Learning Classical languages

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nooj
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Learning Classical languages

Postby nooj » Mon Jan 22, 2018 6:57 am

Did you learn classical languages in school? Are you learning them now or have you before?

Do they present a special or different kind of challenge to 'ordinary' languages?
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Re: Learning Classical languages

Postby languist » Mon Jan 22, 2018 7:19 am

I studied Latin at school and was very dedicated to it. I got 100% in my exams and placed top in the country, and thought about studying Classics at Oxford (didn't happen lol). These days, I have essentially zero knowledge of Latin. At school, although not part of a class, my Latin teacher tutored me privately in Ancient Greek (again, which I have forgotten completely). I am infinitely grateful for having (initially) been made to study the classics, because I think they laid a strong foundation for language learning. At least when it comes to my education, the approach to grammatical concepts and vocab acquisition for classical languages was completely different to that of the modern languages. Not only were these languages more complex, but we studied them in so much more depth, as although we were learning to produce as well as to understand the language, the teaching was certainly weighted more towards understanding, given the nature of the beast. Being dead and all. However, alongside Latin I also studied French and German, in a much less intense way, and although I was more proficient in Latin than the other two back then, it's the modern languages which have managed to stick in my brain through the years. So I'd say there is something fundamentally different between learning a language which you're expected only to understand, and one which you are expected to speak, and it's all down to the teaching/learning method. The fact that my Latin has faded away could also be due to the fact that I'm not naturally exposed to it as I am with pretty much every living language, of course.
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Re: Learning Classical languages

Postby zenmonkey » Mon Jan 22, 2018 8:59 am

No - classical languages were not part of my school curriculum. Whatever Latin or Greek I learned was through the influence of my mother and later my grandfather (an amateur microphotographer / biologist). I later put a bit of focus on both languages but really have the lightest patine of knowledge.

Other languages like Classic Hebrew, Syriac, Aramaic, Tibetan, Nahuatl are minor interest today. I tend to focus more on modern versions.
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Re: Learning Classical languages

Postby tarvos » Mon Jan 22, 2018 9:13 am

I studied Latin at school. The biggest drawback is that I never got to speak Latin, so it didn't become automatic like French or German.
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Re: Learning Classical languages

Postby Dylan95 » Tue Jan 23, 2018 8:49 am

I studied Latin for 6 years in middle school and high school. I also studied French for 3 years in high school, Italian for 1 semester, and Russian for 4 years in college.

Latin was very different. After a year of French, we were already using only French in class. The same was true after a week or two of intensive Italian in college. No English. After 6 years of Latin, I could translate Vergil (with difficulty), and Caesar's de bello gallico without too much of a challenge, but I didn't even know how to say "how are you?." Learning a dead language is very different. You'll grow a big passive vocab because all you need to do is translate texts, but your active vocab will be very low. I enjoyed the first 4 years of Latin when we were translating normal nexts etc. But once we got into poetry, it got a lot more difficult for me.

For some people it might be challenging because, knowing that they'll never need to use it in real life, they might lose motivation. This wasn't the case for me, but it definitely is for some people. Only half of my 7th grade latin class continued into 9th grade. Most of those people continued with it to graduation though.

I don't know if this is true, but it also seems that classical languages can be quite a bit more complicated than their modern counterparts. As someone who has studied Latin, French, and Italian, I can say with confidence that Latin's grammar was more difficult. And I've heard that ancient Greek and Sanskrit etc. are even more of a challenge.

I haven't used Latin at all since I last studied it 5 years ago. I wouldn't be able to translate anything really right now, but I feel like if someone were to give me a couple of weeks or a month, it wouldn't take so terribly long to get it all back. Learning huge amounts of vocab in latin was pretty easy since you only need to know it passively. Being an english speaker, the words also just weren't that hard to remember in general.

I will say that I don't regret studying Latin despite the fact that I haven't used it because I think it has helped me with the languages I have studied since. It introduced me to complicated conjugations and a case system etc. which has helped me in my studies of russian and french. And who knows, it might even help me with Turkish, since in most Latin poetry, the verbs are almost always at the end.
Last edited by Dylan95 on Tue Jan 23, 2018 4:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Learning Classical languages

Postby IronMike » Tue Jan 23, 2018 10:31 am

Over the years I've studied Latin and Old English and enjoyed both, especially since there was little to no pressure to learn how to speak them. I enjoyed reading (parts of) Beowulf in the original.

In the future I will pick up OE again and will take a whack at Nahuatl.
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Re: Learning Classical languages

Postby Iversen » Wed Jan 24, 2018 12:47 am

I did get through some courses in Latin long ago, and I have worked on my Latin later with the intention to make it an active language - though so far it is still somewhat shaky in that respect. I never got around to do the same thing with Ancient Greek (in any of its forms), partly because I wanted to learn Dhimotiki first, and even though I have learnt to read a number of other 'old' languages I have never tried to make them active. And that's a pity.

So the real hurdle with dead languages (including the 'standard' classical ones) is that they are dead - and if I have proceeded further with Latin than with the other dead ones it is only because I could get some resources that to some extent could be used to learn it as an active language. And is that a satisfying situation? No. But I can't see myself learning to write messages in Chaldean or Old Chinese soon, and unless I find a really good Modern -> Old French dictionary my attempts at communicating in Ancien Français will remain few and far between - and not an expression of true communicative capabilities. Sorry..

But there is another aspect I would like to mention, namely that we are historically inclined to forget that the Greeks and Roman weren't the only ones to write stuff in the old days, and they may have been glorified more than they deserved. And we may not even have rescued the most valuable writings. I would gladly have 'sold' a dialogue or two by Plato if I could have had a textbook written by the man who constructed the Antikythera Mechanism (or even better: by his teacher) - or maybe an Etruscan-Latin dictionary. And there are other things to be missed sorely from other ancient cultures. For instance the Gilgamesh epos and the Egyptian Sun hymn and at least one travelogue by an old Egyptian have survived, but they can't have been the only things written in the respective languages. What have we lost because nobody cared to translate and rescue the stuff?
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Re: Learning Classical languages

Postby Josquin » Wed Jan 24, 2018 2:35 pm

I learned Latin at school and I'm now studying Ancient Greek, Biblical Hebrew, and Sanskrit on my own. As a few people already mentioned, learning Latin was quite different from learning a modern language. We never even tried to speak it in class, all we did was learning grammar and translating texts. In the beginning, these consisted of made-up texts adjusted to the students' needs, but after three years or so, we dived into Roman literature: Caesar's De bello Gallico, Ovid's Metamorphoses and Ars amatoria, Pliny the Younger's letters. After gaining the so-called Latinum, which is the German school certificate for knowledge of Latin and is still needed for admittance to some subjects at university, our Latin classes ended. Nobody wanted to continue except for me.

As I already mentioned in another thread, I enjoyed studying Latin enormously although I never really had emotional affection for the language. The complex case and verbal systems were quite a challenge, which I truly enjoyed. Translating ancient literature even was some kind of meditational exercise and it was fascinating to read 2000 year old texts in their original language, although Roman literature can be very dry and the language overly complicated.

After reaching the Latinum, I tried to go on studying Latin on my own by translating Vergil's Aeneid. I think I made it halfway through the first book before giving up. I toyed with the idea of studying classical philology at university, but finally decided against it. I still needed Latin for my studies of music history though. A lot of music theory has been written in Latin and the Vulgate Bible has been a major source of texts that were set to music over the centuries (just think of Mozart's Requiem, which is all in Latin).

Now, I'm studying Ancient Greek, Biblical Hebrew, and Sanskrit on my own and the process is very much the same as with Latin: learning grammar and vocabulary and translating pieces of ancient literature or made-up practice sentences. Although this may not be as stimulating and exciting as learning to "speak" a language, I once again enjoy the process enormously. I love getting access to Ancient Greek theatre plays, philosophical works, and epics, understanding the Hebrew Bible as it was written, or even reading excerpts of Sanskrit epics like the Bhagavad-Gita that are thousands of years old.

Yes, classical languages tend to be more complex than their modern counterparts, but that has never scared me away. In fact, I love morphologically complex languages. They tend to be more elegant or refined in their expressions, as a lot of information can be squeezed into very few words (Sanskrit is notorious for this with its composite nouns and participle constructions). This makes translating them more challenging, but I like it. In the future, I would like to continue stuying classical languages, such as Old Irish, Old and Middle English, or Old and Middle High German, because they give you an insight in past times that a modern language simply can't.
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Re: Learning Classical languages

Postby Seneca » Wed Jan 24, 2018 5:26 pm

Josquin wrote:I learned Latin at school and I'm now studying Ancient Greek, Biblical Hebrew, and Sanskrit on my own. As a few people already mentioned, learning Latin was quite different from learning a modern language. We never even tried to speak it in class, all we did was learning grammar and translating texts. In the beginning, these consisted of made-up texts adjusted to the students' needs, but after three years or so, we dived into Roman literature: Caesar's De bello Gallico, Ovid's Metamorphoses and Ars amatoria, Pliny the Younger's letters. After gaining the so-called Latinum, which is the German school certificate for knowledge of Latin and is still needed for admittance to some subjects at university, our Latin classes ended. Nobody wanted to continue except for me.

As I already mentioned in another thread, I enjoyed studying Latin enormously although I never really had emotional affection for the language. The complex case and verbal systems were quite a challenge, which I truly enjoyed. Translating ancient literature even was some kind of meditational exercise and it was fascinating to read 2000 year old texts in their original language, although Roman literature can be very dry and the language overly complicated.

After reaching the Latinum, I tried to go on studying Latin on my own by translating Vergil's Aeneid. I think I made it halfway through the first book before giving up. I toyed with the idea of studying classical philology at university, but finally decided against it. I still needed Latin for my studies of music history though. A lot of music theory has been written in Latin and the Vulgate Bible has been a major source of texts that were set to music over the centuries (just think of Mozart's Requiem, which is all in Latin).

Now, I'm studying Ancient Greek, Biblical Hebrew, and Sanskrit on my own and the process is very much the same as with Latin: learning grammar and vocabulary and translating pieces of ancient literature or made-up practice sentences. Although this may not be as stimulating and exciting as learning to "speak" a language, I once again enjoy the process enormously. I love getting access to Ancient Greek theatre plays, philosophical works, and epics, understanding the Hebrew Bible as it was written, or even reading excerpts of Sanskrit epics like the Bhagavad-Gita that are thousands of years old.

Yes, classical languages tend to be more complex than their modern counterparts, but that has never scared me away. In fact, I love morphologically complex languages. They tend to be more elegant or refined in their expressions, as a lot of information can be squeezed into very few words (Sanskrit is notorious for this with its composite nouns and participle constructions). This makes translating them more challenging, but I like it. In the future, I would like to continue stuying classical languages, such as Old Irish, Old and Middle English, or Old and Middle High German, because they give you an insight in past times that a modern language simply can't.

What are your favorite/suggested resource for these thus far?
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Re: Learning Classical languages

Postby Josquin » Wed Jan 24, 2018 5:59 pm

Seneca wrote:What are your favorite/suggested resource for these thus far?

Ancient Greek
Joint Association of Classical Teachers: Reading Greek, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge 1978.

Biblical Hebrew
Lambdin, Thomas O.: Introduction to Biblical Hebrew, Darton, Longman & Todd: London 1973.

Sanskrit
Ruppel, Antonia M.: The Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge 2017.

These are the main English-language resources I use. I also have some German-based textbooks and grammars, but I guess they wouldn't be of any use to you.
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