muckefuck: (Default)
muckefuck ([personal profile] muckefuck) wrote2007-04-19 11:45 am

Amharic to Zulu

I ended up doing an on-the-fly inventory of my language-learning titles last night and I've decided I need to buy books on Quechua and Xhosa so I can have all 26 letters of the alphabet covered.

Would anyone be interested in a [livejournal.com profile] princeofcairoenesque eliptony core sample of them? I've got enough for over a year of weekly updates.

[identity profile] princeofcairo.livejournal.com 2007-04-20 06:21 am (UTC)(link)
I need to buy books on Quechua and Xhosa so I can have all 26 letters of the alphabet covered.

Surely you should be buying books so you could cover all 33 letters of the Georgian alphabet, or all 41 letters of the Glagolitic alphabet, or all 58 letters of the Hindi alphabet.

[identity profile] muckefuck.livejournal.com 2007-04-20 02:06 pm (UTC)(link)
If I were acquiring language-learning materials in Georgian, Old Church Slavonic, or Hindi, I'd do just that. (I'm not sure what the hell I'd do if I were buying them in Chinese. All 214 radicals?) But I'm not. I'm buying books in Western languages--English, German, Spanish, etc.--all of which use the modern Roman alphabet of 26 letters.

[identity profile] princeofcairo.livejournal.com 2007-04-20 07:39 pm (UTC)(link)
So transliterate them (or transliterate the initial phoneme of each language at any rate), perhaps with sticky tape on the back, or with a smattering of brightly colored adhesive dots, for multivariant alphabetization. Why let the dead hand of the Caesars prevent you from pursuing a richer, stranger abecedarian gonfallon?

[identity profile] muckefuck.livejournal.com 2007-04-20 08:16 pm (UTC)(link)
It's a goal that enticing more for being easy to reach than anything else. If I'm going to start setting arbitrary goalposts in my acquisitions, I'd rather they be more germane to the subjects. "Representatives of every known language family" for instance.