(no subject)

[pne]

Three writing systems that I would like to get around to learning to read some day are Armenian, Georgian, and Devanagari.

Comments

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Armenian is fun. I still have some trouble distinguishing the characters for sibilants. (It doesn't help matters that Western Armenian reversed the values of the voiced and voiceless plosives and then merged one batch with the aspirates.)

Devanagari is the bane of the life, though. I've never managed to memorise the forms of more than a handful of letters. I couldn't begin to tell you why.

[darth-spacey.livejournal.com]

Armenian and Georgian are just alphabets. You can quasi-learn them in a day each. Full retention obviously would take longer. Have you tried Henrik's flashcard thing lately?

Devanagari is mostly simple, but I have never yet mastered it. The conjuncts are a pain in the rear, but all the other stuff is trivial if you have any familiarity with other Brahmi-derived scripts. Somebody needs to teach India to use the virama more liberally, preferably several centuries ago...

[pne.livejournal.com]

Have you tried Henrik's flashcard thing lately?

Very briefly, mostly to try it out (and with Armenian and Georgian, yes). I can imagine that that might be what I'd use to practice.

all the other stuff is trivial if you have any familiarity with other Brahmi-derived scripts.

Bit of a chicken-and-egg thing, though, isn't it? I would've thought that anyone who knows any Brahmi-derived script would be more likely to know Devanagari than anything else.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

And, as someone who has spent more time studying Tibetan and Thai scripts than Devanagari, I can't agree that the transition from one to another is "trivial". I managed to get a handle on Tibetan pretty quickly, but the others still cause me endless trouble. (With Thai, of course, there's the whole let's-fix-our-spelling-in-1283-and-then-never-revise-it-again thing going on, too. But it's not like Tibetan is blissfully free from that its own self.)

[darth-spacey.livejournal.com]

The prefix and circumfix vowels can be daunting if you haven't dealt with them in some form before, and the notion of an inherent vowel may be discomforting (though not to pne, I'm sure).

[darth-spacey.livejournal.com]

Kinda chicken-and-egg: I learned Sinhalese writing before Devanagari. It uses a virama almost exclusively, though there are a limited number of rare and optional conjuncts, which are all transparently-formed. For some reason, the out-of-sequence vowels were easy for me to get to grips with, too.

[tungol.livejournal.com]

Henrik's flashcard thing? What is this? It sounds like something that might be handy.

[darth-spacey.livejournal.com]

Distribution may or may not be limited to a select inner sanctum. I'm not aware of the current desires of its creator, who IMO is one of the most useful programmers I know, btw. If pne knows the situation better than I, I'll let him answer, or I'll ask Henrik.

Henrik's flashcard thing

[pne.livejournal.com]

Henrik is Henrik Theiling, the current Master of Instrumentality (IIRC) of the CONLANG-L mailing list.

His "flashcard thing" is Henrik Theiling's Script Teacher, http://www.theiling.de/schrift/. (No idea whether it's "secret", but since it's linked to from his sitemap (http://www.theiling.de/sitemap.html), I rather doubt it.)

It has flashcards that let you practise, among other things, Japanese kana, Bopomofo/Zhuyin, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, Georgian, and Armenian.

Re: Henrik's flashcard thing

[tungol.livejournal.com]

Thanks. (I figured it was that Henrik.)

[ubykhlives.livejournal.com]

Georgian really is quite easy - a standard alphabetic script with no upper/lower case distinction worth mentioning. I had it entrenched in memory within a week.