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Ever try to Learn a Dead Language? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Luso Hexaglot Senior Member Portugal Joined 6059 days ago 819 posts - 1812 votes  Speaks: Portuguese*, French, EnglishC2, GermanB1, Italian, Spanish Studies: Sanskrit, Arabic (classical) | Message 9 of 23 13 June 2015 at 5:14am | IP Logged | ||
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It is a great experience, very much enhanced if it also happens to be a sacred one.
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| mar_plij Newbie United States Joined 3485 days ago 2 posts - 5 votes Speaks: English* | Message 10 of 23 13 June 2015 at 6:27am | IP Logged | ||
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I took both Latin and Greek in college and really enjoyed them for a couple reasons. First, the linguist in me was very interested in how differently they operate from English or any of the other modern (Western) languages I'd learned. However, I also enjoyed them because they gave me a completely new appreciation for poetry. Learning the meters that the Iliad and Aeneid are created around give the original versions so much more flavor than in translations. And while there are lots of stories about virtues and gods, there are just as many about vices and reprobates, so there's all kinds of fun reading.
If you do Latin, you're probably going to use Wheelock; for Greek, I'd recommend C. W. Shelmerdine. But, as others have noted, you aren't limited to them. Assimil's hieroglyphics gets solid reviews, Diamond looks like a good gateway to Old English/Anglo-Saxon, etc. Good luck! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5554 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 11 of 23 13 June 2015 at 8:30am | IP Logged | ||
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I've learned a bit of Latin or Ancient Egyptian from time to time and have blogged about my experiences here on the Forum. For Latin, I used "Lingua Latina" (with accompanying audio), and I really enjoyed the whole "inductive reading" method, where you just read whilst listening to the texts and work out the meaning in a graded i+1 fashion in the context of an ongoing story. Assimil's "L'Égyptien hiéroglyphique" and Allen's "Middle Egyptian" are also top notch, with which I made headway to round off 2014 for a fun challenge (Champollion's Challenge. Learning more about such a prominent ancient culture and being able to read a bit of "The Tale of Peter Rabbit" in Ancient Egyptian was a high point of that year! My only regret is that I generally don't have enough time to include these on a more regular basis, hence the occasional projects, but I'll no doubt return to continue where I left off and finish these books one day. After that, who knows, Sanskrit, Akkadian, or an earnest attempt to decode the Voynich manuscript *lol*...it might seem a strange diversion to others, but I love it!
Edited by Teango on 13 June 2015 at 8:32am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| OlafP Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5433 days ago 261 posts - 667 votes Speaks: German*, French, English | Message 12 of 23 15 June 2015 at 2:01am | IP Logged | ||
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This thread wouldn't even exist and the question wouldn't arise if it wasn't for the dysphemism "dead". Obviously this is not a neutral description but a successful attempt of whoever came up with this term to force their opinion upon others. We are dealing with a rhetoric twist here that is used to put your opponent in a situation where he continuously has to defend himself and doesn't even know how he came to it. There is an appropriate German noun for this: Deutungshoheit, which could be translated as "interpretational sovereignty". You cannot win an argument against a skilled speaker if you don't recognise this and know how to countersteer.
A neutral description would emphasise the properties of such languages: they are natural languages that have no living native speakers. This is a bit too verbose, though. You could emphasise that they do not change their structure and vocabulary over time, i.e. they are stable. At Debian they call a distribution stable when the software packages don't get any more upgrades except for bug fixes. This does not make the distribution "dead", but the perfect choice if you want something rock-solid. The languages are not the problem. However, the use of language may be. Knowledge of rhetoric devices should be a key interest of any language learner. It even transfers from one language to another without additional effort, just like literacy. What is the point in building an airplane if you don't learn to fly it? BTW, Latin rocks. 9 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Luso Hexaglot Senior Member Portugal Joined 6059 days ago 819 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, French, EnglishC2, GermanB1, Italian, Spanish Studies: Sanskrit, Arabic (classical) | Message 13 of 23 17 June 2015 at 3:37am | IP Logged | ||
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Great post, OlafP.
I enjoy the stability of Sanskrit. Of course, being the classical language of India, it's not as "dead" as it seems: as we use Greek and Latin to come up with concepts like "television" (that one being both Greek and Latin), in India they use a Sanskrit-based word (in this case, दूरदर्शनम्). 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| DaisyMaisy Senior Member United States Joined 5378 days ago 115 posts - 178 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish Studies: Swedish, Finnish | Message 14 of 23 17 June 2015 at 8:15am | IP Logged | ||
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Isn't Mayan still spoken? The writing system is obviously no longer in use but a fascinating glyph based system.
Studying Latin if you're an Indo European speaker is great due to the history and languages that came from it. Plus it just sounds great to say something in it! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4770 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 15 of 23 17 June 2015 at 9:15am | IP Logged | ||
Edit: The link is working for me now, but the figures it shows are bizarre - according to Indian census data between 1981 and 1991 the number of native speakers of Sanskrit jumped from 6,106 to 49,736 people, but by 2001 it dropped to 14,135 people. Edited by vonPeterhof on 17 June 2015 at 4:41pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4770 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 16 of 23 17 June 2015 at 9:31am | IP Logged | ||
2 persons have voted this message useful |
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