Re: Old Languages

On Wednesday, October 3, 2001, at 09:41 PM, Roger Mills wrote:

> Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
>
>> On Wednesday, October 3, 2001, at 08:30 PM, Roger Mills wrote:
>>
>>> A "dead" language with a considerable and fascinating literature, all
>>> but
>>> unknown in the West, is Old Javanese. (snip)  It is
>>> still used (though probably as memorized) in performances of the
>>> shadow-puppet plays in Java and Bali.
>>
>> Roger, I've been curious about shadow-puppet plays for a while.  :-)
>> Could you recommend resources for learning (and learning about) Old
>> Javanese and/or modern Javanese?  I may not be able to pick up on it this
>> year but come the summer...
>
> Ah, ya shoulda stayed at Cornell.  I'm sure they teach mod. Javanese
> there.
>
<rueful look>  Don't I wish.  I would've *loved* to stay at Cornell, but
for personal reasons it didn't work out that way.  Too bad I didn't take
advantage of more languages while I was there (I'm sure my advisors wouldn'
t've minded, one of them was delighted I was interested in Turkish at all)
.

> Textbooks certainly exist.   I suspect you might find courses at UC
> Berkeley
> too, (I'm sure they teach Indonesian at least, and where there's
> Indonesian,
> there tend to be Javanese speakers too....).  Maybe even at Stanford.
> Old
>
Alas, I am only allowed to take *one* elective, and it *has* to be in math
or education.  Professional programs seem to suck that way.  <sigh>  But
if it's taught, I might be able to sneak away with the class text/reader.
  =^)

> Jav. might be harder to pin down, it's pretty specialized. The only
> grammars
> I can think of are in Dutch or Indonesian-- but I'm not up to date.   Talk
> to whichever dept. handles off-beat Asian languages-- usually either
> Linguistics or (East) Asian languages.  (Cornell might offer a summer
> program, if you're heading back that way)
I'll keep that in mind--it'll be a while before I can afford to take
summer courses, but hey, I'm in no rush.  Thanks muchly!
(Hmm.  I wonder if I could learn "grammar" Dutch along the way, too.  That
year of German might be more handy than I realized!)

YHL