11 Responses to “See you soon”

1. nabi al-raml Says:
   May 1st, 2008 at 4:24 pm

   Oh good luck with Latin. I do Arabic and I’m sick to death of cases (iirc they’re harder than the ones in Latin, but my opinion is that they’re always evil) but I don’t have to worry about serious Arabic work until I actually start my MA program in the fall. I took a just-for-kicks English class this semester which is essentially Medieval with a side of Tolkien (the professor is a fairly well-known Tolkien scholar) so we read Beowulf (for the billionth time although at least it was a different translation this go around), Prose Edda, and the Battle of Maldon. Great class, it’s amazing to see how much Tolkien mined those sources, and others, for all they’re worth. On a lark this summer — if I have time between studying French, studying for my Arabic placement exam and moving across the country — I’m half-tempted to write a paper comparing sacral kingship in various grail romances/arthurian tales/celtic myths to the scant evidences of it in Lord of the Rings. Best of luck again!

2. Chad_Writtenfire Says:
   May 1st, 2008 at 7:57 pm

   Thanks. I’ve never studied Arabic, but I did hear once that the vowels were similar to French, though I’m not sure how accurate that is. I’m fairly fluent in French (after having studied it for years in school and in college and lived there for a year, in Reims). After not living there for a couple of years my speaking is slower than it once was, but reading is still easy.
   That class sounds great. I hear a lot of Tolkien’s words for things are derived from or similar to Old English. I haven’t done any comparative studies of it; I’ve never even read past the first book (I did see the movies, and they’re not bad, but not quite the same I think). I read the Hobbit, of course, but the last time I tried to read the Lord of the Rings I was eleven or so, and I got tired of it after the first book and haven’t picked them back up again. One of these days, I will get around to it. There’s no rush, it seems to me, since I already know how it ends.
   You should write that paper, it sounds really interesting. Sacral kingship hrmm. I would think the “sacrifice” of the king would be integral somewhere, or at least his link to the land and the health of the king = the health of the land. And definitely the Percival story, by Chretien de Troyes, since the Fisher King is one of those sacral kings who is tied to the land.
   What cases are there in Arabic?

3. nabi al-raml Says:
   May 2nd, 2008 at 5:38 pm

   I would definitely be working with Chretien’s Percival and in LotR it’s a bit more of…the quality of the king or the presence of the king. Such as in Mordor the king is bad and the land is a wasteland and the rest have to do with Gondor not having a king whose claimed his right. Not sure what to do with Aragorn having what is essentially healing abilities yet. But if you remember anything from LotR look through Edda, almost all the dwarf names and Gandalf’s are listed there.

   Well there’s just the three main ones, nominative, genitive, and
   accusative. Thankfully there’s no vocative.They’re complicated that nouns and verbs can be singular plural or dual, and are of course gendered. If the noun is definite then the the case ending changes. And some preceding words will change which markings mean what case on the words that follow them. And the numbers have cases. For example for 3-10 the number takes the genitive and the noun has to be the opposite gender and
   plural, but when you get to 11-19 they are indefinite accusative and singular. I don’t know if the Arabic vowels are similar to French as my knowledge of French, until I start studying for my research language test, is limited to phrases I’ve picked up from my sister. She’s been taking French for 9 years and at this point it’s mostly a question of increasing her vocabulary. I hope at some point she can gift me books in Arabic for leisure reading like I was able to give her French books for leisure reading. Arabic being a semitic language, usually only the three long vowels (alif, wow, yaa) are written and all the short vowels are omitted which is fun with the passive voice since the main indicators are the short vowels and context. And there’s something called the ‘jussive’ mood which I’m pretty sure only exists in Arabic.

   And that’s my grammar lesson for the day

4. Chad_Writtenfire Says:
   May 2nd, 2008 at 11:51 pm

   [By all that's linguistically holy, this got long! I wasn't sure if you already knew it, but I wrote it anyway. I'm rather proud of this. Can I count it as an update? I could mention Allen somewhere and post it as the next chapter.]

   Ahh, the king tied to the land. An old, old, folk belief. The king is not just the figurehead, he literally is the earth and the bounty. And his death, in some cases, will bring new life, in a sort of recursive regeneration. His life for the land, rather than that his life is the land. The “green man” sort of king. There’s an old Celtic/Teutonic belief that the king of the summer and the king of the winter are born in this way, and their gestation, birth, maturation, and death mark the turning of the seasons. The eight festivals (two solstices, two equinoxes, and the four quarter days (Beltane, Lammas, Samhain, and Imbolc)) mark the rise and fall of the two kings. [Imbolc literally means "in the womb"]. There are a lot of names for these days. Imbolc is currently Groundhog’s Day, Feb. 2nd. It used to be called Candlemas. Beltane is May Day. Samhain is Halloween and All Saint’s Day. Lammas is August 1st, and the most forgotten of the days, although it was once a large harvest festival. The exact dates have varied with calendars and cultures, but typically it’s the 1st or the 2nd of the month. The Celts, as I understand it, celebrated the holidays from the 2nd to the 4th of the month, but they counted their days from sundown to sundown (so we would have said that the festival began at sundown on the first day of the month, I think). The mother of the two kings is the primordial Goddess (the earth, the moon), although the Celts believed in a triple goddess as well and I’m not familiar enough with the mythology to explain the relation between the triple goddess and the primordial goddess.

   Hrmm, interesting about Arabic there. Except for the obligatory specifics, it sounds rather similar to Latin and Greek. Greek has a dual case, as well as a middle voice that is “between” the active and the passive, such as when a general conquers another army. He didn’t really do it; his men did it. So it would be in the middle voice.

   Three cases, hrmm. Similar to modern English then, although English calls them the subjective, objective, and possessive (because English grammarians are brainless, imho, and break with tradition (and comparative linguistics) in an attempt to simplify). Old English had five, Latin had seven (but the locative was basically defunct and the vocative always easy to spot (and the same as the nominative except in the second declension), so five main ones), Greek had four main cases (no ablative, everything was in the dative/accusative/genitive instead). Numbers are often weird, like in Latin (and Old English, actually) the numbers 1, 2, and 3 decline, but after that they don’t.

   That the definite nouns decline but the indefinite ones do not is interesting. That’s similar to Old English, which had weak and strong nouns (as well as weak and strong verbs); and the weak nouns’ declensions were basically the same in every case (so they might as well have not bothered to decline really), while the strong nouns had different endings depending on the case they were in.

   It sounds like the vowels and the markings would be the most annoying, for reading and interpretation. What is this about the preceding words changing the markings on later nouns? Is this similar to prepositional phrases in Latin, in which the preposition determines the case of the other words in the prepositional phrase?

   Languages are a hobby of mine. I’ve studied five so far, formally, (Latin, French, German, Ancient Greek, and Old English). I know a few words in Italian and Spanish, which I’ll get around to learning eventually. And I can make my way slowly through Old French, unsurprisingly, since it’s between Latin and modern French. After a while they all seem like the same thing. I suppose I can thank Proto-Indo-European for that, as the mother tongue of all the ones I’ve studied. I might be content, eventually, if I learn every language derived from PIE that is at all useful to me. Old Norse, Occitan, Old Italian, Old French, variants of all of those, modern Icelandic, maybe Slavic …hrmm… It’s a good thing my field of study, medieval, encourages (basically requires) multiple language acquisition, or I’d be bummed out and wondering if I could ever use them all.

   The Latin I’m taking now is a graduate course. I did a Bachelor of Arts in Ancient Studies, and this was a chance to take a course in Medieval Latin, something I’d never got around to before, focusing on Classical instead.

   There’s a iussive in Latin, as there is in English, although the word is not used commonly to refer to English. “Iussive” just means “command” from Latin; it’s alternately called the “hortatory” (to urge). It’s the iussive/hortatory subjunctive (subjunctive being the mood, and iussive being the specific usage of the mood. Is there a subjunctive mood in Arabic? Most old languages have one. It’s nearly defunct in modern English, at least in a recognizable form. We prefer to use the preterite tense as a subjunctive, which was possible in Old English as well but not as common. “If he went to the store…” etc. The normal subjunctive, these days, is just the infinitive, except in the verb “to be,” where it’s “were” in most conjugated phrases, excepting the usage, “if there be…”, “whether there be…”, “be there any…” etc). Iussives in English: “Let him go to the store.” “O’ alas is me, let me perish!” “O’ that he might bring me some chocolate!” “Let all good people hark to my words.” And so on. French does a similar thing with “Que…”, i.e. “Qu’il y soit” = “That there be….” French likes the subjunctive much more visibly than does modern English. One could mix the hortatory subjunctive into modern English more dramatically though, and use the subjunctive phrase: “Would that he were a goldfish!”

5. nabi al-raml Says:
   May 4th, 2008 at 12:09 pm

   I did know most of this stuff because at one point I really enjoyed investigating Celtic beliefs slash modern paganism (because religions fascinate me) except Lammas I always called Lughnasadh for some reason. I’m going to blame an Irish movie I saw once.

   That’s really interesting about Greek’s middle case. If I were actually able to comprehend structural linguistics I probably would have had that as a major. Sadly my mind just can’t wrap itself around it just like math and computer science.

   It wasn’t that definite nouns decline but indefinite ones don’t, it’s that they take different markings. Take the approximately transliterated word ‘zemil’ meaning classmate, colleague, etc. If it were definite and nominative, al-zemil (or more properly, az-zemil, because due to tongue position there are ‘sun letters’ where the L is swallowed by the following letter and ‘moon letters’ which the L stays, which is why you see things like Ar-Rashid), the markings would be a single damma, which is approximately a ‘oo’ or ‘u’ sound. So it would be al-zemilu. But if it were indefinite zemil, it would take taween or double the markings, in the nominative case, it would be zemilatun. Don’t ask why two of the same sound somehow get an ‘n’ in there. Two fatHas (approximately an ‘a’) for the accusative become ‘-an’ and two kasras (approximately an ‘i’ become (-in). I’m not sure if the thing I was talking about is a prepositional phrase? There are these two categories called Sisters of Kana and Sisters of Inna. They have one of the sisters, then a subject, and then a predicate. For the sisters of Kana the subject is nominative like normal, and the predicate is accusative. But with the sisters of Inna the subject is accusative and the predicate is nominative. I don’t really understand it, but the first link at the bottom has a whole chart.

   I’ve always liked languages but I haven’t had the discipline with studying them. My Latin was limited to one summer at what was essentially geek camp, and is supposedly equivalent to a semester of collegiate Latin, but I didn’t study so I didn’t get too much out of it. I tried to learn Russian and Japanese on my own in high school but the only things that came out of that are I know the 5 Russian letters that correspond in shape and form to the English (A-K-M-O-T) and that it doesn’t have a present tense ‘to be’, like Arabic, and I know lots of greetings in Japanese. I studied Spanish formally for about 6 years in middle school and high school and was fluent when I was a wee tot, but sadly most of the Spanish has vanished due to the last two years of my instruction being very poor and the fact that I haven’t studied it since high school. This is my third year of Modern Standard Arabic, which is a bit like taking Classical anything, in that if you try to speak people can probably understand you but you sound like you’re reading from ancient/holy texts. So to remedy that deficiency I’m also in my second year of Egyptian Colloquial Arabic which is quite useful except that some of the different letter pronunciations and verb conjugations and negations are starting to creep into my MSA which annoys me to no end. I have about a year and a half to get my proficiency in French from knowing a few greetings and possibly making myself understood with simple sentences such as ‘where is the bathroom?’ to being able to translate passages with the aid of a dictionary. I also have two years to get to the intermediate level of Persian. Grad school will be fun! I’m hoping the PIE will save me some trouble with Persian combined with already knowing most of its script, since it was taken from Arabic. But languages are awesome and one of my genie-wishes involves knowing languages.

   I haven’t actually learned the jussive yet so, I can’t speak as to what it does in Arabic. And if there’s a subjunctive I haven’t come across it. However, I would definitely like to be able to throw phrases like “Would that he were a goldfish!” into my everyday life. But for the first 3 levels it’s interesting because everyone uses the same book series, Al-Kitab (which literally means The Book) and its choices of vocabulary are interesting, such as the very first lesson in the first book the words go “mother, father, United Nations, office of admissions”.

   If you want a more in-depth grammar discussion I’m probably going to have to refer you to these wikipedia articles:
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BCI%CA%BBr%C4%81b
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_grammar
   They seem reliable even if I do question their transliteration sometimes.

   Ok, this got really long as well. I’m sort of amused that just we two have been having such a detailed conversation on a blog. But really, any excuse to geek it up.

6. Chad_Writtenfire Says:
   May 4th, 2008 at 11:05 pm

   Lughnasadh just gets transliterated into Modern English as “Lammas” since the pronunciation of the two words is similar (Irish consonants are very soft, or nonexistent, it seems, with the “m” “n” and “d” + “h”…haven’t studied it though). “Lughnasadh” is more correct, I’d say.

   Interesting! It sounds like Arabic has its own grammatical language for things. A little confusing, but rather poetic to have Sisters and moon-letters.

   The shifts in spelling/pronunciation where two of the same letter get an “n” is probably due to phonetics. If something is difficult to pronounce, it usually assimilates to something easier to pronounce. There are three varieties of phonetic shift I learned for French, but I don’t recall the names of them: “assimilation” “assonance” and one other, I think.

   The shift in consonants for the “al” prefix is something that Latin does as well, in its prefixes, like in “ad-cipere” (to grasp) = “accipere.” Same thing if it’s an “in-” or “ab-” or so on. Most Latin prefixes come from the Latin prepositions, and they just assimilate to the first consonant of the word, at least in Classical Latin (Medieval Latin sometimes writes them without the assimilation).

   Very cool about Persian and French. There’s a big forum for languages at forum.wordreference.com. Lots of native French speakers there who will answer your questions. There are a lot of languages discussed there.

   French grammar is not that bad. Sometimes they do weird things because they’ve mechanically altered their own language since the 16th century to look and sound pretty and articulate…but other than that…mostly it’s about figuring out the conditional (would/could mood) and the subjunctive, and some few idiomatic phrases like “il y a” which = “there is.” Scholarly/literary French likes to rearrange words for effect…and to invert phrases to seem elegant and put the verb last. It’s mimicking Latin a bit there. But once you get used to it, no problem.

7. Chad_Writtenfire Says:
   May 4th, 2008 at 11:09 pm

   Finished with Latin translation project and Latin final now. Down to the two essays. Dum de dum…

8. nabi al-raml Says:
   May 5th, 2008 at 9:12 pm

   Luckily I have my sister to help me and another friend who is fluent in French and has helped another person pass the reading test. My sister has often explained how the French have at various parts changed things around to make things prettier. About the only trick I’ve learned from her (which actually helps with some cognates) is that a word with a circumflex was originally followed by an ’s’. Luckily the test is written and translation based which is easier for me since I can draw on my Spanish. Glad to know there’s a good forum for a bunch of languages. At the moment I’m looking at buying an electronic dictionary/translator with Arabic/English/Persian/French, and thankfully they actually exist.

   Arabic definitely loves being poetic at times. My favorite example is actually the word for “poet” which can be translated as “one who feels”.

   Glad you’re done with your big Latin stuff. I’m working out how to summarize the plot of Dune in Arabic, as I am giving a presentation tomorrow on the use of Arabic words and Islamic concepts in the book. Wheeeee

9. Chad_Writtenfire Says:
   May 5th, 2008 at 9:19 pm

   Dune in Arabic? Sweet! I only ever read the original book and its sequel (or maybe it was two sequels?). The ones written by the other author never appealed to me. “House of Atreides” (?) and such. Nice Homeric reference there though.

   Old French keeps the “s” and has no circumflex, yep. Kind of fun, really. I passed my reading exam in French for my MA, and it wasn’t bad. They weren’t actually supposed to ask me to translate specific passages or anything, but I did, on demand and aloud, which was easy enough for me. I had four hours to read a 10pp article in French (it was on a Chaucerian topic), and then 5 min to verbally (in English) summarize the article and 20 minutes to discuss the argument in the article. I think some universities do it differently (less rigorously perhaps?), but it wasn’t bad.

   Dead languages are usually either 300 words (no dictionary) or 500 words (with a dictionary), as I understand it. Three or four hours to translate them.

   Good luck on your presentation!

10. nabi al-raml Says:
    May 6th, 2008 at 9:13 pm

    I think Frank Herbert wrote the first 6 Dune books. His son’s (and Brian J. Anderson’s) ones haven’t interested me as much, but I know they’re based off his dad’s notes, so I keep reading thing, but I’ve fallen behind lately. Dune (the first), however, is my favorite book ever, by far. I even managed to work it into my graduate application essay.

    Lucky you with you dead languages. Sadly mine is alive and well…although the only people who actually speak Modern Standard Arabic (which is what is taught in universities) are scholarly/educated people. If you want to communicate well with and be understood by any regular people without sounding like you’re narrating from the Qur’an, you have to learn a dialect. Thankfully the one I’m learning, Egyptian, is blissfully simple in its grammar constructions. But annoyingly some of the dialect is starting to infect my MSA, such as dropping the pronunciation of the letter qaf and pronouncing the letter jiim as giim (for the former, think somewhat of the french ‘j’). Have you had that problem with any of your languages?

11. Chad_Writtenfire Says:
    May 6th, 2008 at 9:24 pm

    Hrmm, none of my languages are spoken by anyone anymore really, except the modern French and German. And those aren’t even what I study. I just learn them/use them for fun and to read scholarly articles written in them.

    I remember mixing up French and Latin, and the French and German, and then Greek and Latin, haha. As it is now though, I’m on number five or six or something and they all seem to have sorted themselves out and don’t give me any more trouble!

    It’s kind of funny though. Learning a language is a source of great humor. Language teachers in high school, especially, were always really bizarre. My French teacher had spent seven years in the Peace Corps in West Africa, and told us a lot of stories about it. Some of them gross.

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