Ok, it’s really not that hard to grock.

So I started school back this week, taking five classes which mostly seem pretty fun … in case you’re interested here’s the workload:

• JA211: Japanese Conversation
• TH247: Introduction to Readings (seems to teach critical reading and analysis skills, probably not too hard)
• SN343: Introduction to Spanish Literature (looks really fun)
• FL346: Northern Thai Languages and Writing Systems
• JA201 LEC: Japanese Reading Skills
• SK202: Sanskrit 2
• JA201 LAB: Japanese Listening Skills

The Japanese coursework represents a change in their curriculum for this year, they had previously started the second year by teaching 600 or so Kanji characters but now they focus on reading the characters and understanding the grammar first. I’ve only had one class so far, but it seems like they want us to be able to understand passages writing at about a 3rd grade level, be able to translate them into Thai, stuff like that. They don’t seem to interested in our ability to translate Thai back into Japanese just yet (well the conversation class does that but at a different level).

The Spanish lit class starts with early writings by Columbus and moves through modern writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar and Juan Rulfo. In some cases, the texts have been simplified for a foreign audience, other times they just provide notes to help us understand more.

In FL346, we will study three different dead languages which were used mostly to write stone inscriptions like this one 500+ years ago in Northern Thailand (and parts of Burma and Laos). I will post more on this as I understand it, it’s fascinating to see how the early writing system and grammars all influenced this modern system. I don’t really grock enough yet to explain it tho.

Part of me was a bit worried that studying five (well eight if you could all three languages taught in FL346) different languages in the same term would be hard, or more so that I wouldn’t have enough time to dedicate to all of them. This blog posting makes some good points that it is actually a good thing to do. Basically it says that studying more than a few languages at once might make things slower going at first, but that it would pay off in the long-run by forcing your brain to work in new ways. I think that this is especially true for languages with different writing systems and radically different grammars. (My friend Alan claims that I am the only person he knows who is making linguistic preparations for his past lives by studying four different dead languages).

That being said, I am going to focus on just these languages for now … I’ll keep working on Lao / Issan with the girls at work, and will keep working through the Pimsleur Vietnamese CDs in preparation for my trip next week, but am not going to spend too much time on anything other than my coursework for a while.

So I’ve been meaning to update my Thai (ภาษาไทย) -> Devanagari (संस्कृता) chart for a while and three things seemed to collide tonight which made me finally start on it. 1: I have a Spanish final tomorrow which I should be studying for but am being lazy 2: I found this great chart on Wikipedia and figured I would just steal it and expand on it 3: I’ve been reading a book about the Northern Thai language and Lanna script (ล้านนา) in advance of a class I am taking next term.

So anyway, I reworked the chart some and this time added in mappings for the Lanna language. I should offer this out with a caveat that I am still learning the Lanna language and may have made a mistake, please let me know if you notice anything. I still need to rework my chart of the mouth and a few other things, I think that I want to add in mappings for more languages first tho … maybe Lao, Cambodian and Burmese.

You will need to download the LN TILOK font to properly see the Lanna text. Alternatively you can download a jpeg version of the chart.

This is a great article on how to properly pronounce the Sanskrit letters. Thai speakers should note that the way that many of the letters are pronounced is different from the way that their Thai representation is generally pronounced in central Thai.

there are often similarities between numbers, due in part to the fact that thousands of years ago numbers were the main thing that different populations needed to communicate for trade purposes. i would love to read more on the similarities between numbers across the world, but have been thinking about the following one lately.

in sanskrit, the word for 100 is शतीम् (śatim) in thai we have สตางค์ (sa dtaang) (listen) which is 1/100th of a baht (kinda like a penny, or cent) and ศตวรรษ (soht wat) (listen) which means century. the words for century in spanish and french are siècle and siglo. interesting how they all maintain a s (or c) sound to start and are generally phonetically similar. there is a list of sanskrit numbers here at http://veda.wikidot.com/sanskrit-numbers i’d be interested to hear what other people might know on this topic.