Y'know, I learned French and German at school. I can even remember bits of it. Boring. I actually passed a French exam five years after my last French lesson - not by trying to remember any of it, but by remembering the slight syntactical differences and the use of loan-words in both English and French (from each other, Latin and other Indo-European languages). It was tough, and to me it's insane that you can get a pass mark by knowing the wrong subject, but it was doable.
Anyways, now I'm learning something where I can't cheat my way through the process.
http://cdli.ucla.edu/
https://www.amazon.com/Sumerian-Grammar-Research-Ancient-Eastern/dp/0890031975
Yes, I'm learning a dead language that has absolutely nothing in common with anything that exists today, where nobody really knows how it's pronounced and where the experts don't agree on who is even an expert. (The book I'm using is controversial for precisely that reason.)
Yes, I'm going to learn Sumerian. It will have absolutely no value whatsoever, other than possibly adding a few years to my mental life (although, do I really want to be mental?). I might try developing a programming language for it, to help ancient web designers. I'm unsure what Inanna and Ea would think of it. Suggestions in an envelope to...
I have been on-and-off with this for years. Bought some expensive books from MIT on Akkadian grammar - they're good books, recommended by all sixty people worldwide still living who can read the language - but they're not cheap. Akkadian is one of those curious languages, it's basically a dialect of an empire using an alphabet stolen from the Sumerians with a few minor adjustments (such as vastly simpler characters). The origins are unknown, it seems to be an isolate. The same is true of Sumerian, but they had an excuse.
So why am I learning it? There's a desperate shortage of experts, but thanks to the world situation over the last couple of decades, there's also a desperate shortage of texts, many having been destroyed, bought by rich souvenir collectors or stolen by marauding, well, marauders. It has no economic benefit, although I will be able to read the Sumerian beer recipe in the original Klingon.
Yes, all that's perfectly true, but when did people become so terribly dull? I'm a British eccentric, whether I like it or not, and British eccentrics have an image to uphold - that of doing stuff that is utterly purposeless, insane and plain nuts for the sheer hell and exuberance of it all.
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/sumerian.htm
I could even write to Santa in it. Although, since he lives in Lappland, I should really use Sami or maybe Älvdalska, except that it's very hard to find books on these. Nah, stuff it, he'll just have to cope.
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