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Polyglots of Ancient Languages | ||
Tags: Dead Languages | Polyglot | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| Delodephius Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Yugoslavia Joined 5199 days ago 342 posts - 501 votes  Speaks: Slovak*, Serbo-Croatian*, EnglishC1, Czech Studies: Russian, Japanese | Message 1 of 10 28 November 2010 at 9:21pm | IP Logged | ||
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Does anyone here know of polyglots who are mostly good in ancient, old, classical and/or dead languages rather than modern living ones? Like that guy Milo Thatch from the Disney's cartoon Atlantis who knew to speak almost all dead languages. Or do such people really exists only in fiction?
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| lingoleng Senior Member Germany Joined 5094 days ago 605 posts - 1290 votes | Message 2 of 10 29 November 2010 at 1:04am | IP Logged | ||
Scholars investigating the common (yet and probably always) hypothetical ancestor of the Indo-European lanugages are certainly good candidates http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_studies. Knowing several "dead" languages - at least Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Gothic - is absolutely necessary for a start, and each scholar will add further languages in the course of his education and work. Of course, these people will not necessarily aim for basic fluency in spoken Hittite or Tocharian, the available sources are not always sufficient for such an endeavor, so that there is a chance that some of them would not be acknowledged as real polyglots according to the definitions of this forum. That's life ... (btw. The Dnghu Project is very interesting and it even makes a grammar of Proto-Indo-European available for free Download an IE Grammar. This is not a final version :-) . Edited by lingoleng on 29 November 2010 at 1:20am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Delodephius Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Yugoslavia Joined 5199 days ago 342 posts - 501 votes Speaks: Slovak*, Serbo-Croatian*, EnglishC1, Czech Studies: Russian, Japanese | Message 3 of 10 29 November 2010 at 1:13am | IP Logged | ||
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I am quite aware about the lack of sufficient sources, and that there isn't much motivation for learning a language no one speaks nor even knows how to speak properly (like Ancient Egyptian for example). Let's just say I'm absolutely not interested in hearing any counter-arguments against learning dead and forgotten languages. I am a bit mad so that would be quite in the realm of normality for me. :-)
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| Gorgoll2 Senior Member Brazil veritassword.blogspo Joined 4942 days ago 159 posts - 192 votes Speaks: Portuguese* | Message 4 of 10 29 November 2010 at 1:27am | IP Logged | ||
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I have same examples:
*Jean François Champollion: Egyptian, Latin, Greek, Amharic, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Ge´ez, Avestic, Pahlavic, Syriac, Sumerian, Ancient Persian, Ancient Arabic, Coptic, etc. *Ioannis Ikonomou: He speaks beyond thirty modern languages, ten ancient tongues: Latin, Sanskrit, Avestic, Gothic, Old Church Slavonic, Ancient Persian, Hitit, Oskish, Luvish and Umbrian 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Delodephius Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Yugoslavia Joined 5199 days ago 342 posts - 501 votes Speaks: Slovak*, Serbo-Croatian*, EnglishC1, Czech Studies: Russian, Japanese | Message 5 of 10 29 November 2010 at 2:31am | IP Logged | ||
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Yeah, that's what I meant. I do suspect however that there were more polyglots of ancient languages in the past, when learning Latin and Greek for example was obligatory in some schools. Also like lingoleng said, it's mostly scholars today that know a few ancient languages, mainly for professional reasons (although I doubt they'd learn if they weren't interested in them), but in the past it was also non-professionals who knew some.
Today it is more popular to learn international and world languages and be able to communicate with people all over the world. But I personally am a kind of guy who likes his nose stuck in a musty old book under a light of an oil-lamp, behind a closed wooden door. Edited by Delodephius on 29 November 2010 at 3:03am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| BartoG Diglot Senior Member United States confession Joined 5243 days ago 292 posts - 818 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Latin, Uzbek | Message 6 of 10 29 November 2010 at 8:04am | IP Logged | ||
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If you go to the University of Texas' Early Indo-European On-Line website, you can work on learning ancient languages yourself, for free. The link is here:
http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/eieol/ More pertinent to your question, a Dr. Todd B. Krause either created or substantially contributed to the courses for Classical Armenian, Old Church Slavonic, Old Icelandic, Gothic and Tocharian. Jonathan Slocum had involvement in the lessons for Classical Armenian, Old Iranian, Hittite and Old English. The linguist par excellence who seems to have launched the program was Winifred P. Lehmann. He passed away a few years ago, but was the creator or co-creator of a number of the lessons as well. It's worth mentioning Orrin Robinson, a former Stanford professor who wrote Old English and its Closest Relatives, which includes short grammars for multiple Germanic languages along with glossed reading passages. I believe it's from the late '90s. I imagine Calvert Watkin and Benjamin Fortson would fit your bill as well. They've both done some pretty important survey stuff about the Indo-European languages. Another possibility is David Stifter, who wrote Sengoidelic: Old Irish for Beginners. He's a contributor to a forum I sometimes visit devoted to Gaulish and if memory serves he refers back to both Latin and Greek in giving tips about remembering both structure and vocabulary for Old Irish. In short, lingoleng is right to suggest you start with scholars of the Indo-European languages if you want to find out who's out there who is a polyglot focused on dead languages. I've put a few names out there for you. Maybe... A difficult question raised here is what it means to know a dead language. In the late 19th c., people like Henry Sweet and Joseph Wright cranked out grammars for multiple Germanic languages. But whether they knew them in their own right, or as variants of some internal Germanic model is hard to say. For my own part, I can read (but not write or speak) Old French, Middle French and Middle English with occasional recourse to a dictionary. But if there's a nuance particular to the language of the time that has disappeared, I wouldn't be likely to catch it in my reading. Where dead languages are concerned, I'm a tourist: I learn enough to get around town, or, rather, to get around in the texts that interest me. I don't know where this places me within the ranks of burgeoning polyglots of dead languages, only that this approach strikes a balance where the pleasure derived from direct access to these texts is not outweighed by the time required to learn what I need to know to have access to them. I imagine this is not an unusual position for people who study dead languages but not professionally. Edited by BartoG on 29 November 2010 at 8:07am 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6499 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 7 of 10 29 November 2010 at 11:21am | IP Logged | ||
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The only old language I claim to speak (though not with utter ease) is Latin, and only because I managed to find some dictionaries (digital as well as paperbased) and other sources with content that made it possible to make the jump into the 21. century. For instance I bought a cheap "New College" dictionary in Manila which normally can help me out when I want to think/write/say something in Latin. I have several other dictionaries from Latin into Danish/German/French where I can search for ages for simple things because the ancient Romans didn't come up with an expression. Those dictionaries can only have one purpose, namely to assist pupils being taught by the old Grammar-Translation method with their homework.. What I need is a dictionary that can help me with things I might wanna say now, not things Caesar said two thousand years ago.
Those who want to learn old languages must continuously run into this problem. My guess is that most people who study these old languages never try to turn them into active languages - maybe because they can't see the point in speaking languages which nobody else speak, maybe because their sources only represent a fraction of any given language (for instance those things you might want to write on tombstones). This probably also apply to those learned scholars who write the grammars and dictionaries. In some cases there is enough old stuff plus a surviving modern version of a language which should make the task easier - but without suitable resources this is a still a herculean task. For instance I can read Old French and Old Catalan and Old Norse prose almost fluently, but I have not tried to learn to speak those languages. However if I did find a really good Modern French --> Old French dictionary I would definitely go for it, and it might then turn out be a matter of a few months to learn to write and speak the noble language of Chrétien de Troyes et al. But without that kind of resource - nope! By the way, Poul Skårup, one of my teachers at the University in Århus (where I studied French in the 70s) taught both Old and Modern French and Old Occitan, and he demonstrated that he actually could speak Old French. Besides he could speak most of the Modern Romance languages plus the usual bunch of Germanic languages. Edited by Iversen on 29 November 2010 at 12:24pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Delodephius Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Yugoslavia Joined 5199 days ago 342 posts - 501 votes Speaks: Slovak*, Serbo-Croatian*, EnglishC1, Czech Studies: Russian, Japanese | Message 8 of 10 29 November 2010 at 12:35pm | IP Logged | ||
Well for now I can only understand Old Church Slavonic. I can't compose much in it aside from simple phrases like 'Good day' and 'How are you?". I actually tried to compose a list of phrases based on the list at the Omniglot website. But as for reading I can say I comfortably understand about 90% of the texts, for example the Bible and the Panonian Legends.
Yes, I have been visiting that site for a few years now. I even contacted the authors asking them about when will the Tocharian lessons be ready some time ago. I don't know about others, but I have one of the most extensive collection of bookmarks of ancient languages on my Firefox toolbox, not to mention all the e-books in my folders. It's amazing all the things people have scanned and placed on the internet. But aside from scholars of Indo-European, are there some who know languages from various different groups? I know for example that theologians know Greek, Latin, Hebrew and perhaps Aramaic. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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