Re-ConLanging II

One of the trickiest parts of learning a new language is getting a hang of the pronunciation. Even with a language with an incredibly easy and consistent phonological system, like Spanish, you still have to learn to speak differently from in your own tongue. One of the bugbears of learning a dead or re-constructed language is that in the absence of native speakers, or even recordings of same, we don't know how the language was actually spoken. Comes the question: Should this stop us?

I am not an expert of Egyptology, but I have fiddled with a grammar or two. One of the things that comes up is the way that Egyptologists speak the language when muttering to themselves. It seems to be fairly consistent, from what I understand, and it seems to help them - it brings the language alive for it to be a spoken thing in the same way that learning written Mandarin would be even harder if you weren't associating it with the sounds of the tongue. So it would be neat if the Egyptian courses included a CD of somebody reading a few passages from the Book of the Dead, or at least a link to a site where you could download a few MP3s. (If it's out there, please let me know in the comments.) They say that you can't speak ancient Egyptian anymore because no one knows how it was spoken. True enough. But we can find out how it is spoken by a community of speakers who know it as a second or third language, at least. If you find yourself with access to texts in hieroglyphics and mutter your way through figuring them out, after all, do you want to sound like just another poor sap trying to sound out Budge's transcriptions from a Dover reprint, or do you want to sound like one of the leading Egyptologists of today?

This return to spoken courses comes not entirely out of the blue, of course. Of late, I've been fussing with Gaulish, and that led me, for comparison, to pull out Stifter's Intro to Old Irish. Stifter has a great system for helping you understand what's going on with the phonological changes in old Irish. His transcription system let's you see at a glance when lenition or palatalization has taken place, and gives guidance as to which word is causing the different initial mutations to unfold through the phrase. The problem is that working through a pronunciation guide focusing on individual sounds and working out how to fluidly pronounce ten or fifteen lines of text in succession are very different things. It would be neat to find at least a few of the poems on line, pronounced by a scholar, so that as a student I could better hear the changes that are made so clearly in the transcriptions. I'll google around for these, some more, and again, if anyone knows a good source, please note it in the comments.

Absent decent audio resources, of course, there's only one thing to do: Make them for yourself. And this is a lot easier than it used to be - plug a mic into your computer, then record and edit the sound files with Audacity and you can make a pretty well-ordered, clear-sounding recording. But it would be nice to have the guesswork about pronunciation taken care of by somebody who knows what they're doing :)

On a bright spot: Teach Yourself Beginner's Latin and Teach Yourself Old English both fairly decent audio. Assimil Latin has audio. You can get audio for a lot of the stuff associated with Wheelock. And now, from what I understand, Bolchazy-Carducci's latest Latin textbook series has MP3s available and configured to work conveniently with your iPod or Zune (though the program is expensive). So with Latin and Old English (!) available, maybe we'll be bringing still more dead languages to life soon.