I study bronze age languages for fun. Its not that hard, I just read a lot. However I feel insanely silly when I remember a word from a dead language before I remember the word in english, or any of the modern languages im studying. My spanish speaking coworkers I practice with think its hilarious.
Is there anything about dead languages that is different from current languages?
On one hand, there shouldn’t be. Anatomy hasn’t changed. The language didn’t “evolve” to something better, it’s just that people stopped speaking it.
OTOH, I know that certain things have changed about languages in living memory. For example, the loss of thee / thou in English, Mexican Spanish dropping “vos”, and in French using “tu” more often than the more formal “vous”.
Mostly the use of old scripts. So for Akkadian Im learning a bit of old babylonian, sumerian and neo-assyrian cunieform. Hittite predominantly uses Old Hittite cunieform with some Luwian glyph writing. Egyptian had me learning a bit of hieroglyphs and demotic. I want to take a more serious crack at Greek/Minoan linear alphabets and those new Elamite books from Francois I back burnered. Ive dabbled in some Eblaite, Ugaritic and Hurrian as well.
The biggest difference has just been the fact that Im a native english speaker. A lot of the grammatical concepts and sounds are relatively new to me. Shortly before Akkadian I started learning Arabic, and that was a huge help getting started with the semitic languages. Its been kind of funny coming back to learn indo-european languages better like Spanish and Hittite. I feel better prepared for certain grammar structures I struggled with when I was younger after learning a bit of some semitic languages and its been fun talking language with my native Spanish speaking coworkers who love to trade language lessons.
That’s what hands are for 🤌
Time to lean heavily on “I forget the word for it in this language…”
That’s me! Between ADHD and bipolar and aging, I’m definitely losing vocabulary. I can now be an idiot in two languages!
“You see, I’m a bilingual. I’m a bilingual illiterate. I can’t read in two languages.”
What I hate is when I’m searching for a word in another language I speak and it comes to me, but it’s just the English word said with a different accent, so I don’t trust it, but it’s actually right.
I volunteer at a language cafe to help people with dutch conversation, while I’m learning french and living in France. I have so many embarrasing moments where I forget the dutch word for something. Even though I still speak dutch daily with my boyfriend/family.
Ok, this one really made me lol. Well done
Smart less ending anyone?
