Re: McGuffey Readers now available in Tatari Faran!

On Mon, Mar 07, 2005 at 12:26:25PM -0500, Sally Caves wrote:
> San tse!
san tse. :-)


> Tatari sa nari!
Hmm, I'm not sure I understand what you intended to refer to.


> Tse sa nari ei. :)
Interesting use of a complement as a verb. ;-) I get the gist, though.
:-)

OK OK, I realize from what you wrote below that my current
presentation style for Tatari Faran isn't quite working. So this is no
fault of yours. If it's any comfort at all, your TF greeting is
impeccable. :-) I've been meaning to write an introductory tutorial
that will be much more useful to the prospective learner of Tatari
Faran than the grammar. The grammar, after all, is the definitive
description of the language, and as such, it's rather difficult to
arrange it so as to be easy for the prospective learner to understand
at first read.

I faced the same difficulty the first time I participated in the relay
with Ebisédian: I attached a bunch of more-or-less arbitrarily
organized grammar notes (well, it seemed a logical sequence to me, but
in retrospect it was quite arbitrary), and expected the recipient to
be able to piece the puzzle together. Well, the results were ...
rather interesting, as the participants can testify. ;-)  I figured
that probably it caused more frustration than was necessary. So
eventually, I produced the Ebisédian introductory tutorial, which I
think helped a great deal in helping people understand how Ebisédian
works.  I also put much more thought into the relay grammar notes, so
in subsequent relays Ebisédian was much less painful, albeit still
rather... interesting. :-P


[...]
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh@...>
[...]
> >As part of the ongoing commitment to stifl^H^H^H^H^H discourage OT
> >threads and YAxPT's with Tatari Faran posts,
>
> hyk hyk hyk!! <--taitfo Teonaht
:-)


[...]
> >The Editors regret to announce that due to technical inadeq^H^H^H^H
> >difficulties, no audio samples of Tatari Faran are available yet.
>
> Aillyyy! :(
Yes, I know yall's expectations were all up recently, what with
Arthaey recording Asha'ille (which is really quite pretty) and all
that. Maybe I should invest in a microphone so that I can, uh, cope
with the changing standards of the modern world. ;-)


> > In the event that this unfortunate situation is rectified, no
> > effort whatsoever will be made to refrain from announcing the
> > availability of said audio samples. We apologize for the
> > convenience.
>
> hyk hyk hyk, hterme! :)
:-)


[...]
> >But of course, I am *the* most humble person in the *whole* world!
>
> Ai, ai!
Yes, that's from the Gratuitous Oxymorons section of my quotes file,
which contains such shamelessly stol^H^H^H^Hborrowed entries as Yoon
Ha Lee's "People tell me I'm indecisive, but I'm not sure about that."
:-P


> ------------------------------
> Vyko... I love the fact you got this up.  It's a GREAT start!  It took wild
> horses, though, to drag a compliment in TF out of me--corrections
> welcome!--since it's so hard to cobble something together.
For a moment, I thought you said "complement", and wondered if there
was somehow a glaring hole in my explanation of TF complements which
I'm unaware of. :-)


> What I think your pages need, and it will take time, is constant
> reinforcement of information...which might require more web space, which is
> a pain.
In my case, though, additional webspace isn't really a problem. The TF
pages are served from a colocated webserver which I administer, and I
have a total of 2GB of space to squand^H^H^H^H^H^Hmake use of.

I think it would greatly help if I wrote an Introduction to Tatari
Faran which is geared towards teaching the language to L2 learners,
:-P rather than expect people to digest the grammar without any aids.
This has been on my TODO list for a while now; I guess I just needed a
little push to get going on it. :-)


> The McGuffey Reader is a wonderful idea, but translate the examples,
> damn it!  :)  It's just a parody, at this point, of McGuffey, and
> not a useful teaching tool (though I love the lifted pictures!)
Good point. You're not the first person to ask for translations /
interlinears of the Reader. Perhaps I should take the liberty of
turning the Reader into an Introduction to Tatari Faran of sorts,
rather than retain its original intention of being a native children's
reader.


> One must move back and forth between your TF lexicon search (which
> you don't provide a link for on your MG Reader);  and in order to
> refresh one's memory of the cases and affixes, one must pore
> endlessly over previous pages of your grammar (link to grammar
> needed in addition to the index).
Right, and the reason is because I translated the Reader as a Reader
and nothing else. While that may be an interesting exercise for me, I
guess it's rather inaccessible to my target audience. (Which sorta
defeats the purpose of the whole exercise I suppose.)


> And trying to write in it!  (Something I'm sure you'd like your
> colleagues to attempt!)  As it stands, you don't have any
> illustration of possessive pronouns that I could find, although
> something could be cobbled together from the genitive and the
> regular pronouns; but how does the genitive ending mesh with the
> case affixes?
Hmm. I think I made the cardinal mistake of assuming that the reader
would know how to put the pieces together. Probably another reason I
need to write an introductory tutorial.


> Why not give tables of pronouns and ways to express possessive
> pronouns?  People love tables instead of being told "Here is the
> first person."  "Here is the second person."  Tables are byte
> gobblers, but they save space on the screen and are eminently
> readable.  So... just some suggestions for the future!  :)
Now, *that's* a very good idea. I should produce more tables for ease
of reference, which is after all what the grammar is for, since I've
taken the approach of the grammar being the definitive (or, *shudder*,
normative) description of the language.


> Could the "search the lexicon" use some refining?
Certainly! There are quite a few glaring problems with it, which I
haven't gotten around to fixing because I made the mistake of not
adequately marking the source text file, which makes it impossible for
the search script to distinguish between the word-level definition of
a term and the more elaborate explanations that sometimes accompany
it. I suppose there's really no reason to continue tolerating this
state of affairs.


> Couldn't find "your" at all;
That is odd. I just tried searching for "your" and it turned up the
entry for _tsen_ correctly. Did you by any chance tick the checkbox
that says "exclude pseudo-entries"?


> I figured out that to find "see" or "and" (and not get every
> instance in which you use these words in your English directions)
> that I needed to specify the word's part of speech.  Didn't work in
> every case.  I'm sure that it will improve as you add to it.
Yes, this is a symptom of my lexicon source not being adequately
marked so that the script could tell between words that belong to the
definition and words that belong to lexicon structure ("see also" and
the like). I guess it's time to fix this, even if it entails the
daunting prospect of revising all 776 entries.


> I LOVE your Tatari Faran, Teoh; it is so original!.
teirias pipi.


> But you make it so difficult to learn, primarily because you don't
> give enough repetitive information.  Repetition is GOD in
> conteaching.  ;-)  Actually in all natlang teaching.  Maggelity
> aside.
[...]

Yes I know... like I said, the grammar was intended to be a definitive
description rather than a learner's guide. I will start working on the
latter now! :-)


> (Whose own pages are terribly omissive as well...so I'm one to talk)
Speaking of which, are the remaining lessons in the Teach Yourself
Teonaht page up yet? I was all hooked and eager after reading the
first (few?) page(s), but was rather disappointed to find that the
remainder of the tutorial was not available yet.

In any case, thanks very much for your feedback. That's what prods me
to do what needs to be done rather than what I habitually do. :-)


T

--
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is that they never crash in any significant way: the free software underlying
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