The Mad Latinist ([info]jdm314) wrote,
@ 2007-07-04 01:55:00
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Entry tags:certo, cuneiform, lewis & short, old persian, serto, stolper, weird al

  • I need to tell you about my close personal friend Weird Al. But later.

  • Today I overheard people talking about how to find a copy of the Lewis and Short Latin Dictionary, so I butted in to help. The guy said that, despite his basic Latin knowledge, he couldn't figure out the Latin words his professor threw around in lectures. Specifically, he said, in a Medieval Latin translation of Aristotle, the Greek word ἀκριβής was translated as "serto," and he couldn't figure out what that word was. It wasn't until well after this conversation that I realized the word in question was certo. Duh!

  • An awesome new Old Persian discovery. Stolper is one of my former advisors. I find the quote "For a modern student, to learn the Old Persian script is a work of scarcely an hour" hilarious because Professor Stolper is absolutely notorious for underestimating the difficulty of such tasks for others. For the record, Old Persian is easier than true cuneiform, but I think it would take most people well over an hour to learn it.

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[info]ai_meilian
2007-07-04 02:26 pm UTC (link)
Well, there's learning the script, and learning the language itself. Of course I myself might be somewhat guilty of Prof. Stolper's skewed thinking, as evidenced by the fact that I'm shocked that you claim to be unable to read ひらがな. ^_-

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[info]jdm314
2007-07-04 04:56 pm UTC (link)
ひらがな is actually a pretty good analogy: I find it difficult for the same reason as 𐎠𐎼𐎡𐎹𐎠: all the letters look the same ;) OK, well that's not quite true in either case. But Old Persian has the further disadvantage that it's not nearly as systematic as the Japanese syllabaries, and in fact it's highly quirky.

And actually if I'm allowed to cheat and use charts, I'd say that OP is actually easier for me than hiragana.

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*snerk*
[info]tiye
2007-07-04 06:05 pm UTC (link)
Oh, Stolper. He pulled that sort of thing on us in Akkadian all quarter long. Some of my favorites:

"It takes only a couple of years to learn all the Akkadian you need to pass a comprehensive exam. It takes much longer to get a degree in French Lit, so obviously Akkadian is easier than French!"

"Those scribes had pretty short life spans, so it must not take too long to get good at Akkadian."

"Reading a newspaper in English is 100 times more complex than reading a cuneiform tablet."

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