What is this?

I’m John Dovydenas. Here’s some new things I’m up to as of January, in the two thousand twenty fourth year of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, may he rest in peace—-

I’m in Egypt and enjoying learning to read hieroglyphs in situ. This impresses everyone, since none of the tourists have the first clue what anything says, the guides can’t even read, so it makes me feel special, which I have never felt before when learning other languages. Perhaps a very very dead language suits me? I’ll update the Egypt section and clean up the index, and start a series on some original translations. The stories I have posted up to now are ‘rewritten’ by me, with a very superficial knowledge of the hieroglyphs, mainly I’m making the academic translations readable, comparing several different translations. But I’m beginning to be able to do the whole thing from scratch myself. The biggest hurdle is an understanding of the grammar, which has some unique difficulties. Learning to read a la Latin ‘hexo hammo drammo gimmo’, thats pretty easy to learn with hieroglyph, and the vocabulary is quite small. It’s the grammar which is very difficult. Thus:

I’ve decided to start a grammar section on this site, making some common sense comments on a maddeningly nonsensical field. Of course it’s actually totally sensical, and the language is what’s ‘nonsense’ in that it communicates human values, it doesn’t program computers. But if one wants to learn other languages, grammar is essential, as opposed to your native language, where it’s worse than useless.

The Užrašai section is really opinionated political diatribes of one sort or another, that is my true passion, and I will keep adding to that.

The book publishing business is very slow, it would be very nice if another publisher wished to do it for me. Eh, I’m taking the 5,000 year view of things, quality over quantity. 2 books have been finished, but in leu of having printed them, which might take me a few more months to do, laying them out and copyediting. So I’ll add some passages from several. Currently Inga and Edita have finished translating their 3rd book of Liudas’s, and are now doing a broad selection of his short stories, then we will come to a decision on a 4th book for them to translate.

Also I am close to being able to self publish! Very exciting, and prestigous. All the great aristocrats chose to self publish, like Isaac Newton, Michel Montaigne, and Julius Caesar, so like I said, a very prestigious opportunity. It will be a collection of Egyptian stories, translated by me. In fact, the most prominent English Egyptologist, Alan Gardiner, was also a self published aristocrat, so it really is a perfect opportunity.