I’ve been interested, on-and-off, in the Austronesian languages for the past 25 years. I started learning bahasa Indonesia in the late 90s with a conversation guide that my then-girlfriend’s brother offered me after his honeymoon in the archipelago. I’ve sadely since lost that book. More recently, my interest has switched to Javanese. Unfortunately, it’s pretty much impossible to study it where I live.
So, when I saw an article yesterday on some MOOCs offered by INALCO that included a 6-week online course in Malagasy, I immediately signed up for it. It may be my only chance ever to study an Austronesian language in a structured way, with material used by one of the world’s top language schools to boot.
I’ve just downloaded the 6 videos that we are going to work on in the next few weeks. The programme is pretty intensive, with 8 hours of study per week and regular tests until late May, although it is possible to extend the deadline until early June.
That is pretty cool. I’m woefully unable to do languages other than English, so I’m quite happy you’re getting the chance to follow up on this interest!
Fun. I teach a basic human geography course to undergrads, and they learn about the amazing Austronesian family, spoken over a huge (if watery) part of the earth, from Madagascar to Hawaii…
….yet the highest diversity among the languages is the dozen indigenous languages of Taiwan, of all places! (Obviously most Taiwanese today speak Mandarin Chinese, but there are still a few tens of thousands who speak these Austronesian ones).
I’ve finished the first week, covering 6 lessons and 6 tests (98% correct answers, yay!). It is great fun, and I really like the language.
However, I must say that, while Malagasy pronunciation is not difficult, the spelling really throws me off. There are a lot of unstressed vowels that are devoiced and become barely audible, more like a slight glide at the end of the preceding consonants than a “real” vowel. As a result, words that are written with 10 letters sound like they consist of only 1 syllable and some words, like folo, foly, fola sound almost identical to me. I’m starting to get the hang of it as I begin to know what to look for, but it’s subtle.
Nice. It’s rather like how, in its cousin Malay, final consonants ;(in unstressed syllables) aren’t aspirated like in English, so to me they all sound the same (a gentle stop, rather than a consonant at all).
Like, “amok” or “batik” sound like “amoh” or “batih”
I’ve just started week 3. It’s getting a bit more difficult, but some of the things that really puzzled me in the beginning are starting to make sense. It’s way too early to say that I get the “feel” of the language but it’s something like it.
Some of the phonetic transcriptions that I’ve found for those Malay words are [ämoʔ] and [batɪʔ , bateʔ], with [ʔ] actually not a t-sound at all but a glottal stop, i.e. a sound that can sound very faint to someone whose native language doesn’t have it.
Interestingly, I was confronted with a similar case in Malagasy.
Misoatra means “Thank you” but I could hear neither the final -a, nor the -r, and the -t sounded weird to me. It turns out that it’s actually a complex retroflex plosive, a sound that, again, sounds faint to the untrained ear. It’s transcribed as -tr, and there are at least three other retroflex phonemes in Malagasy, transcribed -ntr, -dr and -ndr.
When you combine these spellings with the presence of many barely audible vowels I described above, it’s getting clearer why words look much longer than they sound.