Classical Languages - Study Group

An area with study groups for various languages. Group members help each other, share resources and experience. Study groups are permanent but the members rotate and change.
David1917
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Re: Classical Languages - Study Group

Postby David1917 » Sat Jan 16, 2021 6:05 am

thevagrant88 wrote:Ok well since I'm here, I have questions.

What are your experience/s with studying both an ancient language and its modern descendant? I find myself in a situation where I would really like to learn both the ancient and modern varieties of my languages of choice. MSA and a dialect, Ancient and Modern Greek, Latin and (in my case) Spanish, etc, and I wanted other's perspectives. How do you feel learning both added you? Do you prefer starting with the older language and going to the modern variant or the other way around?

With Ancient Greek, I really, really would love to fully utilize Assimil for A. Greek, but I don't know French and/or Italian. Are there any other course with quality, reconstructed pronunciation audio? The first part of the Italian Athenaze has been translated in Spanish, but I really would like audio content whenever possible.


It's generally a matter of preference as to what is more important and motivational in the immediate term, but overall it is probably easier to go backward. You can get more exposure to a modern language to internalize its sounds and structures, and modern languages tend to be simplified versions of their ancestors. The content of modern languages also deals with modern life - not ancient life. To understand Tacitus in the original, you need to know Latin as well as the historical context he lived in. To understand Zafón in the original, you just need Spanish.
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Beli Tsar
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Re: Classical Languages - Study Group

Postby Beli Tsar » Sat Jan 16, 2021 8:04 pm

thevagrant88 wrote:With Ancient Greek, I really, really would love to fully utilize Assimil for A. Greek, but I don't know French and/or Italian. Are there any other course with quality, reconstructed pronunciation audio? The first part of the Italian Athenaze has been translated in Spanish, but I really would like audio content whenever possible.

Scorpio Martianus has recorded a reasonable amount of Athenaze on YouTube, which is worth checking out. JACT's Greek course, Reading Greek, also has a CD available, I think of most of the reading sections (?). It's a good textbook, though I've only used it as a reader and not as an initial course. Other than that and Assimil, there aren't many audio options that I'm aware of.
You can get audio for the typical first books to read after a grammar - e.g. there's an excellent recording of Xenophon by Bedwere on internet Archive.
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thevagrant88
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Re: Classical Languages - Study Group

Postby thevagrant88 » Sat Jan 16, 2021 8:14 pm

Wow, that’s some fantastic info right there. Thanks!
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MorkTheFiddle
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Re: Classical Languages - Study Group

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Sun Jan 17, 2021 7:27 pm

Julius Tomin reads some Plato, the 1st 15 books of the Iliad, Aristotle's Metaphysics , the Greek New Testament and more.
Readings of some Homer are here.
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Beli Tsar
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Re: Classical Languages - Study Group

Postby Beli Tsar » Mon Jan 18, 2021 7:32 pm

MorkTheFiddle wrote:Julius Tomin reads some Plato, the 1st 15 books of the Iliad, Aristotle's Metaphysics , the Greek New Testament and more.
Readings of some Homer are here.

I'm so glad you posted this, I was looking for this site the other day (since I'm reading Plato now) and couldn't find it.

Back to the point of the thread, though the number of courses with audio is small, your options as you get into reading are decent. Geoffrey Steadman has produced a large number of readers editions, available in paper or free pdf from https://geoffreysteadman.com/. Obvious starter texts are Xenophon, Plato, and Lysias, and between Tomin and Bedwere's Xenophon you can get recordings for them all. The Xenophon recording is now best found at https://librivox.org/anabasis-by-xenophon/.
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Ogrim
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Re: Classical Languages - Study Group

Postby Ogrim » Tue Jan 19, 2021 5:22 pm

thevagrant88 wrote:Ok well since I'm here, I have questions.

What are your experience/s with studying both an ancient language and its modern descendant? I find myself in a situation where I would really like to learn both the ancient and modern varieties of my languages of choice. MSA and a dialect, Ancient and Modern Greek, Latin and (in my case) Spanish, etc, and I wanted other's perspectives. How do you feel learning both added you? Do you prefer starting with the older language and going to the modern variant or the other way around?


When it comes to Latin and Romance languages, I don't think there is much risk of confusion. I had studied three Romance languages before embarking on Latin, and I would say it helped in the sense that I recognised a lot of vocabulary, and some verb declinations were easy to relate to the modern languages. Still, Latin grammar (and also a lot of vocabulary) is different enough to force you to treat it as a totally different language.

From my limited experience with MSA and Arabic dialects, I would say it is different. I certainly think it is not a good idea to study the two in parallel, you should at least get a pretty decent level in one (meaning at least a B1) before starting on the other. Depending on the dialect the differences can be more or less pronounced compared to MSA, but it can still be confusing. Also, MSA is not an ancient language, it is the modern version of Classical Arabic, with a modern vocabulary and a somewhat simplified grammar. It is spoken every day on TV and radio. Personally I am focusing totally on MSA, and once I reach a B1/B2 level I may start exploring one or two dialects.
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thevagrant88
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Re: Classical Languages - Study Group

Postby thevagrant88 » Mon Jan 25, 2021 10:59 pm

Quick PSA: there is a pdf of a Spanish translation of the Italian Athenaze floating around. I’m personally ecstatic I have more direct access to the material.
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mokibao
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Re: Classical Languages - Study Group

Postby mokibao » Fri Mar 19, 2021 12:07 am

I'm reading Lingua latina per se illustrata and it's really fun. I'm really impressed how you can really just start reading it with no previous knowledge and keep going until you suddenly realize you can read Latin. I was skeptical of such methods for a long time but it just goes to show the principle is sound if it's well executed. If you haven't read it yet, I advise you do, even if you don't want to study Latin in depth (I don't intend to either); you can still learn a surprising amount by reading casually.

(Okay, I guess my being fluent in French and passable in Italian probably helps a lot)
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DaveAgain
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Re: Classical Languages - Study Group

Postby DaveAgain » Tue Mar 30, 2021 10:03 am

There's a documentary on Arte.tv, The mystery of the trojan horse, which presents the hypothesis that the Trojan horse, was actually a boat.

Greek ships of the period typically had a horse head decoration on the bow and boats were often referred to as horses in surviving texts of the period.
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RyanSmallwood
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Re: Classical Languages - Study Group

Postby RyanSmallwood » Thu Apr 01, 2021 2:06 pm

Does anyone know which Old Norse audio resources use reconstructed pronunciation rather than modern icelandic pronunciation? I know Jackson Crawford does, though most of his videos are filled mostly with English explanations, though luckily he did 2 Old Norse readings I'm aware of here and here. Its nice to have some examples, but it would be cool to have more extensive recordings, or at least to collect all the available samples together.
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