|
 |
Dead Languages & Polyglottery | ||
Tags: Sanskrit | Polyglottery | Romance Languages | Dead Languages | Alexander Arguelles | Greek | Latin | Reading | Grammar | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| Sinfonia Senior Member Wales Joined 6745 days ago 255 posts - 261 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 49 of 115 23 July 2006 at 3:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
Another way of looking at Castilian is: Aragonese with terrible spelling mistakes. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6944 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 50 of 115 23 July 2006 at 8:54pm | IP Logged | |||||
|
A number of ancient languages seem to have had more complex grammar than their modern descendants. Could this make such a language more beneficial for learning its modern descendant than knowing a different modern descendant?
Also, you'd get a "guaranteed" vocabulary core, whereas the descendants are likely to have pulled in different directions as far as their vocabulary evolution. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 51 of 115 24 July 2006 at 4:53am | IP Logged | |||||
Frenkelds observation is to my knowledge correct for at least the Indoeuropean languages, at least if by complexity you refer to morphology. However there are big differences between different languages. I faintly remember something about eight cases in the reconstructed old Indoeuropean (and sanscrit?), six in Russian, 4 in Icelandic (5 with vocative), the same in German, 2 in the Scandinavian languages (who have kept a genetive) and just 1 in English and the Romance languages except Romanian, who has kept 2 cases (nominative/accusative, genitive/dative). In this list German sticks out: it is smack in the middle of Europa, surrounded by 'reductionist' languages and supposedly a modern country, yet the language has more or less kept its medieval morphology! How come? Yet few people start out learning German by burying themselves in the intricacies of Althochdeutsch, while for some people a study of Latin is considered quite natural if you want to learn French. But the immediate gain from studying the old language would seem to be somewhat larger in the case of German than with French and Latin. My feeling is that it is not linguistics at all that gave Latin its role, but things like its use as an almost living language in the church and among European intellectuals. As I have written in an earlier post I do recognize the value of learning predecessor languages for people who are already advanced in the study of a modern language (and even more if they are advanced in several related languages), and I do recognize the fun of learning Latin or Old English or Sanskrit if it is done in a way that emphasizes the foundations of the language and not just its more subtle fringes. But I don't se how learning the intricate morphology of Anglosaxon or Latin could help you with modern languages where all that stuff has been wiped out. Edited by Iversen on 24 July 2006 at 2:10pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6769 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 52 of 115 24 July 2006 at 5:42am | IP Logged | |||||
|
English still has the genitive case. :) That apostrophe-ess is not a separate
word. Anyway:
There's so much more to these older languages besides noun declensions. I imagine learning Latin would let you see the "big picture" of Romance languages. how features evolved in different directions from a common origin. There would be a lot of "so that's why—" moments, and I suppose you'd have an easier time picking up more languages in the family. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| sigiloso Heptaglot Groupie Portugal Joined 6780 days ago 87 posts - 103 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2, PortugueseC1, Galician, French, Esperanto, Italian Studies: Russian, Greek | Message 53 of 115 24 July 2006 at 11:47am | IP Logged | |||||
I apologize for the off-topicking to the rest of you dealing with more serious things, but this sinfonic polemist needs some fighting back. I am more than acquainted with the usual mainstream linguistics stuff "all languages are the same, and army behind a dialect, all standards are codifications of, blah blah"; am a lover/supporter of minority languages such as in-the-limits of surviving Galician, but here we have a different thing. We have a rural gibberish with some connection with old aborted Latin languages hardly used at all, with an inflated supposed 20.000 speakers (a medium size village), snatched by jealous-to-other-language-owner-regions political parties exclusively for their purposes. Everything is all right with me, language is used for a variety of purposes, as when you develop a secret language with your lover, but don't come to an international forum and talk of a language; we are at risk of someone seriously believing it. I suppose your list of Latin languages , Italian ... considered, must reach the 30/40 languages. Write a paper on it, will be heavily quoted. EDIT: Just came to my mind a linguistic experience I had with Asturian, for you to understand. I was once in Asturias and turned on the radio for distraction. There was a program on local politics, sounded amateurish. Listened for a while without paying much attention, until I noticed the guys said "agora" instead of "ahora", and used some "sh" sound occasionaly. I couldn't understand what strange phenomenon was that, since was pure Spanish with every word, intonation patterns, thinking clichés, everything. Then the guys claimed to be in the Asturian speaking radio! Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Edited by sigiloso on 24 July 2006 at 12:12pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| lady_skywalker Triglot Senior Member Netherlands aspiringpolyglotblog Joined 6891 days ago 909 posts - 942 votes Speaks: Spanish, English*, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, French, Dutch, Italian | Message 54 of 115 24 July 2006 at 12:16pm | IP Logged | |||||
I'm not sure the Aragonese would be happy being told that they spoke 'rural gibberish'. Sounds a little snobbish to me, especially since it is listed as a separate dialect, if not language. I've had a quick look at some of the links listed at Wikipedia's Aragonese page and it seems it does differ somewhat to Castilian, probably resembling Catalan more than anything. Also, your comment about the supposed speakers has little to do with the status of a language. After all, there are many very unique languages spoken in the world, many of them have fewer than 10,000 speakers (eg. some of the native American languages). Does this mean that they are not worthy of being classed as languages by your standards, or are they merely 'Pre-Columbian gibberish'? Not to sound rude but you do come across as wanting to be an authority on languages and have been (overly?) critical of other members expressing their *personal* views of languages. We may not all be linguistics experts but a good many of us are very interested in the subject area and I'm willing to bet that there are at least several members who have a solid academic background in languages, perhaps even people you have already dismissed. Please don't try to make things personal as we're all entitled to our opinions, even if they don't match your own. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| sigiloso Heptaglot Groupie Portugal Joined 6780 days ago 87 posts - 103 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2, PortugueseC1, Galician, French, Esperanto, Italian Studies: Russian, Greek | Message 55 of 115 24 July 2006 at 12:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
|
Definitely, definitely, lady Skywalker, deserved scolding. I suspect Simfonia is one of those with solid academic background so I am poking in to see what he/she has to say in the difficult language/dialect debate. Don´t take too hard anything I say; it is just my writing style. I am not a bigot and examine with respect everything people have to say. I don't have much knowledge btw.
EDIT: and you are absolutely right about the number of speakers question; I was trying to put things into perspective, to be informative for some far from Spain reader. Edited by sigiloso on 24 July 2006 at 1:08pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 56 of 115 24 July 2006 at 1:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
Sorry, I forgot that humble little genitive s in English. There is definitely a case for the existence of a genitive in English. But apart from that, I have spent hours on end during my youth learning Latin morphology (mostly forgotten now), and I have spent time learning not only modern French, but also old French, plus several other Romance languages. I do think I have fairly good overview over the entire language family, and as an intellectual passtime I would certainly recommend studying the relationships between Latin and its offspring. And Latin would open doors for you into a lot of interesting reading from Roman times up through the history. But if you just want to learn say French, then knowing the Latin cases would not help you much as they didn't survive into French (not even the genitive). It's another thing with vocabulary, but even there I think knowing another modern Romance language would give you even more "free lunches". In fact you could equally well argue that students of English ought to learn Latin because of all those learned loanwords in English. Edited by Iversen on 24 July 2006 at 2:25pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
