Can you learn a language from Gutenberg / Archive.org?

[rdearman]

While musing about learning a new language in 2019 I was having a wander around the Project Gutenberg pages searching for language books. There are a lot of books there for learning languages. Textbooks for Spanish, French & German. But other interesting little nuggets.

• Cornish
• Latin
• Robinson Crusoe in Latin
• Malay
• Maori
• Esperanto

In addition to all of those there is a HUGE list on archive.org which you can find here in the Librivox volunteers forum.
https://forum.librivox.org/viewtopic.ph ... 650b19e2a7

Anyone tried using older resources for languages? Most languages change of course, but I bet the Latin and Ancient Greek textbooks are still valid. Thoughts?

[Skynet]

Anyone tried using older resources for languages? Most languages change of course, but I bet the Latin and Ancient Greek textbooks are still valid. Thoughts?

Archive.org has been a Godsend! I was able to pick up my pre-spelling reform French books there - Cortina Conversational French in 20 Lessons (1918), Teach Yourself French (1918), Teach Yourself French Grammar (1961), MÉTHODE Berlitz: Partie Francaise - 1er livre (1888) and MÉTHODE Berlitz: Partie Francaise - 2eme livre (1889). These courses had much, much steeper learning curves than any contemporary course book that I can think of. I am happy that I used them, even though I still use the old French spelling reform for many nouns, numbers, and espedcially past participle agreements. I hoped that I could repeat my success with German, but Textualis, Schwabacher, Fraktur and Cursiva were huge deterrents. One day though...

[Querneus]

Anyone tried using older resources for languages? Most languages change of course, but I bet the Latin and Ancient Greek textbooks are still valid.

Yes, in fact, this is an entirely normal thing to do if you study Latin. I see links to books that are more than a hundred years old absolutely all the time in discussions at Latin Internet forums. Dead languages do have the advantage that study materials remain useful for a long time.

There was one day when somebody at a Latin forum asked for a list of verbs for animal noises ("to bark", "to meow", "to bleat", "to moo", etc.). The link provided as an answer was a page from a 17th century textbook from England. I loved it.

For a more extreme example, people were still using Donatus's 4th century grammars, as well as Priscian's 6th century grammar, as late as the 16th century.

[Kraut]

Your IP Address is Blocked from www.gutenberg.org

Why did this block occur?

A Court in Germany ordered that access to certain items in the Project Gutenberg collection are blocked from Germany. Project Gutenberg believes the Court has no jurisdiction over the matter, but until the issue is resolved during appeal, it will comply.
How can I get unblocked?

All IP addresses in Germany are blocked. This block will remain in place until legal guidance changes.

[Querneus]

"PGLAF" = Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, which operates Project Gutenberg ("PG")

Q: Why block PG's entire collection, rather than just those 18 books?
A: PGLAF's legal advisors disagree with all claims that there must be any blocking, or removal, or anything associated - censorship, fines/fees, disclaimers, etc. - for items that are in the public domain in the US. Period.

Because the German Court has overstepped its jurisdiction, and allowed the world's largest publishing group to bully Project Gutenberg for these 18 books, there is every reason to think that this will keep happening. There are thousands of eBooks in the Project Gutenberg collection that could be subject to similar over-reaching and illigitimate actions.

PGLAF is a small volunteer organization, with no income (it doesn't sell anything) other than donations. There is every reason to fear that this huge corporation, with the backing of the German Court, will continue to take legal action. In fact, at least one other similar complaint arrived in 2017 about different books in the Project Gutenberg collection, from another company in Germany.

Project Gutenberg's focus is to make as much of the world's literature available as possible, to as many people as possible. But it is, and always has been, entirely US-based, and entirely operating within the copyright laws of the US. Blocking Germany, in an effort to forestall further legal actions, seems the best way to protect the organization and retain focus on its mission.

Q: The plaintiff is S. Fischer Verlag, GmbH. Is that the international conglomerate?
A: Yes, it is part of a family of companies all under single ownership and control or majority stakeholdership, from Germany, reaching around the world. S. Fischer Verlag, GmbH is a unit of Verlagsgruppe Georg Holtzbrinck GmbH. Internationally it is known in the US and elsewhere as Holtzbrinck Publishers LLC. Readers in the US know this as Macmillan, which is one of the largest publishers in the US by revenue, and owns many familiar imprints. US readers might also recall that Macmillan was one of four companies accused by the US Dept. of Justice in 2012 of price fixing. The companies eventually settled the antitrust claims, including by giving credits to customers who had overpaid for eBooks.

Source: https://cand.pglaf.org/germany/index.html

[devilyoudont]

This is really neat. The only grammar on Japanese on Project Gutenberg is only from the 17th century, but negatives are formed entirely differently.

It's very difficult for me to read tho, because all the Japanese is romanized using a romanization system I have never seen before. In some cases, it looks to me like sound shifts have occurred since the book was written.

There's nothing wrong with the Esperanto course listed, other than it seems to move through topics insanely quickly.

[DaveAgain]

A lecture about Tolkien mentioned that he'd learned Old English (Mr Tolkien's day job was teaching Old English) from Mr Sweet's books, which are available from archive.org.

[vonPeterhof]

This is really neat. The only grammar on Japanese on Project Gutenberg is only from the 17th century, but negatives are formed entirely differently.

It's very difficult for me to read tho, because all the Japanese is romanized using a romanization system I have never seen before. In some cases, it looks to me like sound shifts have occurred since the book was written.

The romanization system is based on Portuguese orthography, and the language itself is apparently from the period of transition from Late Middle Japanese to Early Modern Japanese, since it appears to reflect some characteristic features of both the former (like the two different long o sounds) and the latter (like final vowel devoicing).

[SGP]

This is really neat. The only grammar on Japanese on Project Gutenberg is only from the 17th century, but negatives are formed entirely differently.

It's very difficult for me to read tho, because all the Japanese is romanized using a romanization system I have never seen before. In some cases, it looks to me like sound shifts have occurred since the book was written.

The romanization system is based on Portuguese orthography[...]

We are used to refer to Japanese written with the Latin alphabet as Romaji.
But Below the Tip of the Iceberg, Romaji is sort of an ice cream. Y'know...several flavors. And yes, this is valid even for the contemporary variants of it.

Some like to eat ice cream, some don't.

There are several ways of transcription. And this is one of the reasons why it really does have its limitations.

Yours truly,
A Romaji Hiragana Katakana Kanji Frequent Switcher .

[David1917]

For a modern living language, I'd say the drawbacks are four:

• As mentioned in the initial post, problems with language changing over time. I've said elsewhere I think this concern is overstated when talking about 1st/2nd gen Assimil courses, but when you get up to 100+ years, you should have something more modern as your primary resource.
• Lack of audio again requires a different primary source.
• Many older language courses assume a baseline understanding of Latin, Greek, French, and German. That may be why the first edition TYS courses for French & German start pretty fast; other courses in the series will reference these 2 languages for pronunciation points. An Englishman in the 1950's seeking to pronounce a foreign language may be referred to a German vowel with an umlaut, for example. Moving back even further to the 19th century, one of the Old English books I'm looking at from Gutenberg (thanks to this thread for inspiration) references Greek in the Greek script and everything.
• Exotic language scripts might not have had proper typesetting, or the romanization schemes might not mirror what they are today (e.g. pinyin for Chinese, while not complete in itself, an older treatise on Chinese usage would be that much more difficult to follow in a different transliteration). This is especially problematic if the course is entirely romanized.

The great benefit for anyone who can overcome these obstacles is of course a more dense and thorough examination of their target language, and free to boot. I would definitely recommend perusing the options to any language learner.

For a "dead" language, the first 2 drawbacks are of course mostly irrelevant (though one should not sideline proper pronunciation entirely), and the 3rd sort of resolves itself in that you might either be learning Latin or Greek itself, or if in my case you're studying Old English, references to German should be expected for a complete and comparative approach. The fourth is the only hindrance to really look out for.