Vocab, Signs, Anki: Through Lesson 35

So close! Only three more chapters to go! We are up to 1,942 vocables (WOW!) and 888 signs. I have switched to MS Word for the sign list, because the Excel file was getting too buggy. You can actually re-sort this list without the sign images going all over the place. The only bad thing is, a lot of the images are kind of large, making the document nearly 100 pages long. Does anyone know how to resize 888 pictures inside a Word document, without opening the “Edit Picture” dialogue window for every single one? I would love to know! I tried to create a Macro but it doesn’t work.

Here are the goodies:

Anki flashcards: I have updated the files online. This time around, I would recommend re-downloading both decks. There have been so many changes that you will want to start over from scratch.

Blessings and a happy end to the semester!

Lesson 25 Update: Vocab, Sign List, & Anki

Greetings Akk-olytes,

I am pleased to deliver the goods for Lesson 25.

Updated Excel Spreadsheets:

Anki Updates:

Blessings on your studying, and I’ll see you in class!

Updated Vocab/Signs/Anki/Everything! (1-24)

New stuff! For you!

  • Cuneiform Signs, Lessons 9-24: Updated Excel Spreadsheet (In alphabetical order by sign value; sort by any other column at your own risk: for some reason the sort function is still messing up the placement and size of the images)
  • Vocabulary, Lessons 1-24: Updated Excel Spreadsheet (You can re-sort this one to your heart’s content!)
  • The Anki decks have also been updated through Lesson 24. Right now, until they improve Anki’s syncing functions, you have two less than perfect options for getting the new cards into your computer:
    • 1. Re-download both decks from the Anki server (Open Anki on your computer and go to: File > Download > Shared Deck, then type “Akkadian” in the Search field and click on the deck (mine are the two with the long names), then click OK. You have to do this once for the Vocabulary deck and once for the Cuneiform deck). Drawback of this technique: it will erase all your personal learning statistics. Benefit: this method is quick and easy. Also, you will get all the additions, cross-references and corrections that I have made to previous lessons, in addition to the new material.
    • 2. Import only the new lessons using the following technique. (Benefits: you get to keep all your learning statistics from the previous lessons while adding the new material. Drawbacks: much more involved than method 1; also, you won’t get any of my updates/corrections/cross-references/additions to previous lessons.)
      • 1. Download the following three files, saving them to your desktop:
      • 2. Open Anki.
      • 3. Open the Vocabulary deck.
      • 4. Go to File > Import
      • 5. Choose the “Vocabulary Lesson 24” text file that you downloaded to your desktop and click “Open”
      • 6. In the Import window, click on the “Change” button next to the words “Field 5 of File is <ignored>”.
      • 7. In the Import:Select Target Field window, select “Map to Tags” and click OK.
      • 8. Back in the main Import window, click “Import” (next to the “Field 2 of File” line).
      • 9. Repeat steps 3-8 for the Cuneiform deck.
      • 10. In your computer go to My Documents > Anki > Akkadian Vocabulary – Huehnergard GA 2nd Ed.media
      • 11. Drag the “Cuneiform Images” zip file from your desktop into this … .media folder.
      • 12. Unzip the file in the .media folder. The images must be in that folder itself, not in another sub-folder inside it. After unzipping, you can delete the .zip file.
      • 13. Both decks should now contain the updated material and the cuneiform signs should be displayed properly in Anki.
  • So there you have it, you can pick your poison. Unfortunately Anki works best when sharing complete decks that aren’t constantly changing. But I fully expect them to improve this aspect of the program, since they are constantly refining it.

Introducing Anki: Friendly, Intelligent Flashcards

I admit it: I’ve been seeing another flashcard program. It’s a free, open-source program called Anki (slogan: “friendly, intelligent flashcards”) that is both really easy to use and jam-packed with features. It’s also based on some pretty impressive educational research—for instance, it automatically schedules flashcards to be reviewed at the optimum time for your brain, and there are several answer buttons so you can tell the program how hard it was for you to get each card right. All of this coupled with its impressive online syncing and sharing features, plus apps for both Android and iPad, and I’m wondering where Anki has been all my life.

Try it out with Akkadian, you won’t be sorry! Just download the right version for your platform at http://ankisrs.net/ and install it as you would any other program. Then go to File > Download > Shared Deck, and type “Akkadian” in the search prompt. The two decks that I have shared are called “Akkadian Cuneiform – Huehnergard GA 2nd Ed” and “Akkadian Vocabulary – Huehnergard GA 2nd Ed”. These decks are made from the same spreadsheets I’ve been compiling all along, and they are  current up through Lesson 21 (more to follow, of course). Download them, and you’ll be ready for a trial run. There is extensive online documentation, including quick start videos on YouTube to get you off and running in no time flat.

Let me know what you think. If anyone is interested, we could even do a little basic Anki how-to session together. I know a couple of other TEDS students who are already using Anki, and we could invite them and swap tips and ideas. For my part, I am hoping this will help me get a better handle on the cuneiform signs, which are starting to accumulate in a most disheartening way—flitting around my head like so many angry black moths! Hopefully this will be another way to make everyone’s life a little easier this semester.

Updated Vocab and Signs, 1-21

Happy New Year, everyone! Here are the latest editions of the Huehnergard “Überlisten”. We are up to 658 signs/variants plus 778 lexical items. Huzzah!

Vocabulary – Huehnergard – Ch 1-21

Cuneiform – Huehnergard – Ch 9-21

A word to the wise: the larger this sign list gets, the more funky things happen to the images when you sort by a different column. The images tend to get displaced and it is a real pain to put them back next to the correct sign values. So I recommend not re-sorting the sign list until I figure out how to fix this.

The vocab list includes all the irregular verb forms from the Lesson 21 paradigms.

Previous versions are obsolete. As usual, many retro-active changes, corrections and cross-references have been added.

Shalom!

–Josh

Updated Vocab and Signs, 1-18

With this post comes a major new recension of our growing digital glossary and sign list for GAkk-2. Improvements include:

  1. Extensive new logogram cross-references between the vocab list and sign list.
  2. Additional vocab and signs from contracts and Hammurapi included.
  3. As always, typos and other errors corrected whenever found (if you see any errors while using these files, please let me know).

I am in hopes that this will become the ultimate digital reference to GAkk-2. Let me know what you think.

P.S. If anyone is interested, here are the top ways that I use these files when I study:

  1. Use the search function in Excel to look up vocab and signs.
  2. Use the “Sort” function in Excel to scroll alphabetically through the vocab or the sign values, or to see the vocab and signs grouped by lesson or Labat number (for Labat, sort by column A in the sign list; the JPG files are named according to their Labat number).
  3. Merge the files into Perpetua to create flashcards, then study the flashcards.
  4. Copy needed images from the Excel sign list and insert them into a Word document, for instance when an assignment says to write something in cuneiform. (I’ve been typing all my assignments, so I figure that inserting an image of a cuneiform sign is tantamount to typing a Roman character!)
  5. There are no doubt other uses for these spreadsheets and images that I haven’t thought of. If you can think of any, please share them!

 

Ištēt Unqum

1 Šalāš unqātum1 ana šarrī Lilî2 šaplān šamê, Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
2 Sebûm ana bēlī Kurî3 ina appadānīšunu4 ša abnim, Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
3 Tišûm ana Tenēšētim5 enšētim6 kišid eperim,7 Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
4 Ištētum ana Bēlim Eklim wašbim eli kussîšu eklim One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
5 Ina māti Mūrdūr8 ali ṣillū iṣallalū.9 In the Land of Mordor where the shadows lie.
6 Ištēt Unqum ana bêlīšina kalîšina, Ištēt Unqum ana amārīšina, One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
7 Ištēt Unqum ana puḫḫurīšina10 kalîšina u ina eklētim kaṣārīšina One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
8 Ina māti Mūrdūr ali ṣillū iṣallalū. In the Land of Mordor where the shadows lie.

Akkadian translation and footnotes by Joshua Tyra.

[1] unqum – f. “ring; (stamp-)seal” (Jeremy Black, Andrew George, and Nicholas Postgate, eds., A Concise Dictionary of Akkadian [Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1999], 423).

[2] šarrī Lilî – “the Elven-kings”, lit. “the kings of the (storm) demons” (see Ibid., 182). Here I have followed the lead of Faragallah Sayyid Muhammad who, in his magisterial Arabic translation of The Lord of the Rings, chose the term jinn (“demon[s]”) to translate Tolkien’s elves. A jinn can be harmful or benevolent and so can a lilûm, as far as I understand the matter (see J. R. R. Tolkien, Sayyidu l-Khawaatim: Rifqatu l-Khaatim [The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring], trans. Faragallah Sayyid Muhammad [Cairo: Nahdet Misr, 2009]).

[3] kurûm, f. kurītum – “short”; as subst. “short (person), dwarf” (Black, George, and Postgate, A Concise Dictionary of Akkadian, 169).

[4] appadān – “pillared hall”, a Neo-Assyrian loanword from Old Persian. Probably too late to be used in this translation, which otherwise mostly adheres to Old Babylonian norms, but the meaning is such a good fit (the dwarves’ halls are indeed pillared) that I couldn’t resist.

[5] Tenēšētim – “human kind”, pl. of tenēštum (Black, George, and Postgate, A Concise Dictionary of Akkadian, 404).

[6] enšētim – for “mortal” I have used enšum “weak”; this term is not only related to the previous word tenēšētum (see note 5) but also to Hebrew ʾenôš, “man[kind]”, translated “mortal man” in such passages as Job 4:17. As Averbeck has suggested, perhaps the Semitic root originally implied the weakness, limitedness, and hence mortality of humankind. I’m open to better suggestions for “mortal”.

[7] kišid eperim – “acquisition of the soil”, “conquered by the soil” = doomed to be buried (Ibid., 74–75).

[8] Mūrdūr – Following standard Akkadian practice and Faragallah’s Arabic example, the name of Mordor is indeclinable.

[9] By a happy (and poetic) coincidence, one verb for “to lie” (ṣalālum) is from the same root as “shadows” (ṣillū) (Black, George, and Postgate, A Concise Dictionary of Akkadian, 332).

[10] puḫḫurīšina – puḫḫurum = “to bring together, assemble (trans.)”, the D-stem inf. of paḫārum (Ibid., 261).