Languages and Linguistics | Polyglots, Language Learners and Linguists!

Hello! I hope this is okay to ask, here!

I'm searching for a well-structured European Portuguese language course -- English to EU PT, that teaches Beginner to A2, or further.

Online, or physical materials that can be obtained online and shipped is a necessity.

I found a course which I already really like, one that's gotten quite popular via its helpful videos, but the full program is just too darn expensive for what I can invest--it may just be overpriced, in general--so I'm investigating all options, and would greatly appreciate any recommendations.

Besides main curriculums, there are many lovely (and a few unhelpful, haha) supplemental materials--websites, apps, videos, books, etc.--for learning and practicing EU Portuguese; I'm familiar with several, but there are always more things to discover. If anyone has suggestions for those, let me know!

Obrigada, desde já!

Note: This is a work in progress and just a place holder for jotting my thoughts down.

Disclaimer: This should not be viewed as being a legitimate source of information, and just as something fun (and I do find it fun, 😊 ). As well as I am getting older, and my hardware is fairly outdated, and the programmers are a joke. So expect a lot of this to be the mere musings of a madman.

I will be updating this, eh, as much as I can. Anyway, let's do this thing.

I have had this idea of writing Tzotzil (as it's the only Mayan dialect I know well enough) with the Mayan characters, and the following are the rules that I am attempting to adhere to.

Basics

1. Abide as much as possible with known Mayan rules and knowledge of their writing.
2. Standardize and simplify the characters as much as possible as if they have continual use into a college setting, internet chatroom setting, written novels, mathematical texts, technical documentation, or children passing notes in grade school.
3. If the need arises to create a character, use only what is known.

(And I've lost my train of thought for the moment. Ok, at least I got this part started).

What I'm working on at the moment is writing down the lyrics to Vayijel's "Kux Kux".

Top: Is a fancier writing and closer to the original Mayan.

Middle: Is a more simplistic shorthand which I am attempting to further simplify the codices written forms.

Bottom: Is a transliteration of the characters used.

Non Modified Characters

a, li, ku, to, la, e, me, na.

Modified Sounds of Known Mayan Characters (That follow Mayan rules).

• vu <= huun (Huun is the Yucatec word for paper, which is vun in Tzotzil).
• s <= u (u is the third person pronoun in Yucatec, and since there are several characters for the sound u, I repurposed one of those characters for s, which is the third person pronoun in Tzotzil).

Modified Characters of Known Mayan Characters (That do not follow Mayan rules).

• xu <= nuuk (I have found a 'xu' character in my "The New Catalog of Maya Nieroglyphs Vol. 2", but haven't implemented it as of yet).
  • Since ku is spelled twice, I added an extra tail onto the character xu to reduplicate it across both ku characters.
• k'o <= o embedded with the letter k'i.

The final word "svulanot", is spelled "s vulan[a] to" with "s" and "to" as affixes separated by a space to the verb vulan[a], but this may change once I start making it possible to write these characters much smaller (as should be for written novels, text books, etc).

(Ok, I've spent what little brain power I've had...Man, I hope I can remember this...I really really enjoy this kind of thinking, heh).

(Also, if ya'll have any questions, just ask. Maybe it will help this aging mind to concentrate a bit better...Anything is possible, 🤣 ).

The Past, Present, and Future of Language Learning in Italy and Great Britain

***CALL FOR PAPERS***
The Case of English in Italy, and of Italian in Britain
9 Nov. 2024
Pembroke College, University of Oxford
Deadline: 2 Sept. 2024
➡️ http://italianstudies.ox.ac.uk//content/cfp
#CfP #languageLearning #languageTeaching #SLT #ELT
@languages

Hi guys! I've made a new community for people learning the main three Scandinavian languages.

So if you speak or are learning Swedish, Danish or Norwegian, head on over to !learnscandilanguages@lemmy.world

I hope it can be a fun place where we can support each other and share resources.

I've used this a use times and it's fairly good. I recommend it.

Here’s the story of how and why I took this language test. I wrote this for friends and family, but others have read it as well. After putting all of this together, I myself am amazed at how long and hard I worked on this. It didn’t seem like it at the time, but when I wrote it all down, it turned out to be quite a lot.

Huh! In my speech, the Tr in "tree" or "trigger" is really close to Chr as in "chree". In fact to pronounce "chree" I have to aspirate so hard to distinguish it from /tr/.

Is this common? [ˈt͡ʃɹi:] instead of [ˈtɹi:]? Why does this happen? Is there something about going from a plosive to an approximant that creates an affricate?

I'm not sure if this is something you guys can or want to help with. The bathroom at my current job is completely free of graffiti except for the words "itik nuliak" written very clearly in Sharpie. It's not a language local to where I live and putting it in Google translate doesn't do anything. It's been bothering me.

A: thEHm B: thUHm C: əm

I was watching an episode of Monk (S03E12), and in the first few minutes, the detective asks his assistant "Do you have a pliers?" That immediately struck me as weird, but later, towards the end of the episode, he makes the comment "This was cut with a scissors." The only place I've ever seen 'a scissors' was in old Peanuts cartoons, and I've never ever heard 'a pliers', but I guess it could make sense in a way.

I grew up saying a pair of scissors or pliers, which is weird in its own way, since it's a single object. I'm just wondering if anyone else has ever heard these terms.

For me it was Hebrew and it's cool writing system, then ithkuil and how alien it seems. It lead me down a deep rabbithole to where i now make writing systems.

By words in reverse, I actually mean the entire word reverse pronounced and not just the letters rearranged. Best example is when you reverse a video, pronunciation of every letter in every word reverses.

Is it because instead of blowing out the air, we're breathing in? Are there any papers related to it? I'm interested to read

Nothing rigorous or scientific, but an interesting test of mutual intelligibility between romance languages, considering Romanian has evolved separately from the other major and minor languages/dialects of southern and eastern Europe. I like that Iulian, the conductor of the experiment, chose mostly non-cognate words to make the game non trivial (except for the "greier"/"grillo" pair) and some of them had slavic origin (e.g. "mândrie" coming from old slavic "mondrŭ") which would have been unintelligible for the average Italian speaker.

For me personally, the Mayan script is by far the most beautiful scripts on the face of the Earth. How it is writ is just so fascinating. However, unfortunately, I started finding more about it late in life after my mind began slowing down. So, unfortunately, I have not been able to retain a lot of the information. Oh well.

http://www.famsi.org/ This is one site that I frequented a lot in the middle phase. Even tried my hand at learning Yucatec (which is quite different from Tzotzil, which I know the most).

In the early days, http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/med/, this site was the only one I knew of, and had spent a lot of time here.

Later (relatively recently) I began using the books "The New Catalog of Maya Hieroglyphics Vols I & II".

Now, again, I got old (too fast), and the mind wasn't too keen on learning new tricks. So I decided, just for fun, I'd learn to write Tzotzil with the letters. Which, as any who have studied the Maya scripts would know, that wouldn't exactly be a simple task.

The majority of known written words were in Ch'ol and Yucatec. Ch'ol is fairly similar to Tzotzil in many ways, but one thing I have had an issue with, is discerning which characters were used for which prefixes/suffixes in Ch'ol verses Yucatec. Then there are word parts that are not exactly the same as in Yucatec.

Tzotzil ch- is 'ta + x'. Not hard to do in certain circumstances, ta+xi, ta+xa. Simple, easy, can do. However, dealing with ta+x, on the other hand, not so easy. I have not been too fortunate to figure out that one. So what I did, then, is I use the letter for "yax" for the "x" sound.

Another one, is Tzotzil has 's' for the 3rd person, whereas Yucatec uses 'u'. Again, not that difficult, just equate 'u' as 's'. So, I could, in theory (again, just for fun, not to be correct), I could spell a word such as chk'opoj as "ta+yax+[u]+k'o+po+[ho/hi]" (brackets don't necessarily need to be spelled. One of the very fascinating things of the Maya scripts, for me anyway).

And I lost my train of thought.

Just a final summary.

There is a lot that I just don't know, and there is a lot that I will never be able to retain the information for, but I still play around with this idea. I do know I'd have to change some letters' sounds (which is not necessarily un-Mayan). As well as I would have to create new rules (hopefully, fingers crossed, I could find and remember the information for those rules that might be useful and correct enough) in order to make this possible.

Don't know if I'll ever succeed, but no harm in trying, I think, 😅 .

https://imgur.com/a/tq4OaMM Second experiment (Before I realized ta+x = ch).

https://imgur.com/a/npy2Qaw Third experiment.

https://i.imgur.com/Wpvxkqy.jpg "I'm not afraid of not ghosts", "Mu-xixi' ta-ch'ule[lal]" (Characters in the brackets aren't spelled). These, I believe, are pretty decently spelled.

Unfortunately, my mind is not too great, but hopefully someone finds this interesting. 😇

Trying to force my mind to think on something (health issues making brain a wee wonky).

Anyhoo, here's some links to things I've done a long time ago when my mind was more capable.

Some basic grammar.

https://forum.unilang.org/viewtopic.php?t=28886

A Cherokee Phoenix article with literal translations below the translation of each paragraph.

https://forum.unilang.org/viewtopic.php?f=122&t=32262

(And oooooof! Lemmy does that blasted double space for a newline. God I hate that).

Hilvsgi dikahnesdi gvhdi tsalagi. Here's a few words using Cherokee.

gayo, gayotli : A small amount. A little bit. Formed from the word[s], ahyotli, diniyotli (Child, children).

gayo tsalagi tsiwonisgi. I speak a little Cherokee.

Tsalagihas gohlga? Does he understand Cherokee? Gayotligwu. Just a bit.

usdi; tsunsdi : Little, small, baby (human); Little living things, babies.

usdi asgay tsigohti. I see a little man.

usdi tsigohti. I see a little one. I see a baby.

ada, anida : Young animal

anida gitli gatsigohti. I see puppies.

ada ada ada. Wood just said a baby animal. (Trust me when I say I'd have a hell of a time trying to pronounce this, regardless how much I know, but it does crack me up every time I think about it, heh).

Welp, that's a very very small set of words...But meh, I did something, 😄

What do y'all think of conlangs? Anyone here know toki pona? I personally speak it, and am wondering.

I wrote this a while back, it's a probably a niche tool for people who like to stay in the terminal, load their own data from simple tsv files, and still learn vocabulary.

Let's answer this simple question just to get this community started!

We're a board for polyglots, language learners, linguists and anyone interested in human languages.