It looks like my last post was in the beginning of September, and at the time I was having fun receiving images from weather satellites.
Well the weather turned, and my solar powered satellite receiver system had too many days in a row of dark clouds… so I decided to take the station down at least until spring.
I followed up spending time playing with my amateur radios — talking on the radio, playing around with radio and antennas… but even that has settled down to me occasionally pulling email over radio and just talking every few days or so.
So what’s the new topic? Well it’s language learning…
In my life I have tried again and again to learn a second language… I tried Spanish in high school… and it just did not click for me, Tried again after college, again — it appeared I have no nack for learning languages.
Years later I met a friend at work — who I worked closely with, He was from Israel, and I spent a lot of time trying to learn Hebrew — I really liked the sound of it. But only managed to learn the alphabet… Vocabulary is so difficult.
Later in life I became a Christian (another story) and I wanted to really study the Bible. Knowing it was written in Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic, I began studying biblical Hebrew and biblical Greek. At the same time I realized the modern versions of those languages were a little different, but figured it may help to look in to the modern versions… So I studied all of them… Wow, being very motivated I learned to read Hebrew and Greek, and spent more time in Hebrew. I gained a lot of vocabulary as far as being able to read, and eventually I was able to study the Bible in Hebrew and Greek using lexicons and the bit of knowledge I learned about the languages.
Coming up to more recent times, in January of 2020 my wife and my new years resolution was to learn Italian (Our ancestors are Italian) and I said, once we learn it well enough we’ll take a trip to Italy as a reward. We studied a lot but then the pandemic hit, and it hit Italy real hard… I decided, and it still seems the case, we’ll be doing no international traveling any time soon, so we gave up on the Italian lessons.
Yet now it’s becoming winter and I again have the urge to dig in to a language. Italian? Hebrew? Greek?
Well what I have done is start a refresh on modern Hebrew, but what about a new to me language?
[As an aside, I just bought a workbook that helps train you in writing Hebrew printed letters as part of my Hebrew refresh, here is an affiliate link to it… if you buy though this link I will get some financial support by it.]
So I looked online for “The easiest languages for English speakers to learn”, and the list of languages — which don’t get me wrong– I sure they are fine languages, did not seem to inspire me… None of them looked like I’d find much in the way of movies and TV so I could get exposure to the spoke language.
So it came upon my mind to take a new approach. Having already had an exposure to, basically, ancient Hebrew, and first century Greek, I thought, why not go deeper in time… And so I looked for the oldest written language.
Mind you when you do that, you will come up with the oldest artifact that has writing on it — they call that the oldest written language… Forget about artifacts that haven’t been found yet or artifacts lost to the destructive nature of time and entropy. But the oldest written language turns out to be Sumerian.
Well I have already a bit of knowledge about that. It turns out the oldest written joke we know of is written on a clay tablet in Sumerian using Cuneiform writing. The oldest cuneiform writing is a Sumerian tablet from around 3500 BC.
So now that’s my goal — Learn Sumerian! Digging in to that I found a site that said, wait… before you go ahead and start with Sumerian — which you can do— you should learn Akkadian first. Sumer is a more ancient civilization in Mesopotamia, The Akkadians came later, and adopted Sumer’s cuneiform writing to their own language. Akkadian turns out to be the oldest written semitic language. The language tree, if I can describe it in words, has proto-semtitic a the top (meaning more or less, the original semitic language). branching off of that is Akkadian, on a separate branch, down a level or two we find Arabic, and other languages, down below that we find Hebrew. These are all very ancient languages, and are related together in that all semitic languages have common features…
So I began my study of Akkadian — and already see, yes, there is similarities to ancient Hebrew, and then it dawned on me… This is where my real language interest lies– in ancient languages of the middle east, and in their writings. Sure I can rely on experts to translate things to English, but it all seems more real to learn to translate myself.
If I follow the trail from Akkadian and Sumerian, to Arabic and Hebrew, and maybe even go as far as ancient Egyptian… I will be happy that I’ll have a more direct connection to the area of the world and the time periods I find very interesting. Will I be able to read that original joke directly from cuneiform? The code of Hammurabi right off a photograph? The Epic of Gilgamesh? Only time will tell…
Knowing myself, this surge will last a month or two before I run out of steam and have to put it aside for some other interest… How far can I get ?
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