Grammatical tidbits

[muckefuck]

I'm kinda between languages again. Seeing Iron Ladies 2 (สตรีเหล็ก 2) got me interested enough in Thai to carry around my books for a few days, but this morning I took them out and put in my Hindi and Punjabi grammars so I could make some comparisons. Last night, I downloaded some Coptic fonts at monshu's so I could take advantage of some online lessons, and today I spent some time browsing the crappy selection of similar sites for learning Kurdish.

I don't know how much vocabulary and such I'll retain, but I'll probably remember the following:

• Punjabi, like Hindi, is split ergative. This isn't too surprising, as in general the verbal systems are very similar, just as one might expect with two such closely-related languages. So far, the most obvious contrast is a full inflected past-tense paradigm for the Punjabi auxiliary verb hoṇa, whereas Hindi prefers a participle inflected for number and gender, but not person.
• I'm more surprised to find that Kurmancî (Northern Kurdish) is also split ergative (e.g. Ez te dibînim "I see you", Tu min dibînî "You see me" vs. Min te dîtim "I saw you"), especially since Central and Southern varieties aren't. It's probably no coincidence (although difficult to say which came first) that these other varieties also merge direct and oblique pronominal forms (e.g. Central Kurdish Min to debînem "I see you").
• Thai, like Chinese, has resultative compounds, e.g. คิดไม่ออก "can't work out" (lit. "think not issue"; cf. Ch. 想不出). I've been let down in the past expecting that my study of Chinese would give me a big leg up on learning other isolating languages like Vietnamese and Thai, so it's nice to see when something does carry over.

Comments

off-topic

[niemandsrose.livejournal.com]

Hey, my browser here at the bank still won't read CJK, but it'll *totally* read Thai! Weird!

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

CJK is so special that you have download a dedicated extension for it. At least, I had to get a tech in here to help me since our insanely restrictive IT policies prevent us from even downloading fonts (thus the lack of Coptic on this machine), whereas for Thai all I had to do was tell the OS "Hey, I wanna read Thai."

Isn't it maddening how itsy-bitsy that Thai font displays? It's crazy. Given how many letters are distinguished by a subtle curlicue here or tiny coil there, I'm amazed anyone can read it.

[niemandsrose.livejournal.com]

The ability to distinguish has to be contextual, like telling the difference between l, 1, and I (whether you're using serif or sans-) or O and 0.

[pne.livejournal.com]

Isn't it maddening how itsy-bitsy that Thai font displays?

It is.

I'm amazed anyone can read [Thai text on a computer screen].

I've thought that before, too.

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

so I have a question, which has been bugging me, because I'm currently working on Dutch, Portuguese and, sporadically, Arabic.

When you 'do' a language, what level of competence do you acquire? Can you read a newspaper, translate an article, hold a conversation, or are you mostly after a cognitive model of its structure/grammar, or what? Clearly, the answer is going to be "depends on the language," but I'm trying to get a handle on your expectations.

...I promise not to immediately follow this up with a request for document translation.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

It's hard for me to get a handle on my expectations, so I'm not quite sure how to sum them up for another. I just like playing with languages. For some, like Hmong, it's quite enough to know a few facts about their phonology and grammar, maybe a phrase or two. For others, my expectations are a little greater, because I've actually got a useful purpose in mind. I really would like to understand the lyrics of all the songs I have. I realise that's a tall order for some of the languages I list, like Arabic or Mande, but others I've made some real progress on and I just need some more discipline and inspiration to push me to a level of competence commensurate with my goals.

Keep in mind also that "level of competence" is a dynamic measure; what you acquire you can also lose. I've uncovered notes that I myself have written but that I can longer comprehend completely because I've done so little with the language in question in the interim. I was well on my way to becoming conversational in Chinese this time last year, but a year off with minimal practice or study has left me struggling to regain enough to start tutoring a friend.

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

"level of competence" is a dynamic measure

Don't I know it. 15 months of no Arabic and I can hardly remember the alphabet. I've also come to the sad realisation that my active memory (the one I where I store vocabulary) has a built-in 2 language limitation: I can speak English and one other language reasonably fluently, switching back and forth, but to deal with a third one I need to reset, preferably by sleeping. 3-way conversations or simultaneous translation between 2 non-English tongues is just not in my power.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I can relate. Twenty years of monkeying about with Arabic (more off than on, obviously), and I still haven't mastered the alphabet.

I've done simultaneous translation between Spanish and English and between German and English and always found it rather exhausting. I can't imagine trying to go between Spanish and German. I think I wrote about the way watching Wagner with Spanish subtitles made my head all hurty. Paradoxically, it wasn't as hard watching it with Hungarian subtitles, since I don't understand enough Hungarian to have any reasonable expectation of grasping more than a word or two.

I did manage to take language courses--Welsh, Catalan, Korean--while studying in Germany, but that's different. They were all introductory, plus the time pressure just wasn't there.