A language learners’ forum

Anyone here have a favorite relatively compact Latin-English dictionary/lexicon? I understand that the Oxford Latin Dictionary is generally considered to be the best, including over Lewis & Short, but I don't have any particular desire to lug around the full two volumes. I have the Pocket OLD but it's in pretty bad shape so I'm considering replacing it with a different option (maybe the Desk OLD which seems to just be the same thing but in hardcover). Is Cassell's good?

Thanks for help with my continuous questions on books.

In English your best bet is probably Lewis' Elementary Latin Dictionary, but it's really much easier to carry around your smartphone where you have access to pretty much everything via apps.

If you absolutely want something printed, and you trust your German, I recommend this one, you can get an old copy or a reprint relatively cheaply.

Just a heads up that the ever generous and multi-talented Luke Ranieri has started recording Orberg's Colloquia Personarum (which accompany the early chapters of Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata) on YouTube:

The first one can be found here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUEKlXcEx2o&t=13s

Hi everyone. I've been back and forth with Old English for several years, now I'm here to stay with the language. I've got the Complete TY Old English course and I've edited the audio so I can do some shadowing. I'd do this for Old Norse if there were materials I was aware of...

Two years ago I was really keen on Indo-european studies. I purchased "the Elements of Hittite" but never got around to studying it.
Two years ago I also got started on learning Sanskrit for a month and made good progress with the writing system. I haven't moved much further though. I'd need to relearn it. There is a really good endorsement from a polyglot on YouTube for the Le sanskrit sans peine course (yes it's in French. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKoKKjOAZ2U&t=285s I purchased it and found it to be very useful.
There was also a really good online resource for learning Classical Chinese but I'm having trouble relocating that website. One good resource for Classical Chinese is "Gateway to the Chinese Classics." It would help to know the 300 characters that are listed at the beginning of the book though.

TY is scheduled to release Old Norse in Feb 2020.

How's their Old English?

Ὁ βίος βραχὺς, ἡ δὲ τέχνη μακρὴ, ὁ δὲ καιρὸς ὀξὺς, ἡ δὲ πεῖρα σφαλερὴ, ἡ δὲ κρίσις χαλεπή. Δεῖ δὲ οὐ μόνον ἑωυτὸν παρέχειν τὰ δέοντα ποιεῦντα, ἀλλὰ καὶ τὸν νοσέοντα, καὶ τοὺς παρεόντας, καὶ τὰ ἔξωθεν.

"Life is short, and Art long; the crisis fleeting; experience perilous, and decision difficult. The physician must not only be prepared to do what is right himself, but also to make the patient, the attendants, and externals cooperate." (Hippocrates (460 - c. 370 BCE), translated by Francis Adams (1796-1861))

I had no idea that this quote was originally a comment about the difficulty of working as a doctor. Its extension to mean any sort of art, craft or skill seems right nevertheless.

IronMike wrote:How's their Old English?

The 'yellow' version of the Old English book from TY (by Leslie Blakeley) was first published in 1964, and I own the reprint from 1978. And in spite of being a slender little thing it seems to be reasonably thorough and systematic. It has however been replaced by a newer book by Mark Atherton, and I simply don't know what that is like. If things have changed in the usual direction there is more fun and games and less information on more pages than in the old one (oh, yes I'm a grumpy old man, but that's the direction in which the TY textbooks normally change these days).

I haven't studied my version of the book systematically, but I'm going to use it as goodnight reading tonight. Instead I learnt the basics of the Anglosaxon grammar from Wardael's Old English grammar, with a few peeks in Martin Lehnert's Altenglisches Elementarbook (written as a historical account of the sound shifts rather than a grammar).

And by the way: the word "ὀξὺς" in the quote from Hippokrates reminded me of an excellent TV documentary series that describes a now lost river by that name on which Alexander and his army may have sailed. But it seems that this meaning of the word has been forgotten - my Dhimotikí-Danish dictionary only know it as an adjective meaning "sharp" or "acrid".

Greetings. I'm going through Coulson's Teach Yourself Sanskrit, which has numerous problems. I'm struggling a little with word order, because my answers to the translation exercise rarely match those given in the answers to the back. Of course, Coulson's explicitly says that getting the same order "is hardly possible", and many different orders may be correct. Still, surely some orders must be less idiomatic than others. I think I need some guidance on this beyond the book's rather vague tips.

I've just finished going through the sixth chapter (out of 15). After this, I have a tentative plan to get a copy of Maurer's The Sanskrit Language, which according to a review isn't much good as an introductory text but has a really good selection of readings (extracts from literature, I think) with extensive notes. That seems a sensible way to prepare myself to read the actual literature.

Just came across this on Twitter:

At age 42, Tolstoy immersed himself in the study of ancient Greek. Months later he wrote to a friend:

"How glad I am that God inflicted this madness upon me. Firstly, I enjoy it; and secondly I'm convinced that until now I knew nothing of all that the human language has produced that is truly and simply beautiful; and thirdly, because I've stopped writing - and will never again write - such verbose nonsense as War and Peace. I'm guilty, but I swear I'll never do it again."

(Letter to Afanasy Fet, January 1871, quoted from "Tolstoy's Letters," trans. and ed., R. F. Christian, 1978.)