ḏd.f · ḫꜣ n.j ḫnw ḫmmj · ṯzw ḫppy · m mdwt mꜣ(w)t tmt swꜣ ·
‘He says: Would that I had phrases that are unknown, utterances that are strange, in a new language that has never yet passed by…’
—
The Complaints of Khakheperraseneb, recto line 2, c. 1500 BCE
Languages I work on
[edit]
Old list, needs updating
Label all Egyptian verb senses as transitive or intransitive and remove passives from inflection tables where needed.Correct and properly templatize all the wrong and malformatted Egyptian translations.Finish wikifying the Story of the Shipwrecked Sailor for use in quotations.- Make Manuel de Codage soft-redirects for all Egyptian entries.
Finish going through Allen’s Middle Egyptian Grammar and adding relevant grammatical information.Add conventional Egyptological pronunciation for all Egyptian entries.- Go through Loprieno’s Ancient Egyptian: A Linguistic Introduction and add reconstructed pronunciations for Egyptian entries wherever possible.
Make entries for all the missing words from the Egyptian Swadesh list.Mark all non-nisba Egyptian adjectives as the appropriate type of participle.Add all the most frequent Egyptian words — say, those that appear more than 100 times in the corpus of the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae (ignoring a few excluded categories, 0 are missing).Make inflection tables for Egyptian relative forms.Remove systematic anglicizations from Egyptian proper nouns that don’t use them.Make inflection tables for Egyptian participles or accomodate them in the adjective inflection table.Add passive relative forms to the verb table, and possibly split nominal/emphatic relative forms into a separate column from the rest. Or maybe remove all the .tj and .tw passives from the table and just make a note.Write Finish writing an appendix on Egyptian verbs.- Surpass 4000 Egyptian lemma pages in the long term (and so become the largest existing Egyptian dictionary in English, barring simple wordlists and Budge’s outdated mess).
- Learn more about Late Egyptian and Demotic and expand coverage of those.
Add the missing Late Egyptian demonstratives, and eventually also the missing Old Egyptian ones.Consider splitting the table of personal pronouns into stages (Old, Middle, Late Egyptian).Consider getting rid of <hiero> tags in template parameters by using {{#tag:hiero|}} in templates. (This really needs a bot to do the tag-deletion gruntwork.)Make conjugation tables for more dialects of Coptic (at least Akhmimic and Lycopolitan; Oxyrhynchite would be nice too).
(With approximate CEFR reference levels:)
- Serbo-Croatian: C2+. First (native) language, now a bit atrophied. Like most modern Shtokavian speakers, I don’t distinguish short falling syllables from short rising ones or vowel length in unstressed syllables.
- English: C2+. Second language, learned from ~4 years old, now better than Serbo-Croatian. Native depending on how you define ‘native’. Mostly Midland American/General American pronunciation with some influence from the Northern Cities Vowel Shift. No cot–caught merger, no fronted /u/, no /æ/-breaking, some Canadian raising, retroflex r [ɻ]. /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ raise to [e] and [o] before [ɻ], /æ/ raises to [e] before /ŋ/ (all remain monophthongal). My vowels are pretty close to the ones in this chart, but with lower /æ/ and /ɛ/.
- German: B2–C1 for reading, much lower for production (B1-ish?).
- (Old and Middle) Egyptian: CEFR levels aren’t really applicable here. Maybe low B1-ish if I had to choose an equivalent. But even the most fluent Egyptologists don’t reach the fluency levels of advanced speakers of living languages, for obvious reasons.
- Old Church Slavonic, Middle English, Russian: all around B2 for reading, A2 for production. Somewhat more theoretical linguistic knowledge for the dead languages, somewhat better production for the living.
- Latin: A2- or B1-equivalent.
- Ancient Greek: A2-equivalent.
- Mandarin: Low A2.
- Slovene: A2 comprehension plus some theoretical knowledge. No production.
- Coptic: A1-ish, plus more in-depth knowledge of phonology and dialectology.
- Spanish: A1-ish. Better for written comprehension.
- Others: Macedonian and Bulgarian are at about B1 for comprehension via partial intelligibility with Serbo-Croat etc., but I’ve not yet made any conscious effort to learn them. Some reading knowledge of Middle High German, maybe A2-ish, but again no conscious effort to learn. Any former proficiency with Lojban has dwindled to nothing. I’ve made abortive efforts at learning Slavomolisano, Phoenician/Punic, Ye’kwana, Classical Chinese, Kurmanji, Late Egyptian, Demotic, K’iche’, Old English, Kabardian, French, Japanese, and Kari’na in the past, and so have some minimal knowledge of how they work.
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