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A dead languages challenge? | ||
Tags: Dead Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4043 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 57 of 75 18 February 2014 at 5:40am | IP Logged | ||
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I was originally going to create a new topic for this question, but now that this challenge exists, it seems appropriate to ask it here.
What's the best time to study an ancient language in a language family one wants to be familiar with. I think Professor Arguelles once recommended studying the ancient language after learning 2 modern languages that have developed from it. Does anyone know of any good reasons why one might learn the ancient language earlier or later? Also when studying an ancient language where one already knows several related languages, is it best to study the ancient language by itself first and make connections on your own, or would it be more efficient to read some sort of comparison between the ancient language and the modern ones that came from it first? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| espejismo Diglot Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 4840 days ago 498 posts - 905 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: Spanish, Greek, Azerbaijani | Message 58 of 75 18 February 2014 at 7:19am | IP Logged | ||
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I'd love to participate with Old English.
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| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6386 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 59 of 75 18 February 2014 at 8:11am | IP Logged | ||
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It depends, as always. If you're dead excited about a dead language :), go for it. If you live in the USA, Canada or Switzerland and are considering Spanish/French/Italian, also go for it. You don't have to choose, either - dead languages are studied and used in different ways from the modern ones, and interference is quite unlikely. (in your case such monsters as Russian/Cantonese/Hungarian are a much bigger concern - as much as I support learning multiple languages at a time, it really doesn't seem to me that you have space for more)
In some cases it's about the resources - afaiu, it's pretty much impossible to learn Old Norse without knowing German AND a modern Scandinavian language. For Latin there are tons of resources so I wouldn't say you necessarily need French/Spanish and certainly not both. (I know for Prof Arguelles it's part of a general rec to learn the big three of English/German/French for the sake of resources - I disagree with that. I don't like French and even French-based Assimil is very useful without any French knowledge. I'm coping just fine without French, although by now I understand it a lot in writing and have even done some lessons at GLOSS) As for purely linguistic reasons, well, with Italian or Spanish you'll be able to see the overall picture more easily than just with French, which has diverged the most along with Romanian. But your Russian and German will be important too - any previous experience can matter. To a large extent it's simply about personal preferences. This applies to your second question too. For me, discovering the changes on my own was massive fun, and when I read a book, it was to build a proper structure and to find out about the changes I didn't notice on my own. If it doesn't work like that for you, that's totally fine. Since your French is already intermediate, you could check if your level allows you to read a book about the history of French or the whole Romance family. This will give you delicious tasters but without adding a whole new language to the mix. Edited by Serpent on 18 February 2014 at 8:13am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4633 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 60 of 75 18 February 2014 at 11:45am | IP Logged | ||
This is not true. There are several books for English learners of Old Norse. If all fails, you can even learn Modern Icelandic through English resources first and then dive directly into Old Norse graded readers (that's what I did despite speaking German...). But, as an answer to the original question: There is no "right" way to do it. If you're interested in the language, just go for it. You will find your way. Edited by Josquin on 18 February 2014 at 11:46am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Lykeio Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4033 days ago 120 posts - 357 votes | Message 61 of 75 18 February 2014 at 11:45am | IP Logged | ||
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It entirely depends on your learning style and what you wish to achieve. A lot of
people, amateurs in particular, like to start with modern languages first due to the superior resources (like movies and native speakers) etc and build up proficiency there, then jump into Latin etc. I don't necessarily think this is the best course if you're primarily after the ancient language and as a general rule its much easier to go from a morphologically complex language to a simpler one. As for making connections yourself, well it depends. I think this is one of those areas where people heavily over-estimate themselves. It's why the net is flooded with folk etymologies, badlinguistics (a reddit term) and so on. There's a reason why we've developed a complex, efficient, technical apparatus for such stuff and it would be more efficient to at least read an article or two to get you on your way. I'm not saying pick up Adam's "The Regional Diversification of Latin: 200-600 a.d" which is the industry standard and chock full of interesting stuff. But at least a wiki article could help you along. There IS a lot of interesting, accessible, work out there but there's no substitute for reading and using the language. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6492 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 62 of 75 18 February 2014 at 12:21pm | IP Logged | ||
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The lack of oral resources for most dead languages is a good reason for learning the one or more of their descendants first - insofar they exist (you might have a problem to find a descendant of Sumerian).
For instance I can read Old French, Old Occitan, Old Norse and a few more without too much ado, but when I do so I use the nearest modern language with suitable adjustments to create my 'inner voice'. Well, in the case of Occitan I use my scant knowledge of modern Occitan as it is because I simply don't know enough about the sound changes since the golden age of that language. And Latin is an exception because I have had courses in it and therefore I have heard my teachers speak - and there are even some excellent voice recordings on the internet made by people like Tunbergen and Miraglia who actually can speak it freely in a believable way. So there I go for an eclectic mix based on the 'classical' reconstructed pronunciation (the one with the hard /k/'s). But for most dead languages it is hard to find any spoken resources at all, and then you have to solve the problem in another way. Latin is also special in another way insofar I know more than one of its descendants - namely the Romance languages. And that makes it less attractive to use just one of them as my model language. You could say the same thing about Old Norse and the Nordic languages, but the big difference is here that we have one descendant (Icelandic) which is so conservative that you more or less automatically will use it as your bridge to the old language, leaving Danish, Norwegian and Swedish aside. And therefore it will in practice be the Icelandic pronunciation I use with a slightly different prosody - and not the few short snippets of reconstructed Old Norse I have heard. And my way of 'thinking Anglosaxon' owes as much to Icelandic (and to some extent Low German) as it does to any dialect of modern English. Edited by Iversen on 18 February 2014 at 12:42pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4043 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 63 of 75 18 February 2014 at 3:22pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks for all the responses!
To re-clarify my question a bit, I meant to ask something more along the lines of "when's the best time to learn an ancient language, if you're ultimate goal is to learn the ancient language and 3 or more of it's modern descendants." Personally, my primary reason for language learning is in film studies, so for me modern languages have the most immediate interest. But I'm also interested in studying more literature and history so I do hope to learn some ancient languages as well after I've learned a few modern ones to a suitable level. I believe Professor Arguelles' recommendation was based around the idea that learning an ancient language, makes it easier to learn more related modern ones and that it was better to learn an ancient one earlier on in the process rather than at the end. I'm curious if anyone has had experiences that supported or differed from this idea. EDIT: New topic created, please post any additional responses here Edited by YnEoS on 18 February 2014 at 4:35pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| dmaddock1 Senior Member United States Joined 5222 days ago 174 posts - 426 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, Esperanto, Latin, Ancient Greek | Message 64 of 75 18 February 2014 at 3:38pm | IP Logged | ||
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To give a contrarian view, having some Latin under your belt makes irregulars and other quirks of the modern descendants much easier to remember since you can see how and why they became irregular.
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