User:Thefamouseccles
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Me? I'm the Famous Eccles. :P
I'm a 21 year old amateur linguist from Brisbane, the capital city of Queensland, a state of Australia. My appetite for languages runs from the unusual (to be kind) to the crazy (to be frank). My favourite languages to study are those that are:
- phonemically complex - !Kung (141 phonemes)
- phonemically simple - Pirahã (10 phonemes)
- highly agglutinative - Inuktitut (single-word sentences are not uncommon in Inuktitut)
- extinct (Ubykh, dying out in 1992) or going extinct (Wichita, with less than ten speakers left)
- exotic - Elvish
In the past, I have studied Ubykh, !Kung, Pirahã, Wichita (for which four I wrote the Wikipedia pages), Elvish and Klingon, and cast a cursory glance over the Salishan languages, the South Caucasian languages and the Semitic languages. To be more down-to-earth, I have also studied French intensively, Basque and Ancient Egyptian cursorily in my spare time, and I have smatterings of Spanish and German.
I actually speak tourist-level !Kung, middling good French, passable Klingon, and I can say "I don't speak (language)" (probably the single most useful phrase you can learn in a foreign language, except for "Do you speak English?") in the following languages:
- French: je ne parle pas le français
- German: ich spreche kein Deutsch
- Klingon: tlhIngan Hol vIjatlhlaHbe'
- !Kung: mi /ua okx'wi zhu/'hoã kokxoie
- Spanish: yo no hablo español
- Ubykh: atwaqhæ bza asæmq'afan
As you may have noticed from my username, I'm an avid fan of the Goon Show, a mid-20th Century radio comedy. I'm also a fan of learning and using long and rare words. Some of my favourites are:
- bacciferous berry-bearing
- batrachomyomachia a trifling or pointless altercation
- curmudgeon crusty ill-tempered old man
- floccipaucinihilipilification the act of estimating as worthless
- harridan short-tempered scolding woman
- sesquipedalianism the practice of using extremely long words (literally, the use of words that are a foot and a half long)
- spannungsbogen the delay between when one begins to desire something and when one tries to achieve it
- tintinnabulation the sound of ringing bells.
I also like to know where I am in the universe:
- Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
- Australasian Plate
- Southern Hemisphere
- Earth, Sol system
- Orion Arm, Alpha Quadrant, Milky Way galaxy
- Local Group, Virgo supercluster
I study the Northwest Caucasian languages in my spare time, with a focus on the Besney language, a divergent form of Kabardian; on Abkhaz, particularly the Abzhui dialect; and on Ubykh. I'm a serious student of the Ubykh language, which I affectionately call "essentially an Abkhazian impersonation of an avalanche"; I'd like to invite anyone who is interested in learning it, or learning about it, to write a note below the horizontal line below. Before you do, there are some pros and cons you should probably know about:
- PROS. Ubykh is:
- Extinct. The last speaker of Ubykh died in 1992, the final result of the genocide of the Ubykh people by the Tsars of Russia. Without the Tsars' tyranny and forced exodus of the Ubykhs, it would never have died in the first place, so it's worth reviving.
- Interesting. It has a unique verbal system, which incorporates essentially every key argument of the sentence, and it has 83 consonants but only two phonemic vowels.
- Well recorded. Thousands of pages of accurate Ubykh material exist; a 260-odd page dictionary exists, as well as dozens of folktales, many of which are related to the mythology of the Ancient Greeks, including a version of the Nart saga.
- Regular. Ubykh does not have grammatical gender, and has only four grammatical cases, which are easier to learn than, for instance, the Ancient Greek case system.
- Syllabically simple. Despite the multitude of consonants, most words in Ubykh have consonant clusters which are two consonants long at the most. And if you don't think you can pronounce a consonant cluster, you can stick an unstressed schwa in, and it generally doesn't make much difference at all to the end result.
- "Fast". The "speed" of a language refers to how much information can be communicated in a certain size of utterance. Ubykh and the other Northwest Caucasian languages are extremely fast; the verb phrase sjæwqhjaantwaaw (three syllables) means he will give them to us for you (eight syllables).
- CONS. Ubykh is:
- Complicated. The verb basically reiterates the entire syntactic structure of the sentence, agreeing with subject, object, indirect object, benefactive and oblique objects (English, by contrast, has agreement only with the subject of the verb, and that only in the third person singular).
- Difficult to pronounce. The language has been described as sounding like pebbles on a marble floor; with 83 consonants, the vocal gymnastics required to pronounce even some lone consonants (the pharyngealised labialised uvular ejective qw' is the one I had most trouble with) are considerable, and take a great deal of practice.
- Semantically concrete. A large number of abstract ideas are built up around series of concrete elements; wægjæ samæq'æn I do not please you literally means I do not cut your heart, and ch'anæ wæzbyan I love you is literally I see you well.
So, if you've weighed these pros and cons up and think that Ubykh would be worth learning, leave a note below the horizontal line. Only write, though, if you're really serious about learning it; it's complicated, and it will take a long time, so make sure you are really interested. Alternatively, if you just want to know more about it, write a note to that effect: I'm happy to answer any questions you might have.
- I'm up for learning some Ubykh, Mr Eccles sir! :) --Vlad 04:10, 13 Sep 2004 (UTC)
- ach'agjæghæ! (That's excellent!) How much did you want to learn? And more importantly, how did you find my page?? :) My email address is the_famous_eccles1 at Hotmail; if you want to email me there, I'll be happy to answer your questions and start sending you some stuff. I'd like to know a couple of things first, though:
- What made you choose Ubykh?
- And what's your linguistic background? I just want to know so I can find out what level I'm pitching at.
- thefamouseccles 11:12, 15 Sep 2004 (UTC)
I was mystified by your description of Ubykh as sounding like "pebbles on a marble floor". Could you elaborate? --Erauch 18:10, 13 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- Ubykh has 20 uvular consonants, many of which are pharyngealised at the same time; in addition, it has a lot of ejective consonants, and some of these can be pharyngealised too. These all sound very harsh to the ear, involving what sounds like clicking, scraping and grinding. The simile actually isn't mine; there's a story that a Turkish sultan sent a messenger to the land of the Ubykhs to learn some of their language, and upon the messenger's return he drew from his shirt a bag of pebbles and emptied them on the floor, saying "Listen to these stones; a foreigner can gain no greater understanding of Ubykh speech". I don't know whether it's for real or not, but it's a great description. Fortunately, the most violent and harsh of the sounds are some of the rarest, too. :) thefamouseccles 13:43, 20 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- Wow. Are there any recordings available? --Erauch 19:04, 20 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- An MP3 of Tevfik Esenç telling the story "Eating fish makes you clever" is on the Web; you can get it at [1] (http://lacito.archivage.vjf.cnrs.fr/archives/Caucase/Oubykh/Poisson.mp3). thefamouseccles 00:25, 23 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Hi there! atwaqhæ bza asæmq'afan.... yet! But I'd like to. My interests include:
- language isolates and small language families
- endangered languages and language revival
- languages with interesting phonology / morphology / syntax
I've been interested in Ubykh and other Northwest Caucasian languages for many years, and I'd like to learn more. What kind of material do you have? I'm learning several languages at the moment, but I can always find time for more, especially Ubykh. :) Chamdarae
- I'd be more than happy to teach you. :) Drop me a line at the_famous_eccles1 at hotmail dot com. Northwest Caucasian is a pile of fun -if those are your interests, I think you'll enjoy it! One question: Do you read IPA? If you do, that'll make it a lot easier. thefamouseccles 03:46, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Write your note here.