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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 |  | |
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5768 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes  Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 57 of 70 14 April 2015 at 1:26pm | IP Logged | ||
Depends on what you define as successful trolling. I personally would define 'successful trolling' to mean something like "I made people waste their time on something they did not want to spend their time and energy on by eliciting negative emotional reactions they didn't want to have, that hurt them" rather than "I just wasted my time pretending to be more ignorant than I am and getting people try to help me deal with my ignorance, haha those nice fools I made them do what they already wanted to do, I am such a great manipulator!" Especially when while pretending to be ignorant you display some basic assumptions that show the true depth of your ignorance. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6705 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 58 of 70 14 April 2015 at 4:34pm | IP Logged | ||
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People can have all sorts of reasons for NOT wanting to learn a specific language or group of languages (or any languages at all). However a question like "Why learn a dead/artificial language?" is likely to elicit reasons for learning such languages rather than the opposite. Did the OP expect this? I don't know, but I can see why some learners would avoid dead or invented languages when they could have studied living languages with lot of speakers. And apparently the OP is just one of these learners.
I also wonder why people spend their time reading or watch movies about nasty people that don't even exist, but to each hsi or her own. Some like reading about fictive love stories, some delight in watching splatter films and I spend my time reading about dead animals and lifeless celestial objects. We have had real trolls here (and as a moderator I have seen some appalling ones), but this thread doesn't strike me as deliberately inflammatory. Edited by Iversen on 14 April 2015 at 4:44pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5061 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 59 of 70 14 April 2015 at 8:21pm | IP Logged | ||
The only thing trollish about the OP was the tone, saying things like "why on earth" instead of simply "why."
I mostly agree with this but with a few more types: 1. For school. I think it's reasonable to offer Latin classes in schools because a lot of scholarly culture is still somehow tied to Latin, and, with the exception of English, most children learning foreign languages in schools don't end up really using their skills much. The benefit is often more in being exposed to how a foreign language works, which is good for children's intellectual development. I would still offer living languages before Latin, but Latin as one option out of three or four seems reasonable to me. Sometimes the classes are so bad/boring that they don't achieve these goals at all, but that is the idea at least. 2. For a specific academic reason. Many historians, archeologists, linguists, religious scholars, etc. are required to learn one or more dead languages for their profession, either because they use it in their work, or because their community considers it fundamental knowledge for members of the discipline. Some non-professionals also acquire this knowledge as a hobby or for their own intellectual/spiritual development. 3. For deeper understanding of other related languages. In my case, I study Latin because it gives me a better view of the relationships among the four other Romance languages that I speak. I don't think it would've been possible to get the same holistic understanding of the language family without studying Latin. It also helped me understand the origin of many English words. 4. For enjoyment. Some people like really old stuff. They find the language fascinating and fun to study. They would rather spend 10x the time to read Plato in the original. This is no more useless than sports, movies, or games. 5. For thoroughness/variety, in the case of super-polyglots. If I have a hit-list of 30 languages, it makes sense to include at least one classical language and at least one artificial language, if the goal is not only to learn useful languages but also to explore as much as possible of the range of phenomena that is human language. 6. To troll people who are gonna waste a bunch of time figuring out why the hell they would study dead languages. Edited by robarb on 14 April 2015 at 8:23pm 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6599 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 60 of 70 14 April 2015 at 9:17pm | IP Logged | ||
That's my main reason. Without Latin (and reading about comparative Romance philology, materials that assume a knowledge of Latin too), I would probably know Portuguese better through spending more time on it, and I'd have started Italian maybe 2-3 years ago (I started 6 years ago). I have no clue where my Spanish would be, let alone Romanian or Catalan. I'd not be able to use French-based Assimil (without actually learning some French). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tangleweeds Groupie United States Joined 3577 days ago 70 posts - 105 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Irish, French | Message 61 of 70 15 April 2015 at 2:50am | IP Logged | ||
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Looking back, having learned Latin in the driest, most old-fashioned, dead language way,
taught as "calisthenics for the mind", turned out to be excellent preparation for learning arbitrary artificial computer languages. People pay you to know those. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4951 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 62 of 70 15 April 2015 at 3:52am | IP Logged | ||
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This thread reminds me of the poor guy on "Jeopardy!" the other day. For most of you who are not in the US, a contestant on this show (where questions are asked and you must "buzz in" with the answer before your opponents), buzzed-in first to answer the question:
http://www.examiner.com/article/jeopardy-contestant-answer-s hock-by-common-law-12-year-old-girls-can-have-sex Thousands of people immediately went on a bent basically calling the guy a pedophile in all but name. It didn't occur to any of them to think that perhaps this guy was just trying to beat the others and said the first thing that popped up as a plausible answer. You know, we all have those in our inner thoughts, no one hears them, but we all think "strange things without even wanting to. People just refuse to offer the benefit of the doubt anymore, they just jump to conclusions, ironically performing the same "thoughtless" leap without ratiotination that got this person in hot water. In this era of "Instant Indignation", many people need to re-learn the basic human skill of patience. I'm not condemning anyone here in particular, just this thread reminded me yet again of this cyber-age phenomenon: people have no skin! 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4709 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 63 of 70 15 April 2015 at 4:20am | IP Logged | ||
Well played sir, well played. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| chaotic_thought Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 3544 days ago 129 posts - 274 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Dutch, French | Message 64 of 70 15 April 2015 at 12:10pm | IP Logged | ||
Adding emotion or even trying to be purposefully controversial is not the same as "being a troll". The perfect troll will make a carefully designed, short, contentious remark with the purpose of minimizing the troll's effort while maximizing the effort of the opposing parties to expend vast amounts of energy in a "discussion" that ultimately leads nowhere. This is distinct from a normal debate or even a flame war; in a flame war both sides tend to know the discussion has reached a state of pointlessness but at least both sides are still contributing more or less equally to the "discussion". It's also possible, for example, to "derail a discussion" by talking (say) about trolling instead of the original topic (learning a dead language), but derailing a discussion is not in itself troll-like. As for the reason for learning a dead language, I think the real question comes down to human knowledge. It seems that there's a tendency for people to think of human languages as being more or less the equivalent of a kind of "encoding format" -- a language is merely a convenient pattern we use to transmit or store information. In some sense, this is true. For example, to get the knowledge out of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, you don't need to know English. Reading a translation of this work into your own language is just fine. Some people will occasionally complain about missing nuances or whatever, but honestly I think you lose much more simply from the "translate these naturally spoken words into ink blots on a page" process than from the "translate these ink blots in pattern A to these other ink blots in pattern B" process. Good translators can also translate nuances and make good use of word borrowing to maintain the flavor of the original text. But it needs to be said that the language itself is a form of knowledge. We know this because we regularly talk about all our languages using language itself. It is clearly knowledge and is therefore just as worthy for something to be studied as any other topic. Asking "Why learn Latin when everything is written in English nowadays?" carries just as much weight as the question "Why learn arithmetic when you can do that on a pocket calculator?" or "Why learn how to handwrite when you can do it much faster on a computer keyboard?" 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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