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Anyone else learning any languages at the moment? (lemmygrad.ml)
submitted 5 days ago by to c/comradeship@lemmygrad.ml
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If yes, how's it going? What do you like about it? What don't you like? What challenges are you encountering? How are you approaching it?

I ask because my partner and i both decided last year we would start doing a little language learning in our spare time, and it's been quite nice to have that "back to school" feeling again after so many years.

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[–] 10 points 4 days ago (4 children)

Malayalam at the moment. Native tongue, but unfortunately rusty in expressing things in without resorting to english words. Basically trying to go from native speaker who is fine with colloquial tongue to literature oriented, mildly fancier writing. Probably need to read a ton of literature.

Going beyond colloquial Malayalam is quite painful (kinda diglossic language). Tried to read some books and the frequency of dictionary look ups can be very demoralising lol (And a very specific annoyance of e-reader dictionaries sucking because its a heavily inflected language).

I've been wanting to learn other Indic languages (Tamil - sister language to Malayalam basically, Bangla, Hindi) and Spanish. I maybe getting too ambitious.

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  • [–] [S] 8 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (3 children)

    Fascinating. What script does Malayalam use? Is it also written in one of the Indian scripts like Tamil or Hindi or is it closer to the South East Asian ones like Thai or Khmer?

    One of my secondary language learning ambitions is to learn to recognize as many languages as i can just by the way they look or sound, even if i don't speak a single word of them.

    Right now i can get the broad geographical areas mostly right but South East Asia in particular is still quite tricky because it's very diverse.

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  • [–] 6 points 4 days ago

    Its similar to Tamil but different. മലയാളലിപി (Malayalalipi) is what we use to write Malayalam. This and tamil were written in vattezhuthu (zh/ഴ has no english equivalent), but later mixed it with grantha script and modified it heavily to create malayalalipi. Modern tamil script has a different origin, don't know much about it.

    Random passage I found online for example, script is almost phonetic: പണ്ട്, പറന്നു പറന്ന് ചിറകുകടയുന്ന നാഗത്താന്മാർ പനങ്കുരലിൽ മാണിക്യമിറക്കിവെച്ചു ക്ഷീണം തീർക്കാറുണ്ടായിരുന്നു. നാഗത്താന്മാർക്കായി പനകേറ്റക്കാരൻ കള്ളു നേർന്നു വെച്ചു. പനഞ്ചോട്ടിലാകട്ടെ, അവൻ കുലദൈവങ്ങൾക്കു തെച്ചിപ്പൂ നേർന്നിട്ടു.

    The script got simplified again a bit for ease of typesetting by reducing the number of glyphs back in the 60s by the Communist Government here in Kerala. Since its digitised the old script is coming back. Most modern fonts (except the one rendered in the web, maybe Noto Sans) use old script.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 days ago

    The Dravidian languages (predominantly in Kerala, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana) uses scripts that are similar (South Brahmi).

    Southeast Asian ones like Thai, Lao, Burmese, Khmer are from South Brahmi.

    Other Indic ones like Hindi (Devanagari) is North Brahmi I think.

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