I have missed this
Today was the first day of my summer subject, Syriac.
AND I HAD A BLAST.
I have to admit, after getting the texts last week, I was a little leery. It was so different to anything I'd encountered before, including Greek and Latin. The fact that there are three scripts, and that each letter can have up to four forms depending on where it's placed in the word, didn't help my confidence. But our lecturer is a darling - he's so passionate - and he's focused on getting us speaking, reading and writing as quickly as possible. So we're sort of doing little bits of pieces of grammar as they show up and as we need them.
Mostly today we learned the alphabet and the vowels. I don't know them perfectly yet - I still need to do a bit of study tonight - but by this point it's a matter of missing individual letters or putting them in the wrong place, rather than forgetting them per se. Some of the letters are a little challenging in that they represent sounds that don't occur in English - there's a guttural 'h' sound that is hard to remember to produce when we're rushing. Our lecturer described is as sounding a bit like you've got a fish bone stuck in your throat, and I'm forced to admit that he's not far wrong. It's a strange sound - sort of begins deep down in your throat and then rolls off the top of your mouth. But most of them are easy enough - I just have to remember to roll my r's and remember that there are two 'k' sounds.
Writing it is going to take practice. There are some letters that look very similar to one another - Syriac really isn't a language where you can be messy with your letters. Like I mentioned above, there are different forms of the letter used depending on where it is in the word. In addition to that, some letters don't join on certain sides, and there are combinations that need to be avoided because they might be mistaken for something else... There's a lot of things to bear in mind. But it looks pretty awesome.
Oh, speaking of spelling and looking awesome - our lecturer handed around name tags at the start of the class with Syriac transliterations of our names. Apparently I was the only one in the class with an 'official' transliteration - that is, my name has actually appeared in texts. I thought that this was pretty cool. :D
AND I HAD A BLAST.
I have to admit, after getting the texts last week, I was a little leery. It was so different to anything I'd encountered before, including Greek and Latin. The fact that there are three scripts, and that each letter can have up to four forms depending on where it's placed in the word, didn't help my confidence. But our lecturer is a darling - he's so passionate - and he's focused on getting us speaking, reading and writing as quickly as possible. So we're sort of doing little bits of pieces of grammar as they show up and as we need them.
Mostly today we learned the alphabet and the vowels. I don't know them perfectly yet - I still need to do a bit of study tonight - but by this point it's a matter of missing individual letters or putting them in the wrong place, rather than forgetting them per se. Some of the letters are a little challenging in that they represent sounds that don't occur in English - there's a guttural 'h' sound that is hard to remember to produce when we're rushing. Our lecturer described is as sounding a bit like you've got a fish bone stuck in your throat, and I'm forced to admit that he's not far wrong. It's a strange sound - sort of begins deep down in your throat and then rolls off the top of your mouth. But most of them are easy enough - I just have to remember to roll my r's and remember that there are two 'k' sounds.
Writing it is going to take practice. There are some letters that look very similar to one another - Syriac really isn't a language where you can be messy with your letters. Like I mentioned above, there are different forms of the letter used depending on where it is in the word. In addition to that, some letters don't join on certain sides, and there are combinations that need to be avoided because they might be mistaken for something else... There's a lot of things to bear in mind. But it looks pretty awesome.
Oh, speaking of spelling and looking awesome - our lecturer handed around name tags at the start of the class with Syriac transliterations of our names. Apparently I was the only one in the class with an 'official' transliteration - that is, my name has actually appeared in texts. I thought that this was pretty cool. :D