L2 vocab project: Persian

I've settled on Persian for my non-English language for the vocabulary acquisition class. It's a language I'm fascinated by for a host of reasons. It's Indo-European and has a very long history—and I'm a sucker for history like that. And while modern Persian isn't its ancient counterpart, I'm also fascinated with the interplay between Iran and the West, which has been going on for years. And I'd like to go there, because it looks way cool. Alas, money is the biggest obstacle. Though the state based in Washington doesn't think it should be easy for me to go there either (and I'm not entirely sure that the state based in Tehran feels much differently).

So I'll get a little vicarious. As usual, I'll be blogging my way through this mess. In order to keep things from getting off track here, I'm setting up a blog here. To help anchor the words in the culture of Iran, I'm going to pick out proverbs. For one, you can't separate a language from its culture. For another, one of the aspects of a language that has been hinted at in class is set blocks of speech. And I really hope to be able to tell you more about formulaic speech in upcoming entries.

Future personal study

I'm not sure, but I'm thinking Old English and Sanskrit sound like fun targets for organized study.

I like Old English because it is, after all, the forerunner of the language I speak on a daily basis. It also doesn't hurt that there is quite a bit of interesting stuff written in Old English. Including wikipedia. I suspect it would be pretty easy to get to a respectable reading level but real work to master it. The cool thing here is that cruddy learning materials shouldn't hinder me too much—there are some deeply intuitive things going on in Old English for native English speakers. Well, from what I've seen anyway. Here's a sentence I cherry-picked from the OE wikipedia.

Willelm I (c. 1027 – 9 Hāligmōnaþ, 1087) wæs Engla cyning fram 1066 tō 1087.

There's only one word in there that I can't figure out, and I can see it is a month.

Sanskrit also appeals because it is kind rounds out the trifecta of dead languages with bad reputations: Latin and Ancient Greek being the other two. My apprehension with Sanskrit is that it will be Persian redux—cool, but difficult to crack with self-study. I mean look at this:

मनो हि द्विदिधं प्रोक्तं शुद्धं चाशुद्धमेव च ।

I'd tell you what this says, but I don't know. I've never studied Sanskrit.

Speaking of the Farsi debacle, I've been working on this. The idea behind it is to introduce everything with the context of Persian—this should look suspiciously familiar to Latinists. If you are a native speaker of Persian and see any gross errors, please let me know. This is how I am solidifying what I have learned in Persian. Which isn't much. Of course, the whole thing requires that you have a working knowledge of the alphabet. Hey look! I've found a series of videos that do just that.