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Latin, greek, other, 4 training the mind | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| madalieninvader Newbie CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5713 days ago 11 posts - 12 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 1 of 24 24 April 2009 at 9:44am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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I'm trying to decide which language to add to my shopping list of "to learn before
death". If you simply wanted to train (or torture) your mind in things like logic, and linguistic awareness in a compact concise language which one would you choose? I've heard people say Latin trains their awareness of how they write and speak in English and that translating into compact Latin accomplishes this. I've also heard when translating into Latin your usually not just "off" but totally wrong if making a mistake. Would Attic Greek have this self correcting tendency? Russian is highly inflected but doesn't seem any more compact than English. I don't know where it originated but I've heard the structure of German and Greek are what allowed the philosophical wealth to come out of those languages. I don't believe in an extreme Sapir-Whorf but I don't think it's all non-sense either. I don't want to offend anyone but German seems ugly (to ear and eye) and illogical. Basque, Georgian and Finnish are highly inflected and/or agglutinative but don't have the wealth of literature that Latin or Greek (Koine + Attic) does. I guess what I'm asking is: What language is most compact, "philosophical/logical", different from English, makes you "linguistically aware", intellectually challenging, mind training and has some decent stuff to read in? So far I'm leaning towards starting Attic then going to Modern Greek, even though all the irregular verbs might make it not qualify as logical. Edited by madalieninvader on 24 April 2009 at 1:46pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Tyr Senior Member Sweden Joined 5788 days ago 316 posts - 384 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Swedish | Message 2 of 24 24 April 2009 at 9:46am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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I dunno...I find any language increases English awareness.
I've started talking a lot more properly with Swedish- saying 'one must do this' instead of 'you must do this'. Which is odd. But anyway. Yeah. I'll agree with latin. It'll probally be useful when you die too. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| madalieninvader Newbie CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5713 days ago 11 posts - 12 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 3 of 24 24 April 2009 at 10:00am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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I also think any other language increases your English awareness. I find myself saying
"Where do you want to be?" instead of "Where do you want to go?" (not actually sure what an English stylist would recommend), and noticing things about English I never thought about. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6445 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 4 of 24 24 April 2009 at 11:27am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Greek doesn't have much literature, as far as I can tell. Quite a bit was written, but quite a lot was lost as well. Basque, Georgian, and Finnish have a fair amount of literature, and in the case of Georgian, the literary tradition is quite long - it dates back 2200 years. As far as I know (and I could certainly be wrong), Greek does have the strongest philosophical tradition of the 4, though. For logic, study logic - second order predicate logic, intuitionist logic, etc are a blast. I'm unaware of any language I'd consider truly logical - although I freely admit I haven't seriously looked into languages constructed to be logical. I'm fairly firmly convinced that no natural human language is particularly logical - they all have ways of classifying and dealing with the world, which are partially logically followed and partially ... not so logical. For linguistic awareness, any language will help; more remote ones will help somewhat more. An inflected language with cases is a perfectly valid way to explore this. Whether Russian or Latin are more compact than English depends on what you're saying; both have the ability to express things with one word that an entire English sentence can only partially recreate (... and vice versa, though in the opposite direction, it's a matter of the connotations of vocabulary, rather than the delicate interplay of affixes). I find German to be a nice language, and fairly logical as languages go; matter of taste, I guess.
Have you considered an East Asian language, such as Chinese or Japanese? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| minus273 Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5771 days ago 288 posts - 346 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, EnglishC2, French Studies: Ancient Greek, Tibetan | Message 5 of 24 24 April 2009 at 11:59am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
I love this one. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6017 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 6 of 24 24 April 2009 at 1:37pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
English. Books are always smaller translated to English than in other languages.
None. Every one. There's logic in every language, but it depends very much on your viewpoint which is the most logical. Unless you include artificial languages (Interlingua, Esperanto etc) which are inherently more logical than any natural language. But perhaps less psycological.
Any polynesian language.
Any language. But linguistic awareness is subjective -- learning the ergative/absolutive distinction (as in eg Basque and Japanese) won't give you much help in awareness of, eg, Indo-European grammar
Learning a language shouldn't be an intellectual challenge. If it is, you're doing it wrong. If you want an intellectual challenge, take up chess and cryptic crosswords.
That depends on what you want to train yourself to do. Long distance running is great physical training, but it won't help your golf game....
Almost any language. Seriously, you say:
How many books are you expecting to read in your life? I don't think you'll run out of interesting things to read in Basque or Finnish. (Not so sure about Georgian -- was it squashed in the Soviet era or is there a good range of printed sources?) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Juan M. Senior Member Colombia Joined 5905 days ago 460 posts - 597 votes | Message 7 of 24 24 April 2009 at 6:34pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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Sanskrit, definitely.
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| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6148 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 8 of 24 24 April 2009 at 7:33pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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Greek.
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