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Is mastering descendents necessary? | ||
Tags: Choosing a Language | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Paco Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 4278 days ago 145 posts - 251 votes  Speaks: Cantonese* | Message 1 of 26 22 May 2013 at 10:32am | IP Logged |
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In the thread "Alexander Arguelles", Prof. Arguelles wrote:
I aspire to read them [Classical/Literary languages] in a freer and more natural way, and I have come to believe that the best way to approach this is to really master their modern descendents before going back to them. I recall I have come cross similar idea a few times on this forum. It makes perfect sense to me: the grammar or structure of a daughter language is usually easier to master than that of the ancestor, which is usually highly inflected or complex in other ways; if one masters the streamlined version, the old language should look much dearer. But is it worth the time? #A loose definition of "mastery": able to think, process complicated ideas, speak and write in the language If one learned the daughter language for the sole purpose of mastering the ancestor language, they could have devoted the time to polishing the skills they already had. In other words, does the structure of a classical/literary language pose permanent difficulties which make mastering the daughter language almost like a must? (If needed, you may specify the native language(s) of the learner you take as an example. Examples of "old languages" are Classical Chinese, Sanskrit/Pali, Latin, Ancient Greek, etc.; the respective "daughters" are Mandarin/Cantonese, Modern Indic languages, Romance languages, Modern Koine, etc.) On one hand, I raise this question because I am curious, of course. On the other, I think I will have little chance to say anything about it, according to my plan. The case of my Classical Chinese is hardly relevant, as I have already known Cantonese and Mandarin, which are my native languages; in fact, if not for the scarce of didactic materials, I would recommend anyone who would like to pursue Classical Chinese just do it directly. As for Latin, I will start it after French and Spanish. As for Ancient Greek, I will most probably have started Modern Koine long before I face that dilemma, if any. If you have any experience and/or thought about the topic, please kindly share! Edited by Paco on 22 May 2013 at 10:46am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4708 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 2 of 26 22 May 2013 at 10:51am | IP Logged |
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Necessary? Not really, there are plenty people who have mastered Latin without learning
Spanish, Italian, or French. Useful to do them at the same time? Definitely. But I wouldn't describe it as a necessity. You can probably do without it, you will just need to adapt your methods. As for me, the best way to think about it is to see Latin as a language that is not dead but should be actively used. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Darklight1216 Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5101 days ago 411 posts - 639 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German | Message 3 of 26 22 May 2013 at 10:55am | IP Logged |
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In my opinion life is too short. I couldn't be bothered with all of that if my main interest was in the dead language itself and not it's living descendants. Doubly so in the case of Ancient Greek which has a decent amount of free resources that I can access, but whose progeny is much more difficult to come by freely.
Actually I can use a real example that would apply to me. That would be like saying that I needed to study Haitian Creole before learning French. If anyone had said that, I would have laughed in their face. No offense... Edited by Darklight1216 on 22 May 2013 at 11:04am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4708 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 4 of 26 22 May 2013 at 11:10am | IP Logged |
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Greek is not that hard to come by for resources, neither ancient nor modern. That should
be doable. FSI Greek is pretty extensive, f.e. Arguelles' reasoning is based on his enjoyment of literature, which is often informed by classical languages and uses poetic language that often borrows or is adapted directly from the ancestor much more than colloquial speech is. But for me literature is not important, and it isn't that big a deal for many people. However it is always useful to have the extra knowledge, especially to understand how vocabulary is constructed for example. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Paco Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 4278 days ago 145 posts - 251 votes Speaks: Cantonese* | Message 5 of 26 22 May 2013 at 1:12pm | IP Logged |
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I by instinct believe Arguelles' method is the most effective one to master both the
modern and classical languages. I just wondered if it is somehow more efficacious in mastering the classical languages. But yes, I think I have raised a stupid question. Too many variables. Even if someone reports anything about the method, positive or negative, it might be that they have chosen the wrong methods for the wrong languages for themselves. Now that I have just had a shower to cool my head down a bit, I think, no, it won't help. I was totally wrong and illogical. Assume one can master a foreign language with 720 hours (I said assume). What can I do with 720 hours if I am not going to learn another language? I can read a lot already, and probably will have internalised the classical language. Afterall these are not alien languages which perhaps are not for humans' brains, and it is very difficult to imagine normal humans cannot acquire human languages, however complex, directly. I took no offence. By the way, I am afraid French and Haitian Creole are quite different today, to the degree that Creole will not offer much discount to French, which is different from the case of, say, Modern Greek and Ancient Greek. There are a great deal of resources for Modern Greek. tarvos has mentioned FSI, so perhaps my turn is this website. That's not bad, said the reviewers. Edited by Paco on 22 May 2013 at 1:27pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Lykeio Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4245 days ago 120 posts - 357 votes | Message 6 of 26 22 May 2013 at 1:14pm | IP Logged |
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Well I work with classical tongues, so...
Basically the answer is no, its not necessary. In some cases it can be very helpful and certainly interesting and very useful for linguistic purposes but its certainly not a pre-requisite for reading classical languages. Also inflectional endings aren't that hard to master, its the inherent structure of a language, the subtle semantics etc that takes time to learn. I've always used as a rough guide something like beginner = can read language, lower intermediate = beginning to understand register and style and can compose (production IS necessarily...) and grasp differences between various periods, upper intermediate = good feel for register, metrics, semantics, able to mimic target language over a variety of eras and dialects and starting to develop the skills we associate with said language. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Ogrim Heptaglot Senior Member France Joined 4640 days ago 991 posts - 1896 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, French, Romansh, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Catalan, Latin, Greek, Romanian | Message 7 of 26 22 May 2013 at 5:08pm | IP Logged |
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It certainly isn't necessary, and I would not say it is even useful if your only motivation for learning a descendent is that it will be easier to learn the classical language. Say, your goal is to read classical Latin. If you already know Italian or Spanish, you have an advantage, as you will recognise a lot of the words and to some extent the morphology. However, if you do not know Italian, and you are not interested in learning Italian, why on earth would you "waste" time learning Italian before embarking on Latin, which is your target language in the first place?
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Γρηγόρη Tetraglot Groupie United States Joined 4456 days ago 55 posts - 154 votes Speaks: English*, Greek, Latin, Ancient Greek Studies: German, French, Russian | Message 8 of 26 22 May 2013 at 5:11pm | IP Logged |
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I think that what Prof. Arguelles' strategy actually hints at is the value of an active approach in language study.
Because ancient languages are traditionally taught only for reading, the mind's normal faculties for language acquisition are handcuffed, so to speak, since there is little or no practice in speaking and listening. Learning a descendant offers some solution to the problem. If the ancient language and its descendant are very close, the modern language can serve as a close substitute for learning to speak the ancient language. I have personally found this to be true for Ancient and Modern Greek. By learning to speak Modern Greek, one gains a tremendous amount of ancient vocabulary (particularly if one proceeds to an advanced level of the modern language), as well as much of the inflectional system and many syntactical constructions. There are certainly differences from the Ancient language, but these two have developed a symbiotic relationship in my mind, and therefore my reading of the ancient language has been greatly helped by the more ingrained familiarity I have acquired of the the modern language. This is why, in my personal reading, I read Ancient Greek with the same pronunciation as Modern Greek. I already have an instinctive understanding of so many words in the modern pronunciation (i.e., I don't translate them into another language to understand them) that using the reconstructed pronunciation only slows me down and impairs comprehension. (Incidentally, this is the pedagogical reason for teaching Ancient Greek with the modern pronunciation in Greece. Students start their studies of Ancient Greek by reading adapted passages that are very close to Modern Greek with some glosses and grammatical explanations.) With some ancient-modern pairs, however, this might not be as beneficial. E.g., I think that the syntactical differences between Latin and Italian are too great to provide much more of a benefit than some vocabulary help. Because the real benefit of learning the descendant is to gain some active use of the language, it would be simpler in the case of Latin just to learn to speak Latin, which is becoming more and more common. I dabbled in spoken Latin about 10 years ago and, even though I have not continued to speak Latin, I still feel the benefits to this day. I actually read, rather than translate, Latin. I have studied some Italian, but never felt the same kind of benefits that speaking Latin gave me. 6 persons have voted this message useful |
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