muckefuck | Amharic to Zulu

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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

princeofcairoenesque eliptony core sample of them? I've got enough for over a year of weekly updates.

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sure, I'd love to see it; partly because I think it would be a good way of accessing the question of what you look for in such a text (and by extension, what it is you're looking for more generally, as a linguist).

In so many cases, the answer would be, "Whatever was less than $7 at the used book store I happened to be in."

Go for it

Hey, that's my shtick! Why not learn Quiche instead...?

Actually, the problem I've always had with Quechua is finding good learning materials. The best textbook I've found is Clotoaldo Soto Ruiz's for Ayacucho Quechua. (It has a set of tapes, too, but those I had to get in Peru.)

I thought you'd love having someone to practice with!

I'd go for Quapaw instead if I could only find materials. Even though it's supposed not to be mutually intelligible with Osage, it's close enough that I could pick it up without much trouble.

Would anyone be interested in a princeofcairenesque eliptony core sample of them?

absolutely!

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.

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.

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?

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.

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