Monday, December 5, 2011

Future personal study

I'm not sure, but I'm thinking Old English and Sanskrit sound like fun targets for organized study.

I like Old English because it is, after all, the forerunner of the language I speak on a daily basis. It also doesn't hurt that there is quite a bit of interesting stuff written in Old English. Including wikipedia. I suspect it would be pretty easy to get to a respectable reading level but real work to master it. The cool thing here is that cruddy learning materials shouldn't hinder me too much—there are some deeply intuitive things going on in Old English for native English speakers. Well, from what I've seen anyway. Here's a sentence I cherry-picked from the OE wikipedia.
Willelm I (c. 1027 – 9 Hāligmōnaþ1087) wæs Engla cyning fram 1066 tō 1087.
There's only one word in there that I can't figure out, and I can see it is a month.

Sanskrit also appeals because it is kind rounds out the trifecta of dead languages with bad reputations: Latin and Ancient Greek being the other two. My apprehension with Sanskrit is that it will be Persian redux—cool, but difficult to crack with self-study. I mean look at this:
मनो हि द्विदिधं प्रोक्तं शुद्धं चाशुद्धमेव च ।
I'd tell you what this says, but I don't know. I've never studied Sanskrit.

Speaking of the Farsi debacle, I've been working on this. The idea behind it is to introduce everything with the context of Persian—this should look suspiciously familiar to Latinists. If you are a native speaker of Persian and see any gross errors, please let me know. This is how I am solidifying what I have learned in Persian. Which isn't much. Of course, the whole thing requires that you have a working knowledge of the alphabet. Hey look! I've found a series of videos that do just that.