bit_pattern
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I've decided to do a 180 in terms of career and am currently training to be a chef 
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Life Advice & Visual Arts
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What are you learning about these days?
- Thread starter Jamshyd
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bit_pattern
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So... What happened at band camp?
Jamshyd
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^^ That is awesome!! I love sailing
My mum is an adept sailor(ess?), she's taught me a thing or two whenever the opportunity has arisen.
Assuming one lives by a water outlet, is sailing costly? This is something I always wondered about.
I know that yachting costs an arm and a leg, but what about those little boats?
Maybe I should start a new thread, lol...
izzy66
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i''ve been a RN for 20+ years doing direct patient care almost always in trauma/critical care. it's a physically demanding job, 12 hr shifts, always on my feet, moving patients, and i'm tired. i love my work but i'm overdue for a change.
change most likely means going back to school but maybe not. there are lots of possibilities open to me and i'm excited now that i've decided to be doing something different a year from now but also overwhelmed.
-izzy
change most likely means going back to school but maybe not. there are lots of possibilities open to me and i'm excited now that i've decided to be doing something different a year from now but also overwhelmed.
-izzy
MyDoorsAreOpen
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God bless you. Nurses are the heart and soul of healthcare. You're wise to leave this job BEFORE you're completely burnt out.
izzy66
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thank you, that's very kind of you to say.
i took leave for a few years in the '90s cuz of some health problems and job burn out.
so much has changed in medicine and not for the better. i don't want to ever hate going to work and i don't -yet- but it's time to do something else. i have no idea what "something else" will be and i really gotta figure whatever out very soon.
-izzy
ikkyu
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Still on a poetics kick, focusing on post-WWII ("postmodern") American poetry. Apart from that, native plants and their uses, local ecology and geomorphology ever since I moved to my current residence, which happens to be an ideal spot for learning about geological processes.
Toying with the idea of learning a bit of or at least about Arabic, but it looks very difficult. I dunno if I can resist though, the calligraphic script has me spellbound.
Toying with the idea of learning a bit of or at least about Arabic, but it looks very difficult. I dunno if I can resist though, the calligraphic script has me spellbound.
Jamshyd
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^ Take it from a native Arabic-speaker... the irony is that this really pretty calligraphic script, and the sounds it represents, are probably the most frustrating part about learning Arabic! Once you master them, it becomes easier. As such, learning Arabic is similar to learning Sanskrit - with the latter too, it seems a lot of time is spent at the beginning simply mastering the art of deciphering the script and converting it into voice...
MyDoorsAreOpen
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^ Do you guys leave out the vowels completely in everyday written communication, the way Hebrew does? That's one major thing that makes Hebrew a challenge for speakers of European languages.
Althgh intrstngly, we rlly dn't nd vwls to rd Englsh sntncs, unlss thy cme at the bgnnng or the end of a wrd.
Althgh intrstngly, we rlly dn't nd vwls to rd Englsh sntncs, unlss thy cme at the bgnnng or the end of a wrd.
Jamshyd
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^ Haha, yes. Vowels (there are only 3: A, U, I) are always omitted, except when the vowel is critical to differentiating between two otherwise identical words. Someone with enough proficiency to read a newspaper would generally know enough grammar (that is very little actually, relative to the wealth of grammar above and beyond) to not need vowels.
Also like with classic Hebrew, the vowels are usually expressed as tiny "decorations" on the letters, unless they are an integral part of the word's root.
This root system is similar in all semitic languages I've studied, as well as in Ancient Egyptian (which, although not semitic, is clearly related grammatically), yet utterly alien to indo-european languages. It is the second most challenging aspect, IMO, after the script obstacle.
Also like with classic Hebrew, the vowels are usually expressed as tiny "decorations" on the letters, unless they are an integral part of the word's root.
This root system is similar in all semitic languages I've studied, as well as in Ancient Egyptian (which, although not semitic, is clearly related grammatically), yet utterly alien to indo-european languages. It is the second most challenging aspect, IMO, after the script obstacle.
MyDoorsAreOpen
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^ I'd be interested to hear your reaction to Maltese. It's built on essentially a Semitic substrate, but is written in the Roman alphabet, and is chock full of Italian-isms. Tunisians can apparently understand it when all words of Italian origin are omitted. Italian speakers can't.
I must say, the grammar is probably the thing that daunts me most about Semitic languages, because as you said, it's entirely alien to my mind. I'm guessing it's highly illuminating of the general Middle Eastern / Northeast African mindset, that is, the way people in that land see their relationship to each other and to the world. I found that to be true of Chinese and Japanese grammar too. You CAN'T speak Japanese without conceiving of human relationships the way the Japanese do, really.)
I've handled alien writing systems and strange sounds. But putting the verb in a different place in the sentence, and complicated forms of inflection, definitely do throw me for a loop.
The one thing that strikes me about both the Semitic languages AND the tongues of China, is that both seem adapted to (by?) a place where day-to-day life really didn't change much for many many centuries, for most speakers. Integrating entirely new concepts and ways of seeing the world, since the colonial age, has been a major challenge for both. I guess this makes sense when you see that both the Middle East and China invented written language from scratch, and are two of the places with the longest written historical records.
I must say, the grammar is probably the thing that daunts me most about Semitic languages, because as you said, it's entirely alien to my mind. I'm guessing it's highly illuminating of the general Middle Eastern / Northeast African mindset, that is, the way people in that land see their relationship to each other and to the world. I found that to be true of Chinese and Japanese grammar too. You CAN'T speak Japanese without conceiving of human relationships the way the Japanese do, really.)
I've handled alien writing systems and strange sounds. But putting the verb in a different place in the sentence, and complicated forms of inflection, definitely do throw me for a loop.
The one thing that strikes me about both the Semitic languages AND the tongues of China, is that both seem adapted to (by?) a place where day-to-day life really didn't change much for many many centuries, for most speakers. Integrating entirely new concepts and ways of seeing the world, since the colonial age, has been a major challenge for both. I guess this makes sense when you see that both the Middle East and China invented written language from scratch, and are two of the places with the longest written historical records.
Jamshyd
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^ Re: Maltese, you probably won't be surprised to hear that my reaction to it is, in fact, one of immense interest .
You are absolutely right, except that for the most part, Maltese is now formally accepted as a semitic language without question. You are also correct in that Maltese and Tunisian are very close. So much so, in fact, that I will personally go as far as say that Tunisian is more mutually-intelligible with Maltese than it is with Levantine or Peninsular Arabic!
I personally have a very hard time understanding anyone west of Egypt, particularly Tunisians. I imagine that, say, an American or a German scholar who devoted several years to mastering classical Arabic, would be in for quite a shock shortly upon landing in, say, Cairo. Because while the locals will have no problem understanding him or her (since Classical Arabic is still the language of publication), he will need to relearn much of what he learnt in order to understand their vernacular, which I would personally declare to be so far-removed from Standard Arabic as to be classified as a new but closely-related language. The evolution is not unlike that of the Romance languages from Latin.
This ties in to your second part. While this adaptability may be applicable to the vernaculars, Standard Arabic is what I would call an ossified language. I may be going too far, but I'd argue that the reasons for this is that it is locked to somewhere around the fall of the Abbasid caliphate, at which point the Islamic Empire continued, albeit as a fragmented collection of both actual-arab and non-arab (but muslim) identities. But this is actually a point I am still researching and might very well find myself wrong in the near future.
A big obstacle in making these distinctions obvious is a combination of Islam being a dominant religion (hence the Koran studied in classical Arabic) and, more pertinently, the media. The latter not only uses the same Standard Arabic across the board, but also through soap operas and dramas forces people of one part to relearn the "arabic" of other parts (for example: most arabic-speakers are familair with the peculiarities of Egyptian Arabic because Egyptian Drama is so widespread. This creates the illusion that all these devisions are mutually-intelligible when in fact, when taken in isolation, would prove to be entirely different languages.
It is worthy of mention that the Old Ethiopic and the Berber languages are also indisputably semitic, but sadly I know very little of them, although I do know that Berber (particularly Tmeziget) is seamlessly incorporated into Moroccan "Arabic", where it occupies maybe half of the language. The rest is split up between French, Local Influences, and lastly, Arabic-proper.
. You are absolutely right, except that for the most part, Maltese is now formally accepted as a semitic language without question. You are also correct in that Maltese and Tunisian are very close. So much so, in fact, that I will personally go as far as say that Tunisian is more mutually-intelligible with Maltese than it is with Levantine or Peninsular Arabic!
I personally have a very hard time understanding anyone west of Egypt, particularly Tunisians. I imagine that, say, an American or a German scholar who devoted several years to mastering classical Arabic, would be in for quite a shock shortly upon landing in, say, Cairo. Because while the locals will have no problem understanding him or her (since Classical Arabic is still the language of publication), he will need to relearn much of what he learnt in order to understand their vernacular, which I would personally declare to be so far-removed from Standard Arabic as to be classified as a new but closely-related language. The evolution is not unlike that of the Romance languages from Latin.
This ties in to your second part. While this adaptability may be applicable to the vernaculars, Standard Arabic is what I would call an ossified language. I may be going too far, but I'd argue that the reasons for this is that it is locked to somewhere around the fall of the Abbasid caliphate, at which point the Islamic Empire continued, albeit as a fragmented collection of both actual-arab and non-arab (but muslim) identities. But this is actually a point I am still researching and might very well find myself wrong in the near future.
A big obstacle in making these distinctions obvious is a combination of Islam being a dominant religion (hence the Koran studied in classical Arabic) and, more pertinently, the media. The latter not only uses the same Standard Arabic across the board, but also through soap operas and dramas forces people of one part to relearn the "arabic" of other parts (for example: most arabic-speakers are familair with the peculiarities of Egyptian Arabic because Egyptian Drama is so widespread. This creates the illusion that all these devisions are mutually-intelligible when in fact, when taken in isolation, would prove to be entirely different languages.
It is worthy of mention that the Old Ethiopic and the Berber languages are also indisputably semitic, but sadly I know very little of them, although I do know that Berber (particularly Tmeziget) is seamlessly incorporated into Moroccan "Arabic", where it occupies maybe half of the language. The rest is split up between French, Local Influences, and lastly, Arabic-proper.
MyDoorsAreOpen
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^ How about ancient Babylonian? Was that in the same language family?
Here's a crackpot anthropological theory of mine. I think the valleys of the Caucasus mountains were a cradle of humanity during the last major ice age -- somehow these areas remained habitable and verdant when most of the rest of Europe and central Asia were not, and many little micro-civilizations flourished in separate valleys. Then when the earth became more habitable, this area seeded all the surrounding regions as people ventured out. This would explain the myth of Noah's ark (which landed in modern day Armenia), as well as the incredible ethnic and linguistic diversity that exists there. It's nearly as diverse as Papua New Guinea. You find some entire language families confined to that region, and some old Indo-European languages that obviously split off from the proto language very early. I say that area is a prehistoric cradle of humanity.
I don't think Semitic languages came from that cluster, though. Since they have a focal area of high diversity in Ethiopia and Eritrea, I think these languages might be closer to the ORIGINAL source of humanity, and could be far more ancient than other language families presently used in Europe or Asia.
I love playing the armchair geographer.
Here's a crackpot anthropological theory of mine. I think the valleys of the Caucasus mountains were a cradle of humanity during the last major ice age -- somehow these areas remained habitable and verdant when most of the rest of Europe and central Asia were not, and many little micro-civilizations flourished in separate valleys. Then when the earth became more habitable, this area seeded all the surrounding regions as people ventured out. This would explain the myth of Noah's ark (which landed in modern day Armenia), as well as the incredible ethnic and linguistic diversity that exists there. It's nearly as diverse as Papua New Guinea. You find some entire language families confined to that region, and some old Indo-European languages that obviously split off from the proto language very early. I say that area is a prehistoric cradle of humanity.
I don't think Semitic languages came from that cluster, though. Since they have a focal area of high diversity in Ethiopia and Eritrea, I think these languages might be closer to the ORIGINAL source of humanity, and could be far more ancient than other language families presently used in Europe or Asia.
I love playing the armchair geographer.
Jamshyd
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^ Haha, indeed.
Babylonian is a tricky one, mostly due because its formation goes back to a peculiar cultural event that is not well-understood, that is the "semeticization" of Mesopotamia. The Babylonian language (what we think about when we look at cuneiform) is somewhat nominally accepted as a semitic language. But the professor who taught me ancient Hebrew has a good point when he points out that Babylonian contains a lot of "alien" (as in, untraceable.. I used that word hesitantly) elements.
RE: The caucasus, you'll be happy to know that the majority of medieval Islamic intelligencia agree with you, at least as far as language is concerned. This area is called by them "bilad allasain" (the lands of tongues). I find the idea rather plausible, and that the galaxy of isolates found there may indicate remnants of something much more ancient.
Btw, the semitic cluster itself is very homogenously defined and there is very little disagreement about what it constitutes. It is when it comes to making a super-family that contains subsaharan african languages that people start widely disagreeing, which in my little head indicates a pre-historical movement into the sahara rather than out of it!
The connection to the Ethiopic one, although mythologically described in great detail in the kebra nagast (that, apparently, the Ark® was smuggled into Ethiopia by the Queen of Sheba, who was black according to this legend. Of course, this means that God is black, too :D). On a more sober level, it is not inconceivable that the strongest cultural force south of Egypt would borrow from its more willing neighbor (the Yemen). The Gates of Sorrow (the straight south of the read sea) may have made for easy, if not ironic, crossing of language and culture and Khat.
Babylonian is a tricky one, mostly due because its formation goes back to a peculiar cultural event that is not well-understood, that is the "semeticization" of Mesopotamia. The Babylonian language (what we think about when we look at cuneiform) is somewhat nominally accepted as a semitic language. But the professor who taught me ancient Hebrew has a good point when he points out that Babylonian contains a lot of "alien" (as in, untraceable.. I used that word hesitantly
) elements. RE: The caucasus, you'll be happy to know that the majority of medieval Islamic intelligencia agree with you, at least as far as language is concerned. This area is called by them "bilad allasain" (the lands of tongues). I find the idea rather plausible, and that the galaxy of isolates found there may indicate remnants of something much more ancient.
Btw, the semitic cluster itself is very homogenously defined and there is very little disagreement about what it constitutes. It is when it comes to making a super-family that contains subsaharan african languages that people start widely disagreeing, which in my little head indicates a pre-historical movement into the sahara rather than out of it!
The connection to the Ethiopic one, although mythologically described in great detail in the kebra nagast (that, apparently, the Ark® was smuggled into Ethiopia by the Queen of Sheba, who was black according to this legend. Of course, this means that God is black, too :D). On a more sober level, it is not inconceivable that the strongest cultural force south of Egypt would borrow from its more willing neighbor (the Yemen). The Gates of Sorrow (the straight south of the read sea) may have made for easy, if not ironic, crossing of language and culture and Khat.
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mav3rick
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I'm learning about NLP (Non-Linguistic Programming), Russian language and the goings on of the various Mafioso bosses circa 1970-1990s... Haha. How eclectic!
I want to start on some chemistry stuff. I know the entire periodic table off by heart (father was an abusive, alcoholic, chemistry genius who used to lecture me on a daily basis about it) so I want to expand into some more in depth stuff :D
I want to start on some chemistry stuff. I know the entire periodic table off by heart (father was an abusive, alcoholic, chemistry genius who used to lecture me on a daily basis about it) so I want to expand into some more in depth stuff :D
L2R
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a mate dropped off a bass guitar, so that's another project.
oh shit my mandarin fuse has officially shit itself. the mother in-law wants me and wifey to present a "seminar" to university staff and students on subject still unknown when we go to china in may.
and this is supposed to be a friggin holiday. first i'll still be studying my university units while there and now this.
oh shit my mandarin fuse has officially shit itself. the mother in-law wants me and wifey to present a "seminar" to university staff and students on subject still unknown when we go to china in may.
and this is supposed to be a friggin holiday. first i'll still be studying my university units while there and now this. That reminds me, I need to get reacquainted with my good friend Mr bass guitar
Wow good luck with the seminar in China!!!!
I'm sure you'll be be awesome mate
DarthMom
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i wish i could respond to this thread, but unfortunately between work and family, i was ulitimately depressed last week during some free time when i wandered around a book store with no goals, I want somrthing to delve into dammit!
which is worse, no time to find a hobby or no time to think of one?!
which is worse, no time to find a hobby or no time to think of one?!