Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Monday, April 26, 2010
Catalan
The International Day of the Book falls on the same day (April 23) as the feast for Saint George (San Jordi), who happens to be the patron of Catalonia. I decided this was as good time as any to start "Genesis" in Catalan. I happened to have an Argentina-Spanish movie scheduled for that night at Chicago's Latino Film Festival. Though the movie wasn't very good, it had a passable story about love and escape in the Patagonian Andes.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
The "Vendidad" but not really in Avestan
"The Vendidad" is a text of several dozen pages, written in Avestan, an ancient language of Persian. It's a foundational text of Zoroastrianism, also known as the religion of the Parsis. I've know a few Parsis in my life, almost all were Indian citizens who were living in Delhi, although Mumbai is the main center of their religion and culture in India.
As with the Behistun inscription, there's a lot of repetition, and, as with the text from Behisturn, this helps rather than hurts the novice. But there's less repetition in the "Vendidad" and a far larger vocabulary, so, for the moment, I'm reading it in English but just playing around with some of the first verses in Avestan.
It begins, as does Genesis, with an account of Creation. This version, however, relies more on coziness and boosterism than does Genesis. There are steps in the process, just as in the Bible, but these aren't organized from day to day nor from the cosmic down to the human. The first verse tells us that Ahura Mazda (the title for God) has "made every land dear (to its people)" even in cases when that land offers no attractions to outsiders. He goes on to say he did this because otherwise all the nations of the world would have invaded the beautiful and amazing land of Iran, which, clearly, is the best in all the world.
There follows a catalogue of creation but this account doesn't move from the heavens to the earth to the life in contains, as is the case with Genesis, but from one "good land and country which I, Ahura Mazda, created" to another. All of these are lands near the home of the ancient Persians, and each seems uniformly pleasant. Variety is provided in the actions of Angra Mainyu, described as "full of death" who at each stage, makes a counter creation: locuts, sin, pride, disease, unbelief, the "Unnatural sin".
As with the Behistun inscription, there's a lot of repetition, and, as with the text from Behisturn, this helps rather than hurts the novice. But there's less repetition in the "Vendidad" and a far larger vocabulary, so, for the moment, I'm reading it in English but just playing around with some of the first verses in Avestan.
It begins, as does Genesis, with an account of Creation. This version, however, relies more on coziness and boosterism than does Genesis. There are steps in the process, just as in the Bible, but these aren't organized from day to day nor from the cosmic down to the human. The first verse tells us that Ahura Mazda (the title for God) has "made every land dear (to its people)" even in cases when that land offers no attractions to outsiders. He goes on to say he did this because otherwise all the nations of the world would have invaded the beautiful and amazing land of Iran, which, clearly, is the best in all the world.
There follows a catalogue of creation but this account doesn't move from the heavens to the earth to the life in contains, as is the case with Genesis, but from one "good land and country which I, Ahura Mazda, created" to another. All of these are lands near the home of the ancient Persians, and each seems uniformly pleasant. Variety is provided in the actions of Angra Mainyu, described as "full of death" who at each stage, makes a counter creation: locuts, sin, pride, disease, unbelief, the "Unnatural sin".
Friday, April 16, 2010
Behistun Inscription
Darius, King of Kings, was responsible for a huge trilingual inscription placed up high on a rocky outcropping. He ordered this carved 2,500 years ago, and the letters are still legible. The problem was that until the 19th century, they were legible but unreadable. Of course, when he had them carved, people could read them and although his choice of languages now seems obscure, at the time using Babylonian, Old Persian, and Elamite made great sense. And having three versions of the same next not only communicated his message to a wide audience back then but, fortuitously, made it possible to reconstruct these languages a hundred a fifty years ago.
I first read about this inscription, and the adventure of their modern study, in the early 1990s when I had little else to do many evenings in Madurai but browse the Britannica. An Englishman adventurer got a young Kurdish boy to climb up the rocks and make a copy, a rubbing I believe, of the inscription.
Last year, I downloaded a version of the Old Persian inscription, but in romanized transcription, and read the text from the first two columns. This year, I succeeded in reading the entire inscription. It's just about 3,000 words long and because of the constant repetition, there are only about 350 different words in the entire thing. Much of it runs thus: "Darius says, 'I am a king'...'and he revolted and told lies to the people and they went to him'...'and I with the aid of Ahuramazda I thoroughly smote him'.
But, just as with religious texts, this repetition, no matter how boring when read in a language one knows well, is very useful for those who are still just learning. I've read about Darius's ancestry, the rebellions against him, his devotion to God, the way he cut the tongues from rebel leaders and then crucified them.
Henry Rawlinson's birthday is April 11, so I've decided in my Annual Chrestomathy to devote April 11 to re-reading this text.
I first read about this inscription, and the adventure of their modern study, in the early 1990s when I had little else to do many evenings in Madurai but browse the Britannica. An Englishman adventurer got a young Kurdish boy to climb up the rocks and make a copy, a rubbing I believe, of the inscription.
Last year, I downloaded a version of the Old Persian inscription, but in romanized transcription, and read the text from the first two columns. This year, I succeeded in reading the entire inscription. It's just about 3,000 words long and because of the constant repetition, there are only about 350 different words in the entire thing. Much of it runs thus: "Darius says, 'I am a king'...'and he revolted and told lies to the people and they went to him'...'and I with the aid of Ahuramazda I thoroughly smote him'.
But, just as with religious texts, this repetition, no matter how boring when read in a language one knows well, is very useful for those who are still just learning. I've read about Darius's ancestry, the rebellions against him, his devotion to God, the way he cut the tongues from rebel leaders and then crucified them.
Henry Rawlinson's birthday is April 11, so I've decided in my Annual Chrestomathy to devote April 11 to re-reading this text.
Sidetracked by Pijin
New Guinea amazes people who've heard little about it. It's a massive island but still not a very large country. It manages, in the tropical mountains and valleys that cross the nation, to fit in about 1/5 of all the world's different languages into that space. Most of these have fewer than a thousand speakers and the largest truly indigenous language has not more than 50,000 speakers.
One fascinating part of the country is how an English-based creole has developed in the past century and a half. A pidgin language is an incomplete language that develops when adults are thrown together with no shared language. They act as survivors must and strip most of their own languages of the grammar and vocabulary and often borrow heavily from a single language. In plantations, whether based on slave or free labor, the host language naturally is most often that of the overseers. In Papua New Guinea in the 19th century, this tended to be German, but after World War I, the German administrators and planters were replaced by English speakers, and that is from whence most of Tok Pisin comes.
The words aren't simply taken over whole. Some short ones undergo little change. "Talk" becomes "tok", "man" stays as "man", "car" becomes "car". These adaptations make sense since they bring English words into accord with the sound systems of the speakers own first languages. Changes also are made to the meaning of words. Most often, an English word is made to do multiple duty: as a noun and a verb and often with a wider meaning than is the case in English. "Meri" comes from "Mary" and means "woman, female, wife". "Bihain" comes from "behind" and means, variously "behind, after, later, to come after, to follow, to obey." Some of the meanings can surprise. "As" comes from "ass, arse" and means, understandably enough, "ass, arse" but also "bottom, foundation, cause, reason, beginning". In some versions of the Tok Pisin Bible, the first word is "As". Think of "In the beginning (=as), God created heaven and earth."
One of the delights of learning Tok Pisin is the ways these creative semantic adaptions can play tricks with the reader. "Manmeri" is not a mannish woman but "people", as it comes from the idea of man + woman = "people, everyone". "Bararip" comes from the Australianism "bugger up" and means "to make a mess of things, to harm, to destroy". This is the word God uses when he tells Noah he wants to destroy (bugger up) the world.
One fascinating part of the country is how an English-based creole has developed in the past century and a half. A pidgin language is an incomplete language that develops when adults are thrown together with no shared language. They act as survivors must and strip most of their own languages of the grammar and vocabulary and often borrow heavily from a single language. In plantations, whether based on slave or free labor, the host language naturally is most often that of the overseers. In Papua New Guinea in the 19th century, this tended to be German, but after World War I, the German administrators and planters were replaced by English speakers, and that is from whence most of Tok Pisin comes.
The words aren't simply taken over whole. Some short ones undergo little change. "Talk" becomes "tok", "man" stays as "man", "car" becomes "car". These adaptations make sense since they bring English words into accord with the sound systems of the speakers own first languages. Changes also are made to the meaning of words. Most often, an English word is made to do multiple duty: as a noun and a verb and often with a wider meaning than is the case in English. "Meri" comes from "Mary" and means "woman, female, wife". "Bihain" comes from "behind" and means, variously "behind, after, later, to come after, to follow, to obey." Some of the meanings can surprise. "As" comes from "ass, arse" and means, understandably enough, "ass, arse" but also "bottom, foundation, cause, reason, beginning". In some versions of the Tok Pisin Bible, the first word is "As". Think of "In the beginning (=as), God created heaven and earth."
One of the delights of learning Tok Pisin is the ways these creative semantic adaptions can play tricks with the reader. "Manmeri" is not a mannish woman but "people", as it comes from the idea of man + woman = "people, everyone". "Bararip" comes from the Australianism "bugger up" and means "to make a mess of things, to harm, to destroy". This is the word God uses when he tells Noah he wants to destroy (bugger up) the world.
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Tactics. Or is it strategy?
Once I decided to do this, I did a little math. Fifty languages in one year would mean about one reading of Genesis per week. The first foreign language in which I read Genesis in 2010 was Latin, and it took me about 5 hours, a lot longer than I'd hoped for. I was expecting that Latin, which I read fairly well, would take no more than 3 hours, and 3 hours once a week to read Genesis seemed reasonable. Five hours a week, however, would be a bigger investment of time. And this five hours was for a language I had actually studied before and in which I'd already read at least two complete books. How long would it take to read Genesis in some language that I hadn't even yet studied? Such thoughts clouded my plans back in January.
I'd very much like to carry out this silly project with no more than 3 hours per week (which means, for my purposes, 3 hours per Genesis).
But with a bit of tactical planning, I thought, and still think, I can carry this out. I've been concentrating on reading Genesis in those languages most closely connected with languages I already know. In the Romance sub-family, I decided I'd read: Latin, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Catalan, and Romanian. I'd already read the first 20 chapters in all of these except for Romanian. I then thought of other closely connected languages, each with at least one pivot language at the center, said language being one that I already know reasonably well. There's Germanic (with German) and the Indo-Iranian languages (with Hindi). Beyond that, things get a bit stickier. I used to read Turkish at an "advanced level" (using teacherese, which means I could read short stories and newspapers without much difficulty), and Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Kazakh, Uzbek, and Kyrghyz are quite close to Turkish. Just how close I've investigated by finding online versions of Genesis and comparing these with the Turkish. Doable.
The problem is that even taking all the languages I know and have known and even then relying on languages as yet unstudied but still closely related to the pivot languages
Romance (8): Latin, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, French, Romanian, Haitian Creole
Germanic (15): German, Low German, English, Middle English (Wycliffe, 1380), Old English (Aelfric), Icelandic, Old Norse, Bokmak (a kind of Norwegian), Nynorsk (another kind of Norwegian), Swedish, Danish, Dutch, Frisian, Afrikaans, Swiss German. There are also some older translations but, alas, not of Genesis. Old High German and Gothic versions of most of the New Testament exist and for parts of the old but not for the book I need this year.
Indo-Iranian (9): Hindi, Urdu, Awadhi, Nepali, Punjabi, Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Assamese. There are several other possible contenders here. Oriya isn't very different from Bengali, but the script would be a real challenge. Sinhala is more different and also with a tricky script. I could also include Kashmiri and Sindhi but know that unless they're fully vocalized, they'd be really tricky to learn. Languages written with Arabic script don't typicially show all the vowels, so reading them is hard unless you know the language well. I could manage with Urdu, which I speak, but not with Kashmiri or Sindhi. If I got more ambitious and tried to include Iranian languages, I'd pick up quite a few more: Persian, Pashto, Dari, Tadjik, Ossetian, Kurdish, Zaz...assuming that Genesis has been translated into these languages, that these translations are available online, and that I could learn enough of these languages in one week each to read Genesis. That's a lot of ifs.
Turkic (7): Turkish, Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Uzbek, Kazakh, Kyrghyz, Uigur. Maybe also Tatar, Karapalchak.
That's 39 languages I'm confident I could find translations of Genesis and in which I could read the whole book in less than 10 hours. And the more questionable languages (Kashmiri, Sinhala, Pashto, and the lot) would be 12 more. If, and it's a big if, I could get and read all these in the requisite amount of time, I'd squeak past 50. But I have major doubts about availability and feasibility.
It seems wiser to focus on some others that I know or knew, but none of these are well-connected, meaning they don't serve as pivot languages for large numbers of other languages.
Dravidian (2): Tamil, Malayalam. The other two principle literary Dravidian languages, Telugu and Kannada, alas, have a script that would be a real nuisance to learn.
Greek (2): Koine and Modern.
Korean (1):
Chinese (1):
That's 45 languages about which I'm pretty sure I could read in less than 10 hours each.
I'd very much like to carry out this silly project with no more than 3 hours per week (which means, for my purposes, 3 hours per Genesis).
But with a bit of tactical planning, I thought, and still think, I can carry this out. I've been concentrating on reading Genesis in those languages most closely connected with languages I already know. In the Romance sub-family, I decided I'd read: Latin, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Catalan, and Romanian. I'd already read the first 20 chapters in all of these except for Romanian. I then thought of other closely connected languages, each with at least one pivot language at the center, said language being one that I already know reasonably well. There's Germanic (with German) and the Indo-Iranian languages (with Hindi). Beyond that, things get a bit stickier. I used to read Turkish at an "advanced level" (using teacherese, which means I could read short stories and newspapers without much difficulty), and Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Kazakh, Uzbek, and Kyrghyz are quite close to Turkish. Just how close I've investigated by finding online versions of Genesis and comparing these with the Turkish. Doable.
The problem is that even taking all the languages I know and have known and even then relying on languages as yet unstudied but still closely related to the pivot languages
Romance (8): Latin, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, French, Romanian, Haitian Creole
Germanic (15): German, Low German, English, Middle English (Wycliffe, 1380), Old English (Aelfric), Icelandic, Old Norse, Bokmak (a kind of Norwegian), Nynorsk (another kind of Norwegian), Swedish, Danish, Dutch, Frisian, Afrikaans, Swiss German. There are also some older translations but, alas, not of Genesis. Old High German and Gothic versions of most of the New Testament exist and for parts of the old but not for the book I need this year.
Indo-Iranian (9): Hindi, Urdu, Awadhi, Nepali, Punjabi, Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Assamese. There are several other possible contenders here. Oriya isn't very different from Bengali, but the script would be a real challenge. Sinhala is more different and also with a tricky script. I could also include Kashmiri and Sindhi but know that unless they're fully vocalized, they'd be really tricky to learn. Languages written with Arabic script don't typicially show all the vowels, so reading them is hard unless you know the language well. I could manage with Urdu, which I speak, but not with Kashmiri or Sindhi. If I got more ambitious and tried to include Iranian languages, I'd pick up quite a few more: Persian, Pashto, Dari, Tadjik, Ossetian, Kurdish, Zaz...assuming that Genesis has been translated into these languages, that these translations are available online, and that I could learn enough of these languages in one week each to read Genesis. That's a lot of ifs.
Turkic (7): Turkish, Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Uzbek, Kazakh, Kyrghyz, Uigur. Maybe also Tatar, Karapalchak.
That's 39 languages I'm confident I could find translations of Genesis and in which I could read the whole book in less than 10 hours. And the more questionable languages (Kashmiri, Sinhala, Pashto, and the lot) would be 12 more. If, and it's a big if, I could get and read all these in the requisite amount of time, I'd squeak past 50. But I have major doubts about availability and feasibility.
It seems wiser to focus on some others that I know or knew, but none of these are well-connected, meaning they don't serve as pivot languages for large numbers of other languages.
Dravidian (2): Tamil, Malayalam. The other two principle literary Dravidian languages, Telugu and Kannada, alas, have a script that would be a real nuisance to learn.
Greek (2): Koine and Modern.
Korean (1):
Chinese (1):
That's 45 languages about which I'm pretty sure I could read in less than 10 hours each.
50 Languages in 50 Days??
Sometime last year, I noticed that the book of "Genesis" has 50 chapters. Since about 2007, I've used "Genesis" to help me start learning a language. For many English speakers familiar with the King James translation, this might seem odd since, with its archaic grammar (thee, thy, knoweth, etc), it seems harder than in fact it is. The sentences are generally short, the vocabulary fairly elementary and even the repetition, which can be off putting when read in one's mother tongue, comes in truly handy when learning a new language.
Last year, I realized I'd read the first 20 chapters in about 20 languages, and from this simple coincidence came an idea, at once ambitious and daft: why not read the 50 chapters in 50 languages for my 50th birthday? If I hadn't already done about half of the book in about half as many languages, I'd never have considered this, but already having accomplished one quarter of my goal (1/2 X 1/2 = 1/4), it didn't seem too crazy to try to do the whole thing.
Last year, I realized I'd read the first 20 chapters in about 20 languages, and from this simple coincidence came an idea, at once ambitious and daft: why not read the 50 chapters in 50 languages for my 50th birthday? If I hadn't already done about half of the book in about half as many languages, I'd never have considered this, but already having accomplished one quarter of my goal (1/2 X 1/2 = 1/4), it didn't seem too crazy to try to do the whole thing.
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