Vale Latin?

Latin’s a dead language

As dead as dead can be

It killed off all the Romans

And now it’s killing me

So, here’s something I’ve been wondering about lately:  where are the new novels in Latin?

Where can I find a whodunnit or a tawdry romance novel in the language that forms one of the two key “Ancient Languages” once considered part of every educated person’s repertoire?

People study Latin at universities all over Europe and in various other places around the world.  In some parts of the world, Latin is still taught to children in schools (and, I suspect, Ancient Greek probably is as well, in some places).

You have people who learnt Latin in school, majored in it at university, became so literate and fluent in the language that they went on to teach it and translate ancient Latin texts into modern languages as their job.

So why isn’t writing new works in Latin a thing?  Or, if it is a thing, why is it such a quiet thing?  As far as I know, the only new Latin/Ancient Greek texts that are readily available for public consumption are the Wikipedia pages that have been translated into those languages.

Wikipedia in Latin is awesome, but I secretly suspect it’s more of a hobbyist thing than a genuine attempt to create new texts for the Latin speaking community.

Is there a Latin speaking community?  Can you travel the world meeting with other learners of Latin and get along famously speaking Latin with each other?  Can you have a Latin pen-pal and go to Latin conventions?  Are there Latin rock bands putting out Latin rock music?  And is there a magazine where people contribute articles, short stories and original poetry in Latin?

Somewhere out there, is someone translating modern language texts into Latin?  Surely the same people who write “new translations” of the Aeneid in English can also write “new translations” of Alice in Wonderland in Latin…

Esperanto is doing it.  All of it.  The travelling to hang out with other speakers, the pen-pals and conventions, the rock music, the magazines, the translations of Alice in Wonderland… and the new works.  People have been writing novellas, short stories and poems in Esperanto pretty much since the day it was invented – and there’s a sizable library of crime novels, science fiction, tawdry romance and translations of modern language classics.

If you can build that kind of a community around a created language, surely you do the same for an ancient one?  And wouldn’t Latin have a larger base to build on?  Thousands of people all over the world learn Latin.

It must surely exist.

They say Latin is a dead language – and I think that’s supposed to mean no one speaks it and no one creates new works in it.  But why?  People were writing scientific papers in the language until just a century or so ago.  (Incidentally, where do those papers fit in with the Latin cannon?  Are people still reading them – are they used as texts in Latin classes?)

I bet you $4.50 that anyone who remotely enjoyed taking Latin in either school or university tried writing new poetry in the language.  It may have been crap, but that’s beside the point.

What isn’t beside the point is the fact that I’ve never seen a book of new Latin poetry advertised (and I’m an academic librarian, so I tend to get ads for that sort of crap sent to me).  Surely someone out there kept writing poetry and eventually created a few pieces worth sharing with the public?

What does it mean to be a living language, apart from the fact that people are still using it and playing with it?  If that’s all it takes, why is Latin dead?  Is it dead, or is it living very quietly?

Could we breath life into the old corpse yet?

2013/2014 Pt3: Keeping myself amused

Theoretically I suppose I could have included reflection on language learning in the post on studies, but since this is what I do for fun, I figured it deserved to be in a post about things I do for fun.

My Estonian and German studies both suffered a little last year.  After having a cracker of a year in 2012 - which had a great virtuous circle relationship with a trip to Europe in which I spent two weeks in Estonia and two-and-a-bit weeks in German speaking countries (plus a week and a bit in Italian speaking countries, but I'm not learning Italian, so that doesn't count), 2013 was a but of a bust.

I kept my hand in with Estonian by having a lesson once a month (which is not as useful as having one once a week), but for various reasons I couldn't take any German language subjects in my studies, so it was up to me to keep studying things like grammar and such... without an external reminder... while being busy with other subjects...

And, well, good intentions do not always translate to actually doing useful things.  I spent the whole year totally going to do some German studies this week.  Occasionally I actually started a module, which I was totally going to finish by the end of the week...

And then it was 2014.

It's been one of those years.  One minute it's April, and there's something I want to do tomorrow, the next minute it's October, and I can't quite tell you what I did with the days in the middle.

What I did do, and found that helped me keep me slightly in the loop with my German, was start learning Esperanto.

In German.

Just in case you've missed it the last few times I mentioned it: I've been learning Esperanto in German.

I have German books on Esperanto, and I've been using a couple of programmes like Kurso and Lernu, which I've set to German.  I haven't been doing as much with these resources as I'd need to in order to actually have a useful knowledge of the language (considering I've been doing this for a few months, and I should totally be able to go to a congress or something by now), but it's been getting me to use German to achieve some goal or purpose, which is supposed to be good for your language learning.

Plus, as an added bonus, I'm learning Esperanto.  Why?  Well, that's a topic for a later post.

My goals for 2014 are to brush up on my German enough to pass my course (going back to the studies bit), but to also try to find a way to have more useful German based stuff.  I haven't worked out the details of this plan, so I suspect it will fail.

I'm going to endeavour to gain more "contact time" with Estonian.  I actually have a plan for this one:  I'm going to read something involving Estonian words every night (if possible) and watch at least one eesti keeles TV programme or Movie a month.

Actually, I suspect the same plan could probably work for German.

And I'm going to learn Esperanto well enough to feel I wouldn't be wasting my time if I went to a congress or tagged along to a meet up group.

Once again, the overall goal is to be a bit better.

And - on a completely different note - I'm going to try to get away more this year.  To put some of my annual leave towards things like camping and such.  I was too much here last year.  This year I'm going to spend some time elsewhere.

Don't Speak Estonian to the Swiss

I'm having a bit of trouble getting my head into the game, German wise.  It feels as if German is a place I visit briefly, but never long enough to really get my bearings.  The long break between German subjects, during which I abjectly failed to do any serious Autonomous Learning (even though I had grand plans and plenty of resources), didn't help.  I really need better self-control - my self-motivation doesn't seem to be cutting it.

I'm starting to wish I could swing a proper stay in Germany.  Even being there for just a week last year felt like it was making a huge difference   Within days I found myself understanding shop-keepers and asking questions in German without resorting to English (at least, half the time).

Then I had two weeks in Estonia, learning Estonian in an intensive class, and found my grasp on German seriously slipping.

Straight after my course I went on a tour of Switzerland, and I had great difficulty answering people.  I would understand something someone said in German, and go to answer them in Estonian.  Heck, I sometimes found myself trying to answer in Estonian even if they said something in English.  Or, occasionally, French or Italian.

With the French and Italian, it was usually something like "Vabandust, kas te räägite Inglise keelt?"  Which, of course, makes perfect sense.

Usually, though, it was the little words like "hello", "please", "thank you" and "sorry" that I was constantly saying in Estonian before scrambling to remember the German or English equivalent.  Oddly, no one in Switzerland seemed to understand me, but at the same time they didn't seem to care.  They were probably happy as long as I bought something.

By the time I got to Italy I was starting to remember my German again - and fat lot of good it did me there.

Of course, when I got to Austria, I was saying "grazie" to everyone, wasn't I?  It was good to have those few days in the German speaking world again, though.  It helped while it lasted.

Now I really need some quality German time.  I'm just really bad at arranging to get it on my own.

And... I'm a Geek

So, today I was in the middle of showing a group of students how to limit a search in Medline (via Ovid) for use in their Pharmacy Honours research project when I suddenly noticed that you can now limit to results in Esperanto.

This makes Medline (via Ovid) the second major database I know of that will give Esperanto as a language option (Proquest is the other one).

I may have stopped briefly in the middle of my class to indulge in a small happy dance and an exclamation of "Oooh!"

They may have been so used to my saying crazy stupid things just to keep their attention that they didn't even bat an eyelid.

I can't help but wonder how much medical research is written in Esperanto.  Near as I can figure out, most of the research conducted in Esperanto is also about Esperanto.

I'd love to know what the major areas of Esperanta medical research might be, so I can try a search.  I have a feeling that if I just start looking for my "normal" search tests, like "constraint induced movement therapy" or "rotator-cuff injuries in overarm sports" I might just be wasting my time.  It's a bit like googlewacking, I guess - searching for random things just to see if you actually get a result.

Now, if it was Interlingua, on the other hand, I know I'd at least get some articles about spectroscopy...

Ooooh!  I've just discovered Medline (via Ovid) also offers Interlingua as an option...

Curso, kurso

This is a little bit brilliant:

http://www.interlingua.com/an/curso (Curso de interlingua pro comenciantes/Course in Interlingua for beginners)

The genius behind this course decided to make each lesson fit on a single A4 sheet of paper.  Most of the time it's even just one side of the page.  This makes it perfect for breakfast reading, or for those moments where you want to do something kind of intelligent, but not very taxing.

It's text-heavy in a good way, too.  Each page has a few paragraphs and a bit of vocabulary, so that you spend most of your ten minutes reading the language.  Then there are a couple of grammar points to note, and a handful of exercises to do.  The design is simple, but enjoyably so.

I have a few suggestions for improvement, though.  The vocabulary should be compiled at the end in summary - like the grammar points are.  The current vocabulary sheet just tells you which lesson glosses the word in question, when it would be so much nicer if it would lay out the word and some variations (like conjugating the verbs).  It would also be nice if the vocabulary in each lesson was listed either alphabetically or in order of appearance.  At the moment, it's neither.

If I could, I'd change the lessons' vocabulary to "proper" order of appearance (it's mostly order of appearance, but not exactly) and then have the whole list assembled in alphabetical order at the end.

It would also be nice if you could download the whole thing at once, instead of having each page as a separate file - that way you could have the thing as a "proper" eBook (and shorten the time spent downloading the course considerably).

I'd love to have something similar in Esperanto to accompany Kurso de Esperanto - just like I'd love to have something like Kurso to accompany Curso de Interlingua.  Somewhere between the two of them is a very comfortable way to ease yourself into the first steps of learning a language.

I still haven't found any introduction to a language that's quite as good as the Easy German/French/Spanish books published by Usborne (although I still liked their earlier incarnation as Learn German/French/Spanish).  Nicole Irvine's basic concept was quite fantastic.  I just wish someone made a DVD of the thing - that would be awesome.  Also, a version for Estonian.

There are dozens of great little courses and programmes out there where the creators/designers are getting little things so very right.  It's a shame we can't suck them all into lovely multi-format introductions to every language.

I'm starting to think I might be easily distracted...

So, as a result of reading "In the Land of Invented Languages" by Okrent (so much to like, and yet... Oh, well, that's for another post), I felt like looking a little further into Interlingua.

The irony of it is that I wasn't terribly interested in Interlingua until I realised Okrent hadn't given any examples of the language in her book.  She'd shown snippets of most of the languages that had warranted a few paragraphs, but not Interlingua.  I noticed she had touched on a bit of the history, but hardly told us anything about the language at all.

So, I looked it up (well, I *am* a librarian)...

And now I'm thinking that Interlingua is pretty cool, and probably worth learning.  I had figured one auxiliary language was probably enough, and Esperanto is the biggest ship in that fleet, but now I see that Interlingua has a lot going for it.

Interlingua was created by a committee of language people who had the job of evaluating the currently existing auxiliary languages and finding the best one.  Instead they just made their own.  It's based on Latin and Greek roots common for most of the Romance languages - which is kind of like Esperanto, only where Esperanto has tried to "spread the love" when it comes to borrowing from other languages and then install a structure that is unique to Esperanto, Interlingua is almost an updated Latin.

This means that if you speak one of the Romance languages (or you've had a lot of exposure to English words from Latin roots), you have a good chance of picking up Interlingua really quickly.  It also means that, if you learn Interlingua, you have a fighting chance of being understood by some passing peasant in the back streets of Italy, Spain, Portugal or Peru.  The language is different to the language spoken in all of these countries, but close enough that you could probably come to an understanding as long as everyone was speaking slowly.

Esperanto seems less "I'm lost, can you help me?" useful than Interlingua, in this regard.  Then again, if you are wondering around the back roads of Europe and trying to find the key to your hotel, I honestly don't know if "Io ha perdite mi clave!" or "Mi perdis mian ŝlosilon!" is going to get you more assistance.  It depends on how far North or West you are, I suppose.

I am still quite taken with the way Esperanto is structured, too.  I love the table of correlatives (I have them on a mug (actually, three mugs (long story))).  And I like the patterns it follows.  I haven't looked far enough into Interlingua, but I know it is trying to be less "artificial", so it is less likely to have that rigidly-consistent-even-when-it's-slightly-ridiculous thing going on.

Yet, I can't help but wonder which of the two languages would be the pick of the crop, if they were equal in all other regards.  They aren't.  Not by a long shot.  Esperanto has enough speakers to populate a (very) small country (Liechtenstein, for example), while Interlingua doesn't have enough speakers to populate a small town.  A hamlet, maybe.  Esperanto has a large body of texts and a large network of connections.  Interlingua has a tiny fraction of that.  Oh, and Esperanto has over 125 years of use behind it, while Interlingua is just over 50 years old.

Still, I can't help but feel learning Interlingua would be totally worth it if I ever decided to travel in Western Europe again (or South America, for that matter) - if for no other reason than it would be a better foundation for learning Italian, Spanish, French or Portuguese.

So, right now I kind of want to learn both.

I think I just heard my Estonian text books whimper.

...if You Do...

Late last year I bought a T-Shirt that says "I'll Learn Esperanto if You Do".  I actually have three of them now, but I only bought one.  Long story.

Anyway, I bought this T-Shirt because I thought it was a fine joke.  The point of Esperanto is that we all agree to learn it for the sake of communicating with other people.  No one has to learn it - no one needs to learn it.  It's just something you choose to do, which only really works if other people choose to do it, too.

However, I recently learnt that there's a deeper level to the joke on my shirt.  When Zamenhof first published his little book trying to convince people to take up a brand-new language, he put something in it:  a form people could sign and return, promising that they would learn the language if 10 million other people agreed to learn it as well.  Right from the very beginning there was an "I'll learn it if you do" challenge built into the language.

According to Okrent, less than a thousand people sent the form back (actually, I seriously doubt the book - which was only published in Russian at the time - would have been printed in a big enough run for ten million forms to even exist...) but that's still around a thousand people who were willing to say "Sure, I'll learn it if someone else does".

And that's how Esperanto works.  That's how any constructed or planned language works - a bunch of people all agree to learn it and speak it, and - hey presto - there's a language.  Without people agreeing to speak it, it's just an academic activity.

I'm reading Arika Okrent's In the Land of Invented Languages at the moment, and thoroughly enjoying it.  However, I do have one niggling complaint.  Okrent writes like an apologist who has forgotten what an apologist does.  Instead of saying: "hey, this deserves to be given some respect because it is terribly interesting", she seems to be saying "I'm only looking at this because it's quite interesting, but please don't think I personally have any connection to these people apart from scientific curiosity (I wouldn't want you to think I was weird, or anything)".

I don't know, there's just something about the way she writes that makes it seem like she's desperately hoping she can enjoy the same things the nerds enjoy without getting stuck eating lunch with the nerds every day.

Or, occasionally, it seems more like she's desperately hoping she can enjoy the same things the nerds enjoy without losing the opportunity to laugh at the nerds for enjoying such nerdy things.

There's always something vaguely sad about someone who has to qualify "I'm interested in this" with "but I'm not one of those people who are interested in this".

English was my first love...

...but will it be my last?  English of the future, or English of the past?

I've noticed, lately, that I've been dismissive of English.  I've been having such an interesting time exploring other languages that I've fallen into the trap of seeing the baggage of English rather than the magic of it.

There was a time when I was spell-bound by the linguistic possibilities that English could offer - and the intricacies of the language throughout time.  I studied Old English, Middle English and Jacobean English at university and loved every minute of it.  I loved the poetry of the language itself, but also the joy of the literature.  Plays, poetry, novels...  I revelled in the written word of my native language.  I used to write sonnets just for the pleasure of playing with the rhythms and structures of the language.

I seem to have left that somewhere.

When I started learning German I was excited by what it could teach me about English - English is a Germanic language, after all.  Then I started to get enough of a grip on German and Estonian that I began to see the poetry in those languages, and I'm so hungry for these shiny new words that I've forgotten the joy I used to find in my own.

Also, I'm so caught up in the global language debate that I tend to see English as something holding people back, rather than a source of wonder and poetry.  I feel so strongly that everyone should try to learn another language, that I've almost begun to hate the English language purely for its hegemony.  It's such a shame that people who speak English don't feel the need or desire to learn anything else - and such a shame that most speakers of other languages see learning English as the best use of their time.

Granted, anything is better than having French as the international language (that has to be the worst spelling system known to man), but I don't think English should be the ultimate lingua franca of the world.  I don't think it's good for native English speakers - it makes us lazy and gives us a sense of cultural superiority that we don't deserve.

But...

But I used to love English.  I used to love exploring the nooks and crannies of the language - the ebb and flow of the grammar, the endless possibilities and nuances of the vocabulary.  I used to cherish the way a word like "cherish" could add a completely different colour to a sentence than, say, "adore".  I used to love seeing how we gathered together words from all over the world and piled them up in an almost reckless order, like a bowerbird gathering shiny things for his bower.

I loved the way you can say "a gaggle of school girls" to evoke a mental comparison between school girls and geese.

Evoke.  Such a beautiful word.

I guess I still love English, but I've stopped appreciating it.

I have finally decided to take the TESOL subjects for my Master of Applied Linguistics next year.  It took me a while to make up my mind.  I knew that, with my background as an English teacher and my recent acquisition of a Graduate Certificate in Tertiary Teaching, the TESOL subjects would be useful, logical and relevant.  I could probably get a job anywhere in the world teaching English...

But I wanted to play with different toys.  For some reason, even though all of the projects I want to do for a PhD could easily be done from a TESOL perspective (and the TESOL subjects would be useful grounding for that), I wanted to look at them from different angles.  Two years ago I would have jumped at the chance to learn about TESOL, but right now the idea of teaching English almost bores me.

Language is such a big, big pie, and English is just one slice of it.  A rather large slice, but only one slice none-the-less.  Yet I will never know another language as well as I know English.  And at the end of my days, when all my knowledge bleeds away, I will have Shakespeare and Yeats long after Liiv and Goethe have gone to dust.

And that's okay.

The journal

Every now and then I realise I haven't been following my own advice.  I was flicking through George Kutash's book on learning skills for language learners (very late-80s/early-90s, but still worth a look) when I came across a chapter where he talks about replacing action with substitute action (or something like that - the book is in my house, this computer is in my office).

He talks about how we frequently focus on the tasks we're good at to act as a substitute for the tasks we actually need to work on.

It's something I do far too often.  I will often do something where I can see quick and obvious improvement instead of taking the time to work on something harder and slower going.

It's also very similar to one of the study skills techniques I often recommend to my students:  the "what am I avoiding" question.  At some point, you will notice that you are actively avoiding doing a particular task.  That's the task at which you are probably weakest, and the one that probably needs to be directly addressed.

For me, it's writing (well, producing).  I'll happily read another grammar rule to avoid actually producing a sentence.  Seems strange, given that I would probably write underwater if I felt the urge...

...which is probably the reason why I avoid doing it in my target languages.  Because I don't have the skill to write the kinds of things I usually write, it doesn't feel enjoyable to me.  I have to rethink and "simplify" everything I want to say to the point where it isn't what I want to say anymore.

I had plans to write a journal in both languages, and I let it all go while I distracted myself with reading other things instead.

It's time to face the music and dance, though.  Yes, I will write poorly.  Yes, I will get the sentence structure wrong.  Very, very wrong.  Yes, I will struggle to find the right vocabulary (especially since I really should stop looking things up in Google - it's not a good habit to get into).

And, yes, I will occasionally post my ugly, ugly journal entries on this blog.  I see no reason why I should suffer alone.

Maybe I am - just a little

Learning Esperanto, that is.

I really shouldn't.  I'm wasting valuable time that I could be spending on revising and shoring up my German and Estonian.  But...

But it's like a cross between a language, a game and a cult.  It's just so much fun to play with.

And, apparently, I *am* the average Esperanto speaker.  I read a blog post that listed the following people as the folk who are most likely to learn Esperanto:

• Travellers
• Geeks
• Language Lovers
• Vegetarians/Vegans

Now, I'm pretty sure those are meant to be separate categories, but the only description I don't match is vegetarian... and I have a habit of ordering vegetarian meals at restaurants anyway.

So, apparently it's fate.  Nothing for it - I'm going to have to learn Esperanto.

I am *so* not learning...

...Esperanto.

Esperanto has taken over from Italian as the language I'm not really learning, but occasionally allowing myself to be distracted by.

I found Italian strangely alluring right up to the point where I went to Italy.  Now I find I'm over it.  It seems as though all of my vague and ill defined reasons for being interested in Italian have been trumped by "yeah, but Italy kind of sucks".

Maybe I'll come back to it one day through my love of English (once I rekindle it).  It is one of the close cousins of the English language - both languages having Latin as an ancestor.  I have a feeling I'll get around to revisiting French first, though.

Right now, though, Esperanto seems more interesting - and a lot easier.  It's sliding into my head in a way I find strangely appealing, but also slightly alarming.  After reading over a basic grammar key, I can remember not only what "kio estas tio" means, but also why it means that - I'm parsing sentences much more easily than in the early days of German or Estonian.

Actually, I think it would be exceptionally interesting to compare Estonian and Esperanto.  Estonian is complicated and difficult (and the Estonians seem almost proud of that), while Esperanto is simplified and straightforward (and the Esperantists are definitely proud of that), but I've noticed a lot of similarities.

The whole building-blocks approach that Esperanto has seems very Finno-Ugric to me - and there's even a similarity in some of the vocabulary.

Take the question "Do you love me?" for example.

In Estonian it is "Kas sa armastad mind?" and in Esperanto it's "Ĉu vi amas min?"

Now, both "Kas" and "Ĉu" have exactly the same function - they just flag the rest of the sentence as a yes-or-no question.  It's a catch-all for the way we start questions with certain verbs ("do you", "are you", "does he", "is she", "did they", etc).

"Sa" and "vi" ("you") are the subjects of the sentence, so they have no endings.  If they were the objects, they would be "sind" and "vin" respectively.  "Mind" and "min" ("me") are the objects.  If they were the subjects, they would be "ma" and "mi" respectively.

"Armastad" and "amas" ("love") are both constructed by putting specific endings on the root of the verb ("armasta" in Estonian, "am" in Esperanto).  The "d" in "armastad" signifies that it is present tense - which is exactly what the "as" signifies in "amas" (the "d" also signifies that it is performed by "you", which is a distinction that doesn't exist in Esperanto - but that's another story).

If I were to push the sentence into the past tense, I'd add an "s" and an "i" (not necessarily in the same order) into the verbs in both.  "Armastad" would become "armastasid".  "Amas" would become "amis".

All of which leads me to attempt to write a short poem in both languages:

Kas sa armastasid mind?
Kas ma armastan sind?
Kus meie oleme, nüüd?
Ja, siit,
Kuhu?


Ĉu vi amis min?
Ĉu mi amas vin?
Kie ni estas, nun?
Kaj, de tie ĉi,
Kie?



(Actually, I suspect I should have written "ĉi tiam" instead of "nun" - but I've probably made a heck of a lot of other mistakes as well.  At least one of which being crappy poetry...)

He's a fine chair

I love pointing out that German's think chairs are masculine while the Italians think they are feminine.

I don't know why, but I am fascinated by the fact that these two languages which are, essentially, right next to each other would have different views on the "gender" of that thing you sit on.

Yes, I still think having a "gender" for an inanimate object is daft, and I think every language that does so is somehow inferior to the languages that don't (English, Estonian, Esperanto...) but I'm also interested to know why they chose that gender for that object.

I know several studies have been done of several tribal languages with grammatical genders that have determined the they actually see these inanimate objects as having masculine or feminine characteristics. For example, there's one (I think in the Papua region) in which everything large is "he" and everything small is "she".

I think it's perfectly reasonable to assume that all languages with grammatical genders are making "value judgments" about those objects that they call masculine or feminine.

What is it that the Germans see in a chair that makes them think "that's a fine, manly chair"?  What is it the Italians would see in the same chair that would make them think "she's far to feminine to be manly"?

What is the point of difference between these two cultures that makes them interpret the same object as endowed with different gender traits?

Lingvon

I've been allowing myself to be distracted by Esperanto lately.  

Some readers may be aware of the fact that I find the existence of Esperanto highly amusing.  I don't know why, but the concept just tickles my fancy.  Also, the word.  I love saying "Esperanto".  It's one of those words that feel good in the mouth, if you know what I mean.

I have been known to bring Esperanto into a conversation just because I felt like saying the word.  I had the opportunity to tell a couple of Americans and a German about it's existence at my language course in Estonia, so that livened up the meet-and-greet.  They thought it was an interesting concept, too, even if they couldn't quite understand why it would actually be a thing.  The Greek girl knew what I was talking about, though, and she was more derisive.  She was, however, impressed when I mentioned that there were groups of people who spoke Esperanto as one of their first languages (always in conjunction with a "real" language - from what I've read, no one has been crazy enough to create a completely Esperanta community where all children speak nothing but Esperanto for the first few years).

I was thoroughly impressed when I discovered that ProQuest gives people the option to limit their searches to find articles written in Esperanto.  Sadly, the only journal articles written in Esperanto are more or less about Esperanto (and language in general), so if you were hoping to find Esperanta articles about rotator-cuff injuries or baseball, you would be largely out of luck...

However, while I've been fascinated by the existence of Esperanto (and quite fond of saying the word) for years, until I went to the Esperanto museum in Vienna I had never actually looked at the language or the historical/cultural space that it fills.  

To be honest, I've always regarded Esperanto as being, well, useless.

Let's face it, English actually is what Esperanto wanted to be (except for the cultural neutrality thing), and while the number of people who speak Esperanto is roughly equivalent to the number of people who speak Estonian, there isn't really any place on Earth one can go where speaking Esperanto will help you buy a loaf of bread if you are lost and alone in a small town.  At least Estonian is highly useful in Estonia.  

Also, Esperanto seems to be such a dilettante language.  It’s not something you learn to survive – you learn it because you’re educated and are privileged enough to be able to learn a language you don’t need “on the street”.  It wouldn't surprise me at all if you found that anyone who actually speaks Esperanto also speaks English, French, German or Spanish - so why learn Esperanto when you would be better served by one of the big four?

Sure, Esperanto has a large community of users all over the world who love it, defend it, gather together to speak it, translate works of great literature into it, and write poetry in it… but the same could be said of Klingon. 

Should Hamlet in Esperanto really be seen in a different light to Hamlet in Klingon?

Standing in the Esperanto museum I was struck by two things:  1) the language is actually quite interesting from a linguistic point of view, and 2) it’s not a language so much as a pseudo-religious movement.

Firstly, the language:  Apparently there’s some evidence that learning Esperanto can be a useful stepping stone to learning more complicated languages.  The structure is simple and easy to pick up, and it draws attention to the way a language works.  In theory, after learning Esperanto, language learners are better positioned to understand what they are doing when learning another language.

The language does seem remarkable easy to absorb.  I’ve spent less than two hours looking at it, and I already know how to alter a word to mark it as a nominative or accusative noun, an adjective or an adverb – after three years I still struggle doing this in Estonian.  Yet it’s also vaguely Finno-Ugric in the way you attach prefixes and suffixes to create a wide variety of words from the same basic root. 

I am mildly concerned by the weird positive-negative thing it has going.  The word for cold is “malvarma”, which literally means “not warm” – just like the word for short (“mallonga”) means “not long”.  The word for hot, “varmega”, means something like “significantly warm”.  I don’t know why, but I feel like “not warm” is an insufficient way to express “cold”.  If someone asks you what the water is like, and you say “not warm”, that wouldn’t really have the same level of warning as “cold”.

Anyway, the language is kind of interesting, and possibly more useful to me, personally, than Italian (for example).

As for my comment that it is a pseudo-religious movement?  Well, it’s kind of like the Scouts, actually – a group of people engaging in activities that are meant to make the world a better place and getting together for regular camps and conferences.  The history of the language is steeped in a concept that the world can be a wonderful, apolitical place where people speak to each other in neutral languages with no cultural baggage and share things and live in harmony.  A place where people talk to each other instead of fighting.  A place where peace and co-operation reign.

Esperanto speakers are embracers of an ideal.  They’re a club in which the members have chosen their own language and culture – and it is an oddly optimistic one.  They write books, plays and poetry, and happily forget that Esperanto will never be quite what Zammenhof was hoping for.  But, it is good that they don’t lose hope.  The very word “Esperanto” means “hope”, after all...  

Language memo: hoch

So, I've forgotten this a couple of times, and I thought I'd write it down somewhere to see if it will help me remember it:

Hoch, höher, am höchsten

The normal form has a 'c' but no umlaut. The comparative has an umlaut but no 'c', and the superlative has both.

Mount Louisa ist hoch, Castle Hill ist höher, aber Mt Stuart ist am höchsten.

Rætswīn

So, here's something I didn't discover until today:

http://ang.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rætswīn

Wikipedia has an Ango-Saxon version.

There aren't very many entries, and the ones I've seen are a bit short, but still. Anglo-Saxon Wikipedia entries.

Anglo-Saxon is one of the languages I should be avoiding because I find it most diverting.

I studied it for a semester in my undergrad degree, and it has helped me greatly in both my understanding of English and my studies in German and Estonian.

It actually has no resemblance to Estonian at all, but a lot of the concepts I wrestled with when studying Anglo-Saxon (or Ænglisc, as the cool kids are calling it) laid the groundwork for studying other LOTEs. I could, like, totally dig the whole Nominative/Genitive thing thanks to Ænglisc. Of course the no-Accusative/Dative thing was terribly disturbing, especially when mixed with the Partitive/Illative/Inessive/Elative/Allative/Adessive/Ablative/Translative/Terminative/Essive/Abessive/Comitative thing...

One of my ideas for a Masters or PhD project was to create an "Introduction to Anglo-Saxon" book using the same techniques used for modern "Introduction to German" books. Or something similar with Latin and Italian - but to do that I'd have to learn Latin and Italian, and I am so not learning Italian.

I'd have to put some serious effort into learning Ænglisc properly, if I was going to try that project, but I could be okay with that.

Right now, though, I should probably be focusing on Estonian and German, and not letting myself get side-tracked with Anglo-Saxon. Or, you know, Italian. Vabbè.

I'm disappointed with you, BBC...

So I bought a copy of BBC Active's Biongiorno Italia! - not because I'm learning Italian (I am so not learning Italian), but because I will be visiting Italy later in the year and want to be able to read signs and ask for food and things.

I bought it specifically because it was made by the BBC, and I knew it was connected to a televised language course. I bought it because it called itself "A complete multi-media course".

I bought it because I assumed one of the three discs that came with it would contain at least clips from the TV show - something, I don't know, multi-media-like to go with their "multi-media" course.

I mean, it's the 21st Century, right? We've had CD-ROMS for decades now, DVDs are old hat and people get eBooks with video inserts for almost the same price as a normal print book (slightly cheaper, normally - which is a bit crazy when you think it through).

Surely a "complete multi-media course" from the BBC with a TV tie-in would have video clips? It's not unreasonable to think something like this might exist, and the BBC is usually at the forefront of everything cool and useful...

But, no, turns out "multi-media" just means "sound" in addition to "print". The discs are entirely audio. The book politely informs you that you may be able to catch repeats of the TV show occasionally and that you should check out their website to see when they might be screening...

Are you kidding me? You mean to tell me that, not only is putting video onto a disc too hard for the BBC but they can't even manage to put clips on the website? You have to catch a repeat?

What the Heck?!? It's a multi-media course package! This isn't 1975, where having a tape to play in your car is the latest thing in language learning. "Multi-media" in this day and age kind of implies "more than two".

Come on, BBC. You can do better than this. If anyone is likely to be able to produce a true multimedia package, you're the ones to do it. Step up, dudes.

Or, as they might say in Italian: fare di meglio.

Of making many books there is no end...

...and much study wearies the body (Ecc. 12:12).

So, in spite of the fact that I'm supposed to be saving towards a European holiday, the other day I spent $15 on a book called Better Reading: Italian.

I bought this book - not because I'm learning Italian (I am so not learning Italian, especially as it doesn't look like I'll get around to visiting Italy this year after all) - but rather because I've developed an addiction to language books. So much so that I'll buy a book I'm never going to use just because I like the way it's designed and I want to have a closer look.

I was having a conversation over drinks a few weeks back in which someone asked me what I'd do if I was self-employed. After initially saying I'd make ceramic dogs to sell at local markets, I answered honestly: I'd like to write a couple of text books.

"Textbooks? Why would anyone want to write textbooks?" she says.
"Because they're fascinating," says I.

It wasn't a measured response - it was the first thing that came out of my mouth. It's also quite true. There's an element of design that goes into a textbook that you don't find in any other type of written material.

And the skill it takes to write didactic material that is clear, succinct and easy to digest without being condescending or oversimplified! I yearn for that kind of skill. My own writing is usually overblown and excessively quirky.

So, yes, at some point I'd like to write a couple of text books. I've started various projects that were intended to produce text books, but never actually made it past the initial planning stage. Sadly, I am most effectively motivated externally - give me a person who is waiting for me to finish something, and I will do my best to finish it. If I'm the only person who cares, it's probably not going to happen.

Some things need no translation

Now, my ability to read French is not non-existent, but it is terribly limited.

However, I think it's good enough to pull of this recipe:

http://recettessimples.fr/news/saucisses-aux-cheveux-de-spaghetti

Also, I think I kind of have to make sausage jelly-fish now...

Objects at rest? (aka, some more rabbitting on about Estonian Grammar)

Okay, so I've finally decided to start my little cross-comparisons project. I've been thinking for some time that I need to go through everything I know (or, at least, am familiar with) in German and Estonian and make sure I can do it in both languages.

I'm hoping this will also help with revision, and I might finally be able to remember things like ordinal numbers. Have I looked at them several times? Yes. Can I remember them when I want to? Not so much.

I started the other day with creating tables for First Person Singular Personal Pronouns - lining up the case with the word. It was a small table for German, slightly longer (as in, ten more entries) for Estonian.

Then I tried "matching" the words in both sets. To do this, I had to once again go back and try to wrap my head around the way Estonian deals with direct and indirect objects.

I have often struggled with this, I have read it several times, but never quite gotten to grips with it. I think this is partly because every Estonian textbook (and teacher) I have consulted tends to withhold the Partitive case for an interminable amount of time.

I don't know why they do it. Straight up, you get introduced to Nominative and Genative, but then they take you on a journey through all the locative cases and the Abessive and Comitative before talking about the Partitive.

Yet the Partative case is reasonably important for answering the "whom?" question in a sentence. You can't really talk about the object of a sentence without it, so withholding it is terribly frustrating for someone who comes from a Subject-Verb-Object language background.

I can deal with the S-V-O pattern being changed around, but not being incomplete. "Okay, this is how to recognise the subject, and this is what to do with the verb, and, you know what? Let's just leave the object out of it for a little while whilst we talk about everything else".

Plus, it's a bit hard trying to fully appreciate the fact that the Allative case is used for indirect objects when no one has properly addressed what to do with direct objects yet.

Okay, yes, the Partitive case is a bit weird and challenging when you don't have an equivalent in your language, and the locative cases are much easier to understand, so you can get them over with quickly, but still...

So, anyway, the upshot of my little table game is that I'm starting to finally get a grip on objects in the Estonian sentence. So, here's a little summary of my scribblings:

Sentence Part	English	German	Estonian
Subject	I (Nominative)	Ich (Nominative)	Mina/ma (Nominative)
Object	Me (Accusative)	Mich (Accusative)	Mind (Partative)* OR Mina/ma (Nominative)**
Indirect Object	Me (Dative)	Mir (Dative)	Mulle (Allative)***

*If the action isn't completed, involves only part of something or is negative, then you use the Partative (mind, in this example). This seems to be more common than the alternative.

**You only use the Nominative (Mina or ma, in this example) if the action is positive and complete and involves the whole of the thing in question.

***The Allative case is used for indirect objects as well as a locative case, so mulle is the equivalent of "me" in the sentences "he passed it to me", "he did it for me" and "he landed on me".

So, "me" in English could be "mind", "mina" or "mulle" in Estonian, depending on the context of the sentence.

Why it took the better part of three years for me to finally stitch that together in a coherent manner is beyond me.

(Mind you, I can't remember ever seeing it as "mina", so I'm not sure if the thing about Nominative case applies to pronouns exactly...)

Favourite Quote of the Week

I was sent a list of language learning tips this morning that included the following Estonian proverb:

A language requires neither a skirt, nor pants.

Neither does a chair. I just want to point that out to all those Germans and Italians who seem convinced a chair is either a he or a she.