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Why learn a dead/artificial language? | ||
Tags: Dead Languages | Reasons for study | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| 1e4e6 Octoglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4289 days ago 1013 posts - 1588 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan | Message 9 of 70 11 April 2015 at 9:12pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Saying that you can get the same feeling from reading literature in English
translation instead of the original language is saying that I can extract the same travel enjoyment from going to Google Maps into Street View for Paris, Delft, Buenos Aires, Stockholm, Prague, Montréal, or Moscow, and clicking forwards and backwards on the streets instead of actually travelling there and walking around myself. Mind you using English translations just makes no sense to me. Maybe it enhances the English skills for those who are non-native Anglophones, but how can a native Anglophone get any pleasure or learn foreign languages by using English only? This sounds like just using English to push out all other languages that have no power to stop their destruction, in other words, linguistic imperialism. Edited by 1e4e6 on 11 April 2015 at 9:13pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| caam_imt Triglot Senior Member Mexico Joined 4861 days ago 232 posts - 357 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2, Finnish Studies: German, Swedish | Message 10 of 70 11 April 2015 at 9:20pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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I think there is no other reason other than enjoyment. As said before, people like to
do all sorts of things and there is no need to give reasons or try to justify them. Clearly the OP doesn't see the point in learning dead languages, but others do. It's like arguing about music taste: it leads nowhere. But I have to admit that I also find some arguments for studying languages a bit funny. Why not say, "I just like it"? For example "I only read in the original language", as if all translations suck and/or miss a lot of details. I agree with the OP in that one has to be quite good at a foreign language to catch all the nuances of some literary work. If speaking purely on practical terms, there is seldom the need to learn other languages at such a high level. But language enthusiasts (like the people in this forum) don't need to find practical reasons to study languages. It suffices if a language looks "cool" or is pleasant to the ear. I believe that people that see languages as a means to and end often don't understand this, and I suspect the OP fits this description. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 4098 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 11 of 70 11 April 2015 at 9:24pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
This is a false assumption. I can't speak for, say, Biblical Hebrew but the parts of the Bible that are written in Greek are written in Koine, which is considered by some a "simplified" Greek compared to Classical Greek and from what I've read New Testament Koine uses a particularly simplified register. As for Plato, in my Classical (Attic) Greek class at university, we started reading Plato's Apology as a learning tool after half a semester with a text book. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5008 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 12 of 70 11 April 2015 at 10:28pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Well, most translations are really worse than the original, some even suck as you say.
I wouldn't say they miss details, you can usually find the whole story. They lack the form, parts of the characters and differences between them, the style of the writer and so on (someone better versed in humanities would probably give a longer list). Many are just bad. I believe it is more often the case of modern, popular books that the publishers need to get out cheaply and fast (before the readers learn the original language, as that is what happened with Harry Potter for example), it is much less of a trouble when it comes to classics, in my opinion. After all, translators have had enough centuries to polish a Plato translation. So, I am really not saying "everyone needs to learn Latin", no. Just that it can be a much different and enriching experience. I think the discussions like "why learn other languages than English at all" are usually "funny" because people mix together two possible senses of need. 1."need" = something that will make me more money, give me social prestige etc. Well, in that case natives of large languages, especially English, are wasting their time on languages, especially dead ones, as they could use their free time to gather other soft skills or something like that instead. 2."need" = something that will make my life richer, make me happier All the other reasons fall into this, while some sound more "reasonable" than others. I find it sad that most people these days find the second "needs" funny. Those "needs" are more than just vain desires and stupidities as they simply make people happy, which can't always be sad about the first category of "needs". After all, the OP mentioned it right in the first post that this is a discussion about dead languages as a way people spend their free time and we've been giving examples of various uses of dead languages that can be very rewarding for some people. Not convincing them to start learning Akkadian or claiming it to be a necessary skill for everyone. I had spent more than a decade fighting people claiming that I don't need French. Of course I had been right and they had been just arrogant. And I have a friend who had needed to learn Latin in a similar way despite studying an unrelated field later. i see little difference even though one language is dead. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| 1e4e6 Octoglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4289 days ago 1013 posts - 1588 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan | Message 13 of 70 11 April 2015 at 11:04pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Surely one can live just doing all the "useful" things that they "think" is right, like
being a monolingual Anglophone and instead concentrating on what earns the most. In that case, does that also mean that in addition to being a monolingual Anglophone, everyone should stop arts because physics and chemistry pay more, and becuase arts do not extract oil or utilise nuclear energy, which produce big profits? Then everyone would be in the hard sciences. One can live that way, but it would be a fairly homogenous type of lifestyle, and rather depressing to be honest. Edited by 1e4e6 on 11 April 2015 at 11:06pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5765 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 14 of 70 12 April 2015 at 1:41am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Of course you can read translations when they are available. Of course one would be foolish to assume that a translation is 100% accurate, and some are worse than others. But if you know enough of the original language, you can read a translation and in the translation see how the translator interpreted and sometimes misinterpreted the original text. It gives you access to the world behind the filter of the translator's comprehension (and sometimes their cultural bias.)
If you're not interested in that kind of thing you can read Donald Duck pocket books. No, seriously, a number of the classics in Western literature were made into plots of those stories, easy to read, you get the essential message, and you don't have to read the original or a close translation. But that doesn't teach you how to work out the message for yourself, how to think about the context out of which the message emerged, what it meant in that context and whether it is relevant to other contexts, like your own. It doesn't teach you to see your own experiences and those prevalent in your environment from a distance, and understand with some humility that some of our experiences are very universal. Edited by Bao on 12 April 2015 at 1:41am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Luso Hexaglot Senior Member Portugal Joined 6060 days ago 819 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, French, EnglishC2, GermanB1, Italian, Spanish Studies: Sanskrit, Arabic (classical) | Message 15 of 70 12 April 2015 at 2:56am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
I agree with eyðimörk. I still consider the following one of the most interesting posts I've read on this forum (from a couple of years ago):
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 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6702 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 16 of 70 12 April 2015 at 3:31am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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The big difference for me is not really whether there are native speakers or not, except when I'm on holiday - and then minority languages or dialects which aren't spoken to tourists are in the same category as dead languages. But artificial or dead languages with sufficiently active communities of advanced second language learners may be relevant.
The criterion is whether there are enough dictionaries, grammars, text books and videos or TV programs to get started, and whether there are enough and sufficiently interesting materials to read or listen to later. And for Latin this is definitely the case: there are both classical, medieval and modern things to read, and there are enough spoken sources to keep me occupied, but of course not as many as in for instance Italian. It is however unlikely that I'll ever have to speak Latin outside language conferences - I have to add that reservation because last year in Berlin there where actually one participant who was fluent in spoken Latin, so if my Latin had been in tip-top shape I would actually have had a chance to try it out in practice. And one of my teachers at the university in Århus in the 70s had actually taught himself to speak Ancient French, but none of the students followed his lead so he had no one to speak to. In other words: it is not totally excluded that you might find somebody to communicate with in a dead language - it is just not very likely. Some people like to do things which are hard because they are hard. I don't share that philosophy. From my perspektive there is little chance of learning to speak or write or even read a predominantly spoken language unless you get the chance to live among its speakers, and my chances of learning a living language from a valley in New Guinea are probably smaller than my chances of learning to write poems in Sumerian. But as long as the second-language learners of Latin keep writing relevant things on Wikipedia and Ephemeridae I have both a reason and the means to keep in touch with that language - but not enough reason to spend all my spare time on the task. There is little point in developing advanced speaking skills in languages unless you have a chance of finding somebody to speak to. But here in 2015 I have spoken as much Latin as Romanian: nothing at all. I have however read and written in both languages. The difference is that there are millions of living Romanians and Moldovans, and it is likely that I'll travel there once again some day. So it is more relevant to keep a certain level in spoken Romanian than in spoken Latin, but the difference is much less pronounced when it comes to the written versions of these two languages. The same considerations are valid for artificial languages, and luckily there is a reasonable amount of good learning materials for Esperanto (and some, but not nearly as many for Klingon and Quenya). There is even a living community of second language learners plus a few native speakers, and that makes it not only possible, but also relevant to learn it as both a passive and an active language. It is of course both easier and more important for me to keep a decent level in English than in Esperanto - NOT because one is a living language with millions of speakers and the other is an artificial language invented by one person, but because I can find more interesting stuff to read and listen to in English and more chances to write and speak it than I have with Esperanto. And keeping Esperanto at a functional level is both easier and more relevant for me than keeping Anglosaxon at that level. Edited by Iversen on 13 April 2015 at 9:33am 9 persons have voted this message useful |
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