Order for Ancient Language & Descendants (Advice Center) Language Learning Forum

Order for Ancient Language & Descendants
Tags: Dead Languages \| Choosing a Language
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YnEoS
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Message 1 of 7

18 February 2014 at 4:30pm | IP Logged

I originally posted this in the dead language challenge, but it looks like it was a bit disruptive to the discussion of the challenge, so I'm creating a topic here in case there are more opinions on the matter.

To rephrase my original question a bit.

If one is planning in the longer term, to learn say 3-5+ modern languages in a family and 1 ancient language that they've all descended from, how early in the process should you learn the ancient language to get the maximum benefit?

I think Professor Arguelles suggested learning an ancient language after 2 modern descendants, because you would be able to see the differences in development when studying the ancient one, and it would help to learn the ancient language earlier for studying subsequent modern languages.

Below I'll quote the original discussion for reference.

YnEoS wrote:

I was originally going to create a new topic for this question, but now that this challenge exists, it seems appropriate to ask it here.

What's the best time to study an ancient language in a language family one wants to be familiar with. I think Professor Arguelles once recommended studying the ancient language after learning 2 modern languages that have developed from it. Does anyone know of any good reasons why one might learn the ancient language earlier or later?

Also when studying an ancient language where one already knows several related languages, is it best to study the ancient language by itself first and make connections on your own, or would it be more efficient to read some sort of comparison between the ancient language and the modern ones that came from it first?

Serpent wrote:

It depends, as always. If you're dead excited about a dead language :), go for it. If you live in the USA, Canada or Switzerland and are considering Spanish/French/Italian, also go for it. You don't have to choose, either - dead languages are studied and used in different ways from the modern ones, and interference is quite unlikely. (in your case such monsters as Russian/Cantonese/Hungarian are a much bigger concern - as much as I support learning multiple languages at a time, it really doesn't seem to me that you have space for more)

In some cases it's about the resources - afaiu, it's pretty much impossible to learn Old Norse without knowing German AND a modern Scandinavian language. For Latin there are tons of resources so I wouldn't say you necessarily need French/Spanish and certainly not both. (I know for Prof Arguelles it's part of a general rec to learn the big three of English/German/French for the sake of resources - I disagree with that. I don't like French and even French-based Assimil is very useful without any French knowledge. I'm coping just fine without French, although by now I understand it a lot in writing and have even done some lessons at GLOSS)

As for purely linguistic reasons, well, with Italian or Spanish you'll be able to see the overall picture more easily than just with French, which has diverged the most along with Romanian. But your Russian and German will be important too - any previous experience can matter.

To a large extent it's simply about personal preferences. This applies to your second question too. For me, discovering the changes on my own was massive fun, and when I read a book, it was to build a proper structure and to find out about the changes I didn't notice on my own. If it doesn't work like that for you, that's totally fine.

Since your French is already intermediate, you could check if your level allows you to read a book about the history of French or the whole Romance family. This will give you delicious tasters but without adding a whole new language to the mix.

Josquin wrote:

Serpent wrote:

In some cases it's about the resources - afaiu, it's pretty much impossible to learn Old Norse without knowing German AND a modern Scandinavian language.

This is not true. There are several books for English learners of Old Norse.

If all fails, you can even learn Modern Icelandic through English resources first and then dive directly into Old Norse graded readers (that's what I did despite speaking German...).

But, as an answer to the original question: There is no "right" way to do it. If you're interested in the language, just go for it. You will find your way.

Lykeio wrote:

It entirely depends on your learning style and what you wish to achieve. A lot of
people, amateurs in particular, like to start with modern languages first due to the
superior resources (like movies and native speakers) etc and build up proficiency
there, then jump into Latin etc. I don't necessarily think this is the best course if
you're primarily after the ancient language and as a general rule its much easier to go
from a morphologically complex language to a simpler one.

As for making connections yourself, well it depends. I think this is one of those areas
where people heavily over-estimate themselves. It's why the net is flooded with folk
etymologies, badlinguistics (a reddit term) and so on. There's a reason why we've
developed a complex, efficient, technical apparatus for such stuff and it would be more
efficient to at least read an article or two to get you on your way. I'm not saying
pick up Adam's "The Regional Diversification of Latin: 200-600 a.d" which is the
industry standard and chock full of interesting stuff. But at least a wiki article
could help you along. There IS a lot of interesting, accessible, work out there but
there's no substitute for reading and using the language.

Iversen wrote:

The lack of oral resources for most dead languages is a good reason for learning the one or more of their descendants first - insofar they exist (you might have a problem to find a descendant of Sumerian).

For instance I can read Old French, Old Occitan, Old Norse and a few more without too much ado, but when I do so I use the nearest modern language with suitable adjustments to create my 'inner voice'. Well, in the case of Occitan I use my scant knowledge of modern Occitan as it is because I simply don't know enough about the sound changes since the golden age of that language. And Latin is an exception because I have had courses in it and therefore I have heard my teachers speak - and there are even some excellent voice recordings on the internet made by people like Tunbergen and Miraglia who actually can speak it freely in a believable way. So there I go for an eclectic mix based on the 'classical' reconstructed pronunciation (the one with the hard /k/'s). But for most dead languages it is hard to find any spoken resources at all, and then you have to solve the problem in another way.

Latin is also special in another way insofar I know more than one of its descendants - namely the Romance languages. And that makes it less attractive to use just one of them as my model language. You could say the same thing about Old Norse and the Nordic languages, but the big difference is here that we have one descendant (Icelandic) which is so conservative that you more or less automatically will use it as your bridge to the old language, leaving Danish, Norwegian and Swedish aside. And therefore it will in practice be the Icelandic pronunciation I use with a slightly different prosody - and not the few short snippets of reconstructed Old Norse I have heard. And my way of 'thinking Anglosaxon' owes as much to Icelandic (and to some extent Low German) as it does to any dialect of modern English.

YnEoS wrote:

Thanks for all the responses!

To re-clarify my question a bit, I meant to ask something more along the lines of "when's the best time to learn an ancient language, if you're ultimate goal is to learn the ancient language and 3 or more of it's modern descendants."

Personally, my primary reason for language learning is in film studies, so for me modern languages have the most immediate interest. But I'm also interested in studying more literature and history so I do hope to learn some ancient languages as well after I've learned a few modern ones to a suitable level.

I believe Professor Arguelles' recommendation was based around the idea that learning an ancient language, makes it easier to learn more related modern ones and that it was better to learn an ancient one earlier on in the process rather than at the end. I'm curious if anyone has had experiences that supported or differed from this idea.

dmaddock1 wrote:

To give a contrarian view, having some Latin under your belt makes irregulars and other quirks of the modern descendants much easier to remember since you can see how and why they became irregular.

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emk
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Message 2 of 7

18 February 2014 at 5:37pm | IP Logged

I'm with Serpent: Let your enthusiasm guide you. The biggest challenge in learning a language is simply continuing. People fall in love with languages for all sorts of reasons, and that enthusiasm will carry them through all kinds of obstacles. For example, a man named Timothy Fenstermacher learned ancient Egyptian while in solitary confinement, and he would up publishing letters in Egyptology journals.

If the enthusiasm is there, any order will probably work fine. But if you study in a specific order just because somebody else recommended it (even as remarkable a polyglot as Arguelles), you risk a long, dry slog. Languages are too big to learn for any reason other than passion or necessity.
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YnEoS
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Message 3 of 7

18 February 2014 at 10:18pm | IP Logged

Well, I've been studying films from many different countries for years before I decided to start studying languages independently. So I have a long list of hugely important languages to me, that I probably won't be able to get through in my life time. Motivation isn't a problem for me, because I already interact with a number of languages on a regular basis. I'm just trying to remove the English intermediary between myself and as many of the most important ones as possible and in the most fun and efficient way.

I don't have nearly as much exposure to ancient languages, but I'm very curious about a number of them. I generally remember things best when I can group them into periods and can tap into historical explanations for them. This is generally how I remember things about the films I watch, by associating them with their significance in the history of the country they were made in, and in the career/evolution of the director or studio that made them. I think studying ancient languages might be interesting in a related way, in that it would help me remember certain aspects of various languages within a family by seeing how they diverged over the years.
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Serpent
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Message 4 of 7

19 February 2014 at 12:59am | IP Logged

Didn't you sign up for team STARt with the intention of finally taking a language or two to fluency? You've come a long way especially with French and German; unless you suddenly started to hate them, do your best to persevere. Change the way you study, not the languages. And try not to think too much about WHEN you'll have enough time for Latin or any other language - the more you'll think of it, the later it'll happen.

And note that you don't need to actually *learn* dead languages. If you're more interested in the historical context etc, *study* them like linguists do. Get an understanding without necessarily memorizing anything. Every now and then when you're learning something in a modern Romance language, go back to your Latin materials and see how the feature has changed.
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YnEoS
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Message 5 of 7

19 February 2014 at 1:35am | IP Logged

Sorry if I caused the wrong impression, I tend to over analyze and over plan my language goals way in advance. This has been a question that's been on my mind for a while. There was a lot of buzz about ancient languages in the dead language challenge thread so I was curious to get other people's thoughts on the topic. This question was meant more in terms of language learning strategies for general consideration, not some sort of evaluation of my personal routine. I have no intention of dropping any of my current languages to pick up a dead one.

My German and French studies are alive and well and I'm way too enthusiastic about my present routine for far off flights of fancy to pose any kind of threat to it.
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Serpent
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Message 6 of 7

19 February 2014 at 3:14am | IP Logged

That's great to hear, about your current studies :-)

But we all tend to analyze and plan. It's certainly fun, I know. However, the answer to "when to study a dead language" is basically the same as "when to study a living language" :) Things change, and the more languages you are studying/want to study, the more they will change. 7 years ago I wrote this post, and now I'm studying almost all the "important" languages I mentioned there, apart from Hindi/Sanskrit where I just love the writing system. But I couldn't have planned that, and for most languages there was something specific in my life that got me started. As Coelho says, follow the signs :-)

Edited by Serpent on 19 February 2014 at 3:27am
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YnEoS
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Message 7 of 7

19 February 2014 at 4:44am | IP Logged

I agree. It's still a bit too fresh for me to willfully dig it up, but I think one of my first posts on this board was some elaborate language learning plan I hatched up in my head. A lot of what I've learned from bringing french from 0 to intermediate has changed that, and I'm sure once I get through the intermediate stage that will have an equally big if not bigger impact on my ideas about my language learning process.

Still, I can still see some remnants of my old plans in my present schemes. Just a lot has been re-arranged and re-prioritized with the perspective I've gained so far.

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