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Ever try to Learn a Dead Language? | ||
Tags: Dead Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| rbbrum110 Newbie United States Joined 5137 days ago 16 posts - 18 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 1 of 23 12 June 2015 at 11:38am | IP Logged |
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Ever spend a large amount of time (1 semester or more) trying to learn Egyptian
Hieroglyphics, Latin, Mayan or something of the sort? Seems like it would be kind of neat, but was it rewarding at all, or a waste of time? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Ogrim Heptaglot Senior Member France Joined 4434 days ago 991 posts - 1896 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, French, Romansh, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Catalan, Latin, Greek, Romanian | Message 2 of 23 12 June 2015 at 1:07pm | IP Logged |
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Whether it will be rewarding or not depends on why you want to learn it in the first place. When I was at University I spent one semester intensively on Ancient Greek, and three semesters on Latin, and personally I found it immensely rewarding. As I did a major in Romance linguistics, Latin was totally necessary for my academic studies, but I also found (and still find) great pleasure in being able to read Ovid, Virgil and Horace in the original. I took Classical Greek purely out of interest, and today I've forgotten most of it, but it was fun, and when I tried to start learning Modern Greek a couple of years ago I discovered that Classical Greek had given me a basis to start on.
Some people learn "dead" languages out of interest for the particular culture they represent, or because they want to read classical literature in the original, or as a tool to do research (e.g. history, archeology, religions), or simply because they find the language itself fascinating. It all depends on your motivation. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Monox D. I-Fly Senior Member Indonesia monoxdifly.iopc.us Joined 4930 days ago 762 posts - 664 votes Speaks: Indonesian* | Message 3 of 23 12 June 2015 at 1:29pm | IP Logged |
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I want to try learning Latin and Ancient Greek so that I will be able to know the literal meaning of animals' scientific names. Right now I am in reading Euclid's Elements in its original language.
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| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4804 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 4 of 23 12 June 2015 at 1:56pm | IP Logged |
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It's not useless and waste of time unless you feel it to be so.
I had been learning Latin for two years at high school and one year at university. Not only it is a necessary part of medicine, it gave me lots of international vocabulary not only in the romance languages, there are grammar paralels with German or slavic languages and so on. Apart of that, even dead languages are still means of communication. Above all with people long dead whose thoughs have survived millenia. And many of them were very intelligent, good storytellers and had sense of humour. There are people who like to communicate in Latin (perhaps in other dead languages as well but the communities are likely to be smaller) even these days. There is a newspaper, music and so on. It is a hobby like Esperanto, it can connect people similarily and be another connection across nations, alternative to English. Last point: While you don't have some of the popular tools for learning and using the languages (such as movies), there is still a lot of material availabe and majority of literature is public domain, even some courses and grammars are public domain. On the other hand, there are still some modern things like Assimil (Latin, Ancient Greek, Ancient Egyptian, no idea about others) or translation of Harry Potter and the Hobbit, to help intermediate learners. Overall, learning Latin can be much cheaper than learning a highly popular living language. I have forgotten most of the Latin I had learnt but my life is much richer thanks to the experience. So, I can only recommend learning a dead language, if you are interested in it. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4502 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 5 of 23 12 June 2015 at 4:34pm | IP Logged |
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I did five years of Latin in high school and found it very rewarding.
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| guiguixx1 Octoglot Senior Member Belgium guillaumelp.wordpres Joined 3887 days ago 163 posts - 207 votes Speaks: French*, English, Dutch, Portuguese, Esperanto, German, Italian, Spanish Studies: Polish, Mandarin | Message 6 of 23 12 June 2015 at 5:38pm | IP Logged |
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I studied Ancient Greek last semester, and found it very funny, but quite difficult, especially since my teacher was very demanding on all the sorts of accents and stuff. I haven't tried it ever since, but I will maybe :) I am even wondering if I wouldn't try some Modern Greek during the summer :)
As for Latin, I tried it for a couple of weeks at the beginning of the semester, but quickly had to stop because of the workload I had in my major. I nevertheless hope to try it again, since I found the grammar (especially the tenses) quite easy, though I surely haven't dived enough into it to discover all its complexities 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5327 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 7 of 23 12 June 2015 at 6:50pm | IP Logged |
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Yeah, dead languages can be a lot of fun. But I've definitely noticed that some languages are a lot deader than others. :-)
1. Latin is positively lively. People translate into it, speak it, and use it in all sorts of ways. It was the major language of European civilization for a couple of millennia, so there's plenty to read. 2. Ancient Greek apparently has a very good translation of Harry Potter. It's not as lively as Latin, but again, there's a wide variety of classic literature in Greek, some of which is supposed to be remarkably good. 3. Middle Egyptian is far more "dead" than either Latin or Ancient Greek. There's maybe a few hundred pages of entertaining, first-rate literature, and many, many thousands of pages of tomb inscriptions and more specialized texts. But still, there's something unspeakably cool about being able to zoom in on a Karnak inscription and actually read it. Also, Middle Egyptian is blessed with really first-rate beginner courses, including an Assimil course (with a French base) and Allen's Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs. The latter is one of the best "traditional" language textbooks I've seen—lucid explanations, tons of examples, and excellent resources for decoding real texts. 4. Then there are languages like Gothic, an East Germanic language that only exists in a few scattered fragments of the Greek bible. Unfortunately, those fragments appear to heavily influenced by the original greek text—perhaps they were translation glosses. So most people who study Gothic do so because they're interested in the history of the Germanic languages. So obviously there's a big difference between learning Latin and learning a language like Gothic. But if you're interested in the culture, and you're willing to put in the work, it's an absolutely amazing feeling to read a clever bit of satire that was written 4,000 years ago. On some level, it's easy for modern people to believe that the past was ignorant and barbaric—but reading a dead language can sometimes make it come alive, suddenly and breaktakingly, and make you feel a sense of kinship with somebody who was already ancient when the Old Testament was written. 15 persons have voted this message useful | |
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4567 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 8 of 23 12 June 2015 at 8:13pm | IP Logged |
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I've dabbled in both Latin and Ancient Greek for several months each (still reviewing the flashcards I made for both since I intend to pick them back up eventually), and am currently learning Classical Chinese and Classical Japanese. I also intend to dabble in Sanskrit and Classical Arabic at some point. Admittedly whether or not these two count as "dead" is a bit more arguable, but I'd like to study them for the same reasons as the languages I mentioned previously (well, aside from CJ) - the fact that they have each influenced scores of other languages' vocabularies, idioms and literary traditions. CJ doesn't have that distinction, but it's useful for me as a learner of Japanese in terms of getting a deeper understanding of Japanese grammar and idioms.
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