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Thanks for sharing! The Assyrian language itself is threatened by various factors, so I created an online English to Assyrian dictionary using (React & MongoDB

by sogwiz 8y ago

Thanks for sharing! The Assyrian language itself is threatened by various factors, so I created an online English to Assyrian dictionary using (React & MongoDB for the app. Scrapy + Java to power the data matching) to help preserve the language. I owe alot of the development choices behind the web app to the useful posts on hackernews! The frontend code is also available on GitHub. I get feedback from Assyrian parents trying to keep the language alive and from non Assyrians trying to learn, typically to impress their significant other and share a commonality. http://sargonsays.com http://sargonsays.com What I'll try to do next is create an Alexa skill. Languages are important

chris_st 8y ago
Excellent sounding project -- great thing to do for the web! How are you going to deal with pronunciation in the Alexa skill?
- sogwiz 8y ago
  Appreciate that! Regarding Alexa, the sargonsays app does store the phonetic pronunciations so that you could sound it out by saying the word / phrase aloud. To your point though, Alexa won't know how to sound it out correctly. For that reason, the most popular terms have audio recordings already so I'll try to have Alexa just play the recording. I've had some success in the past getting local Assyrian organizations and churches to help with the manual effort of audio recordings. Thoughts?
  - chris_st 8y ago
    Yeah, recordings are a great idea! It's been a long time since I did my Alexa skill (...a long time in internet-scale, anyway!) and they may have a way to do some kind of International Phonetic Alphabet kind of text now. But I know they support playing recordings, so that's a great place to start.
    - thaumasiotes 8y ago
      > they may have a way to do some kind of International Phonetic Alphabet kind of text now A recording is a better idea. Even meticulous IPA isn't going to be a good guide to the pronunciation of any language. Consonants are straightforward, but vowels are points in a continuous multidimensional space and all IPA characters for them are, by necessity, only rough approximations. To get good pronunciation of IPA from a computer, you'd need the computer to already know (1) what language it's supposed to be pronouncing in, and (2) how it should interpret IPA vowels for that language.
idoubtit 8y ago
Please note the modern Assyrian language is not directly related to the old Assyrian language that was used on the tablets at the time of Ashurbanipal. Modern Assyrian derives from the Aramean, which became the vernacular language in most of the Near East during the first millenium BC. The written Assyrian language of tablet derived from the Akkadian, with a few traces of the Sumerian language. All of these were semitic languages, so they had similarities, except for the Sumerian which is an isolate.
- klipt 8y ago
  > Modern Assyrian derives from the Aramean From Wikipedia it seems Aramean refers to the people, their language was Aramaic.
  - kingofpandora 8y ago
    It's complicated ... But as the previous poster said what is called Assyrian today is indeed derived from ancient Aramean rather than ancient Assyrian. The real contention is that the same group of modern people today can't decide what their ancestry is: Assyrian or Aramean. They fight about it a lot.
schoen 8y ago
I had a roommate who spoke Assyrian and one thing I learned as a result was that the contemporary Assyrian language is not the same as ancient Assyrian and may not be directly related to it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assyrian_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assyrian_language But apparently the question of whether there is some relation is quite a culturally sensitive one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assyrian_continuity#Linguistic_continuity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assyrian_continuity#Linguistic...
- peter303 8y ago
  Like Coptic to Egyptian, modern Greek to Old Greek, Italian to Latin, etc.
  - Koshkin 8y ago
    Actually, the modern Greek is quite close to the classical Greek (much, much closer than, say, Italian is to Latin). As to Egyptian, it has gone through several stages (Coptic being the last one) which, for some reason, were all rather dissimilar.
  - amself 8y ago
    As a Greek, while of course Modern is not the same as Ancient, it is a lot closer to it than the other mentioned languages, for sure. I can read Ancient Greek texts easily, after only minimal education, which focuses a lot more on learning different meanings of the same words than new words (for instance δαίμονας). Heck, the grammar is practically the same on many things.
  - schoen 8y ago
    I think that comparison is in controversy, because in these cases the older language didn't stop being spoken while transforming into the newer one. In the Assyrian case, scholars seem confident that ancient Assyrian stopped being spoken entirely some time before the emergence of modern Assyrian and that modern Assyrian can't be viewed as directly derived from ancient Assyrian (although both are Semitic languages).
  - 0xBABAD00C 8y ago

by sogwiz 8y ago

chris_st 8y ago

Excellent sounding project -- great thing to do for the web! How are you going to deal with pronunciation in the Alexa skill?

sogwiz 8y ago
Appreciate that! Regarding Alexa, the sargonsays app does store the phonetic pronunciations so that you could sound it out by saying the word / phrase aloud. To your point though, Alexa won't know how to sound it out correctly. For that reason, the most popular terms have audio recordings already so I'll try to have Alexa just play the recording. I've had some success in the past getting local Assyrian organizations and churches to help with the manual effort of audio recordings. Thoughts?
- chris_st 8y ago
  Yeah, recordings are a great idea! It's been a long time since I did my Alexa skill (...a long time in internet-scale, anyway!) and they may have a way to do some kind of International Phonetic Alphabet kind of text now. But I know they support playing recordings, so that's a great place to start.
  - thaumasiotes 8y ago
    > they may have a way to do some kind of International Phonetic Alphabet kind of text now A recording is a better idea. Even meticulous IPA isn't going to be a good guide to the pronunciation of any language. Consonants are straightforward, but vowels are points in a continuous multidimensional space and all IPA characters for them are, by necessity, only rough approximations. To get good pronunciation of IPA from a computer, you'd need the computer to already know (1) what language it's supposed to be pronouncing in, and (2) how it should interpret IPA vowels for that language.

idoubtit 8y ago

Please note the modern Assyrian language is not directly related to the old Assyrian language that was used on the tablets at the time of Ashurbanipal. Modern Assyrian derives from the Aramean, which became the vernacular language in most of the Near East during the first millenium BC. The written Assyrian language of tablet derived from the Akkadian, with a few traces of the Sumerian language. All of these were semitic languages, so they had similarities, except for the Sumerian which is an isolate.

klipt 8y ago
> Modern Assyrian derives from the Aramean From Wikipedia it seems Aramean refers to the people, their language was Aramaic.
- kingofpandora 8y ago
  It's complicated ... But as the previous poster said what is called Assyrian today is indeed derived from ancient Aramean rather than ancient Assyrian. The real contention is that the same group of modern people today can't decide what their ancestry is: Assyrian or Aramean. They fight about it a lot.

schoen 8y ago

I had a roommate who spoke Assyrian and one thing I learned as a result was that the contemporary Assyrian language is not the same as ancient Assyrian and may not be directly related to it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assyrian_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assyrian_language But apparently the question of whether there is some relation is quite a culturally sensitive one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assyrian_continuity#Linguistic_continuity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assyrian_continuity#Linguistic...

peter303 8y ago
Like Coptic to Egyptian, modern Greek to Old Greek, Italian to Latin, etc.
- Koshkin 8y ago
  Actually, the modern Greek is quite close to the classical Greek (much, much closer than, say, Italian is to Latin). As to Egyptian, it has gone through several stages (Coptic being the last one) which, for some reason, were all rather dissimilar.
- amself 8y ago
  As a Greek, while of course Modern is not the same as Ancient, it is a lot closer to it than the other mentioned languages, for sure. I can read Ancient Greek texts easily, after only minimal education, which focuses a lot more on learning different meanings of the same words than new words (for instance δαίμονας). Heck, the grammar is practically the same on many things.
- schoen 8y ago
  I think that comparison is in controversy, because in these cases the older language didn't stop being spoken while transforming into the newer one. In the Assyrian case, scholars seem confident that ancient Assyrian stopped being spoken entirely some time before the emergence of modern Assyrian and that modern Assyrian can't be viewed as directly derived from ancient Assyrian (although both are Semitic languages).
- 0xBABAD00C 8y ago