of luck in your studies, Anon.

We’re all gonna make it.

where i live people still speak occitan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaJEpA_IODE

>>4823302
>>4823373
>>4823428
>>4823478
>>4823525
>>4823556

This, ladies and gentlemen, is why /lit/ will forever be the best board on this site.

I love you guys.

>>4823764
>Tá a fhios agam go mothú, mo fhear gorm.
you got the nigger part pretty much right.

>>4823783

It was one of the first things I learned, lol. Cracked open my dictionary for the first time, and there it was.

Providential.

Why do you people want to waste your time learning useless languages only spoken by very small populations or even dead languages?

>>4823797
we're on 4chan, it's not like we have anything better to do

>>4823797
>2014
>posting in /lit/
>wanting to learn something that is actually useful
>shiggy diggy

>>4823792
too add to the oddness of the colours, most people would use mo dhuine gorm because the whole language sucks at discrimination. tuigim duit is how one would express sympathy, because fios generally relates to learned information.

>>4823797
Why do mathematicians waste their time with useless puzzles?

>>4823821

Is my syntax otherwise intelligible? I wasn't sure about the vocative, and I was bracing for utter ridicule with my (mis)handling of the object...

It's been three years since I've studied the language in earnest, and I was working from memory and a pocket-dictionary.

>pic abhorrent to my historical sympathies, but still funny

>>4823859
the vocative "a" you don't need to use if that's what you're talking about; a dhuine gorm you're only going to use what calling a nigger to you and i don't see that working well. the first part of the sentence was unintelligible- try to verb your nouns more (mothaigh if it appears in the sentence would replace bi, or replace the object following braith). the syntax is definitely hard to pick up, but with a direct translation it is more so because of verbal nouns and prepositions often switching the subject and object.

>>4823768
Where do you live ocfag?

I have a book on how-to-read heiroglyphics with about twentyfive texts and an english-egyptian dictionary in the back, with pronounciations and all.

What I'm going to do first is translate Ramses' speech in Civilization V into proper Egpytian, not shitty Arabic with an Egyptian accent

>>4823797

I would love to speak dead languages because it is the best way to read messages in the bottles thrown at the river of time. And who knows, maybe in the future, when we can travel to the past, I would be allowed to do so, because of my knowledge of, say, old latin; or even aramaic.

>>4824336
>when we can travel to the past

>>4824351

If theoretical physics are a logic-mathematical model of reality, and we get to develop all it's implications until the last consequence, time travel will occur, or, to be precise, has already happened.

Don't you speculate with it?

I already speak spanish and english, I would love to learn Italian, it's beautiful and it isn't too hard for a romance speaker. I don't have time though...

>>4824454
And after italian, latin would be easier?

>>4824336
>to read messages in the bottles thrown at the river of time.

I lol'd 10/10

>>4824475

Listen to this song, with that sentence in your mind.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLFF2P8fInI

>>4824336
I know what you mean. I recommend reading through old newspapers to get the same feeling.

>>4824540
Why not?

>>4824548
no time while shitposting on 4chan

>>4824351
... did they use a stunt double for the clip of George swinging?

>>4824548
Man, I don't even know how to spell Eyjafjallajokull anymore, you want me to be able to learn the whole language?

>>4824488
that song instantly came to my mind as well.

Babylonian has intrigued me for years. I heard a sound bite a few years ago of spoken Babylonian and it was incredible to listen to.

>>4824694
Holy crap this is awesome
http://www.soas.ac.uk/baplar/recordings/

>>4824733
>http://www.soas.ac.uk/baplar/recordings/
It is indeed. Thank you Raphael.

>>4824560
Is this the teacher?

>>4824766
I wish...

>>4824694

Hopeful (late-antique/medieval) Iranologist, frantically completing an essay on Achaemenid Babylonia here.

Akkadian is badass and understudied from the point of view of comparative-Semitics, and the cultures that spoke it or kept their records in it are G.O.A.T. tier.

It's got to be approached with caution, though.

Some scholars are lucky enough to harness their knowledge of Akkadian to high-flying academic and curatorial careers of philological and archaeological bliss, while others languish as un(der)paid, researchers and archivists, destined to spend decades agonizing over fragmentary logs of the abnormal bowel-movements of a family of temple-janitors in Nippur. [Toppest of keks owed to the Anon who originally came up with the temple-janitor example; I pass on your wisdom with gladness]

Captcha: civilization rovirer

>>4824788

Pic is:

77 (ii 33) [idke anantam nandur?] qabalšu
78 (ii 34) [tamḫāruš idušš]u iqūlū ilū ḫuršāni
79 (ii 35) [...] ˹ina˺ šād Anzîm ilum ittanmar
80 (ii 36) īruḫšu[m-ma] Anzûm irūbaššu
81 (ii 37) ikṣuṣ kīma ūmim melemmašu šadî uštalwi

http://www.soas.ac.uk/baplar/recordings/the-epic-of-anz-old-babylonian-version-from-susa-tablet-ii-lines-1-83-read-by-claus-wilcke.html

Am I right?

>>4824812

I've got an unhealthily elaborate running joke with a friend of mine about Anzu/Imdugud, lol.

My pic just happens to be a randomly chosen less-than-3-mb image from my Assyriology/Sumerology folder; great recording though.

[Anzu is a nearly inexaustible source of lulz; Ninurta's acclamation as "who darkens the sash" in the opening lines of tablet one of the standard recension literally means "moistener of panties". No link to the transliteration, I'm afraid; for the truly determined, there's a volume from the Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus, but the translated text and accompanying sheepish footnote is in Stephanie Dalley's OUP anthology.]

>>4824881

Well you made me somewhat laugh too. No wonder Anu wants him dead. He must be getting all the ladies, including

5 šāt mēliṣim ru'āmam labšat
6 za'nat inbī mīqiam u kuzbam
7 ištar mēliṣim ru'āmam labšat
8 za'nat inbī mīqiam u kuzbam

http://www.soas.ac.uk/baplar/recordings/ammi-ditnas-hymn-to-itar-read-by-doris-prechel.html

Hmmm?

>>4824899

Ishtar is the very definition of ratchet.
I can never forgive her for killing Enkidu.

Oh, FUCKFUCKFUCK

Time's rapidly running out for me; I've got to get back to Muhammed Dandamaev, Amélie Kuhrt and Nabonidus.

Wish me luck, brethren/sistren.

This has been a good thread so far; here's hoping it survives the night.

I want to learn old Arabic or just modern Arabic even. Maybe not weird or obscure but definitely not particularly useful. Not a history nut that would actually be motivated to dig into old books, not a Muslim either. It just looks and sounds incredible personally.

>person coughing up flem while making sex noises
>throat gurgles with vowels
I can understand why people think both of these but I'm still attracted to the language. I've contemplated being a Muslim several times in my life just because the language is so overwhelming, can't do it though because the religion's got too many problems. Still it fucking freaks me out.

And it's phonetic so big plus.

I really want to learn Basque and Quechua, and might start this summer. Just out of pure linguistic interest.

Bumping in the hopes of further enlightening discussion of philology and language-acquisition.

And Franku-Sama's forthcoming album.

>NYYYYYEEEESSSSS

>>4826249
theres barely such a thing as 'old' and 'modern' arabic. classical arabic is still used to this day as a written language and the spoken language differs from country to country in extreme form of dialects (it just takes travelling, tbh)

>>4826249
>>4828804

This. The Arabic they try to teach you in any University is pretty much the same Arabic that people were writing with a thousand years ago. It's the same Arabic used in writing and formal speech today. Spoken dialects are mostly pretty close and easy.