cathexys mentioned this a few weeks ago and I wandered over and thumbtacked it. Oh my god, I am GEEKING OUT over this chapter. It's so cool. Thanks for letting loose your inner nerd. I'll be following.
Thank you very much for reading! And yes, my inner classics nerd kind of went a little haywire in the plot for this story, so I'm glad that you are enjoying it.
I am loving this so much, not least because I'm a fellow language geek. It makes me want to crack out my edition of Aristophanes' Frogs again *happy sigh*
Ah, Aristophanes! My favorite is the Acharnians, I think, largely because of the piglet pun being one of the most brilliant puns in the Greek language *sigh*
As an assyriologist, I can't help wondering though. Do determinatives in Egyptian script really work like that? That's so cool.Granted, I only know about determinatives in Akkadian and Sumerian, but they generally serve to disambiguate word meanings, not grammar. Like, there's a determinative for "wooden objects", and "copper objects", and "female names" and so on. There are also all sorts of complements, inserted especially after logograms, to disambiguate verb endings and so on. I now feel the compulsion to actually look it up, yay!
(Also, the part about Luwian. Huh. You made me regret, oh, so regret, not taking a class in hieroglyphic Luwian when I could. But the professor said the inscriptions were boring, and I didn't really need it anyway ;_;)
SHORTER VERSION: GREAT STORY - OMG GEEKOUT- OMG DEAD LANGUAGES IN A GREAT STORY - OMG YAY \o/
Well, with the disclaimer that in a previous life I was a classicist (5th century Greece) and only ever took the one Egyptian class in college, I think the main difference between Akkadian/Sumerian and Egyptian is that the former a syllabaries, whereas Eyptian is a consonantal script, so it's possible that you wouldn't need grammatical distinctions by determinative in Akkadian & Summerian because it's already taken care of by different syllables? I really don't know enough about the languages to offer anything other than a generic guess. In Egyptian, there are determinatives for word meanings as well, but there are also determinatives that denote gender and number, for example, which are really grammatical indicators.
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*geeks*
"No other reason." HAH!
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As an assyriologist, I can't help wondering though. Do determinatives in Egyptian script really work like that? That's so cool.Granted, I only know about determinatives in Akkadian and Sumerian, but they generally serve to disambiguate word meanings, not grammar. Like, there's a determinative for "wooden objects", and "copper objects", and "female names" and so on. There are also all sorts of complements, inserted especially after logograms, to disambiguate verb endings and so on. I now feel the compulsion to actually look it up, yay!
(Also, the part about Luwian. Huh. You made me regret, oh, so regret, not taking a class in hieroglyphic Luwian when I could. But the professor said the inscriptions were boring, and I didn't really need it anyway ;_;)
SHORTER VERSION: GREAT STORY - OMG GEEKOUT- OMG DEAD LANGUAGES IN A GREAT STORY - OMG YAY \o/
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