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Latin as a supplement to Romance languges | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| ilanbg Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6197 days ago 166 posts - 189 votes  Speaks: French, English* Studies: Spanish, Arabic (classical), Persian | Message 1 of 14 08 May 2007 at 11:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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[This relates to a knowledge in more than one foreign language. I deeply
apologize if this is in the wrong forum, but it seemed to be the only one designed to help beginner language-afficionados. If it's better suited in another forum, I'd be grateful if a mod moved it.] I am wondering if it would be worth my time to learn Latin as a supplement to the other Romance languages. At the moment I know English, French, and Spanish, to varying degrees, and imagine I'll pick up Italian if only because of the advantage I'll have with the other three languages behind me. I would like to reinforce my French and Spanish vocabulary, foremost, and I'm wondering if studying Latin for a college semester would help relay a foundation, or if I'd be better off using that time of the semester focusing on a language I plan to use. Thank you in advance for any offered advice. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6257 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 2 of 14 09 May 2007 at 3:20am | IP Logged | ||
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Latin has been proven very helpful in giving you a grammar base for any language as well as a nice vocabulary base for Romance languages.
That being said, it should be taken with a grain of salt: what schools teach you is Classical Latin (a very stilted language that aristocrats and authors used) and Romance languages developped out of Vulgar Latin (the language of the common people). So quite a few Classical Latin words can't be found in any of today's Romance languages, or only as a foreign term borrowed once Latin was already extinct (e. g. by the sciences). Also, 2000 years is a lot of time for a language to change, so some Latin words have been changed beyond recognition, especially in French. Finally, during a Re-latinisation period, French humanitarians tried to make the language more like Latin again, e. g. they changed the spelling of "savoir"(to know) to "scavoir" in order to make it look more like the Latin "scire" - later people found out that "savoir" came from Latin "sapere". So you may also find false trails. Personally I love Latin for its expressiveness, culture and literature. And for me there is something awesome to being able to read e. g. an eyewitness account of the destruction that the unexpected eruption of Mt Vesuvius in 79 caused. Also I really like Ovid, because if there ever was perfect poetry, it's his: writing entire books in Hexameter (harder than rhyming) while making one coherent story out of all myths you may have heard (Icarus, Niobe, many others, even the story that Shakespeare plagiarised for 'Romeo and Juliet') and still managing to include very expressive language and lots of stylistic devices - he must have spent hours on each verse! I developed free Latin courses for online self-study at http://www.learnlangs.com/Latin; you may want to try Latin like this to see if you like it before you take it at school. However, if you just want a basis of vocabulary for Romance Languages, you should be fine with just Spanish already - Italian and Portuguese are very close in vocabulary to Spanish, to the point of making the study quite hard. While the grammar and vocabulary are almost an exact copy, the tiny difference are hard to remember. For example, the Spanish word for "train" is "el trèn" and in Italian it is "il treno" - since masculine nouns in both languages are likely to end in -o, I can never remember which is which. I didn't have such problems with French and Italian because French is distinct among Romance languages. If you are interested in Latin for the added comprehension of grammar and structures it will give you, Latin is definitely more suited for that than Romance languages. However, Esperanto would give you very similar benefits (plus vocabulary benefits for both Romance and Germanic languages!) and it's so much easier to learn. I would recommend learning Latin only if you are planning to use it, i. e. if you are interested in history and literature or if you may have to prove knowledge of Latin in order to enter a program at university (quite common in Germany, not sure how it is where you live). 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| ilanbg Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6197 days ago 166 posts - 189 votes Speaks: French, English* Studies: Spanish, Arabic (classical), Persian | Message 3 of 14 09 May 2007 at 4:01pm | IP Logged | ||
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(Thank you for your response.)
I've always had a love affair with the Latin language, but at the moment I am more interested in learning languages that will be of practical use. My situation is this: Over the next four years (divided into two semesters yearly), I want to gain a full fluency in French, Spanish, and Italian. I am wondering if it would be worth my time to pick up a fifth language who's purpose would serve to reinforce the other three. With these timelines in mind, would you still suggest Esperanto over Latin? Or, due to the fairly short deadline, would you suggest just focusing on the these studied languages? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6257 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 4 of 14 10 May 2007 at 4:40am | IP Logged | ||
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Good question.
Latin is quite hard, so you'd have to invest at least a year into developing reading fluency in Latin if you're not a wunderkind. Being very interested in Latin would however help you along and you may enjoy seeing the links between languages, e. g. libertas -> liberté, libertà, libertad. Esperanto can be learned really fast, as you can also see from the language logs. I learned it while I was frustrated with French and had to complete another semester before I could take Italian instead. I had read that it was very easy to learn, so I kind of said to myself: if it's really that easy, I can just add another language to my list at no cost, and if it's not, I'll just abandon it as soon as I find it tedious to study. My experience was that it was always a lot of fun to learn because the rapid progress is exhilarating and all the while I felt like pieces of a puzzle I didn't know existed finally fell into place. I believe you could definitely pick up Esperanto while getting fluent in French, Spanish and Italian in that time frame. If you want to pick up Latin in that time, it would require some work. The question is more whether you want to. E. g. are there times when you feel you'd like to learn something but you've had enough of French/Italian/Spanish for the day? Also, are you learning these languages at school and would you like to learn a language on your own that you can progress in as fast (or as slowly) as you like? For some people, similarities in languages serve as reinforcement. For others, they are a source of confusion. If you are the latter type, you might not want to add Latin or Esperanto to the mix, since both have quite a lot of vocabulary in common with the languages you are learning. I believe the best thing would be to just try 1-2 lessons of both Latin and Esperanto and see what it does for you: not just how you like it but also what effect it has on your French/Italian/Spanish. Then you can decide what you want. Free lessons for Latin Free lessons for Esperanto (there are also other courses on that site) Edited by Sprachprofi on 10 May 2007 at 4:42am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Celtica Newbie New Zealand Joined 6269 days ago 11 posts - 11 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Latin | Message 5 of 14 13 May 2007 at 6:22am | IP Logged | ||
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Personally, I think Latin is worth learning for it's own merits. I love it. But it isn't an easy language, and if you're learning it to only supplement another language from the same root, I think it'll merely take time from the languages you truly wish to learn. Plus, you have to watch with latin and it's later relations -words that seem like they'd mean the same thing often don't, on the other hand, they also often do. But you need to know the difference. I've seen these referred to as 'false friends'.
It's up to you, but if you lack the enthusiasm compared to the enthusiasm you have for your other languages, you'll find you keep putting Latin off in order to focus on your 'preferred language'. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ilanbg Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6197 days ago 166 posts - 189 votes Speaks: French, English* Studies: Spanish, Arabic (classical), Persian | Message 6 of 14 13 May 2007 at 10:14am | IP Logged | ||
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Strange... I studied Latin for about six months at one point and found it to be the easiest language I'd ever tried to learn; I spoke it as well as I spoke Spanish after two or three years of study. But that was seven years ago, before I had a better understanding of languages, so maybe I was only learning a few simple tenses, or something.
I'll look into Esperanto, then. I do love Latin, but the time spent learning it would be so much better used focusing on a more practical language. (Although Esperanto can only be considered a little more practical, eh? Hah.) I'm only a beginner when it comes to languages, so I'm trying to learn several easier languages first before trying to learn one of the more difficult ones. Thank ye both for your help. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6490 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 14 13 May 2007 at 3:08pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have learnt Latin in school and was quite good at it. But because the courses were meant as reading courses without any thought of letting us speak the language, it never became anything but an academic exercise in problem solving. One reason more for this was that the choice of texts didn't correspond to the level of the pupils. So Latin was one of the languages that just seeped out of my brain when I stopped doing anything active to retain it. I have it on my list of languages that should be resuscitated one day, but I want to do it right next time, i.e. learn it like a living language. I think there is a dictionary out there somewhere with words for computers and rockets and other post-ciceronean items, - I would certainly like to own that book when I start out relearning Latin.
As for the question about the usefulness of Latin for students of Romance language I think it is exaggerated. True, if you know Latin you will recognize many items in the modern Romance languages, but the Romance languages (with Romanian as an exception) have more in common with each other than with Latin, and trying to trace the intricacies of the rich Latin morphology in the modern languages will just show you how little has been preserved in a recognizable form. So my advice would be to learn at least a couple of Romance languages first, then do Latin when you can really savour the insights it will give you in the development and logic of the modern languages. Edited by Iversen on 13 May 2007 at 3:11pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| awake Senior Member United States Joined 6423 days ago 406 posts - 438 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Esperanto, Spanish | Message 8 of 14 15 May 2007 at 11:30am | IP Logged | ||
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Absolutely Esperanto can be considered more practical (or less practical,
depending on your needs and wants) *grin*. Obviously if you look at my language list, you'll detect some bias, but I would argue that Esperanto is an extremely practical and useful language. The millions of Esperanto speakers worldwide are not concentrated in any one geographical area, rather they are spread out among all the nations of the world. I've spoken and corresponded with people in Africa, Asia, Central Europe, and the Americas (and with many of those correspondents Esperanto was our only common language) What languages or cultures are you interested in? There are Esperanto speakers there. And because people who learn Esperanto often have a more international outlook, they're generally thrilled to share their culture with you. Indeed, there's a service called the Pasporta Servo (passport service) where Esperanto speakers in various countries invite other Esperanto speakers into their homes for free. Going to paris on Vacation? Have to go to Japan for a business trip? You could save money by staying at the home of an Esperanto speaker instead of a hotel. Often they'll even pick you up at the airport. And not only that, they'll be locals who can steer you away from the tourist traps and show you the best parts of their city...so that you can experience it like few tourists can. and practical for a polyglot? Absolutely. Studies have shown that learning Esperanto as a second language greatly facilitates the learning of additional languages after Esperanto. I can also say that by studying Esperanto I have developed a vastly deeper understanding of the grammar of my native language. That's because the grammar of Esperanto is so regular and logical, that just by learning esperanto you develop a deeper knowledge of how languages are put together (well, at least I did anyway :) And of course, Esperanto really is dramatically easier to learn than any national language. Does that mean it's easy to learn? Heck no, If you study EO you'll have many moments of wanting to pull your hair out. But, compared to other languages it is definitely easier. There are only 6 verb tenses, and there are zero irregular verbs. In fact, the grammar rules in Esperanto have almost no exceptions. The orthography is phonetic and the pronunciation is completely regular. And esperanto has an amazing system of affixes that are universally applicable. This means that amount of vocabulary that you have to learn is radically reduced (which speed up learning a lot). And with those affixes you can express remarkably fine shades of meaning, and it gives the language an incredible flexibility. A lot of people think that as a constructed language Esperanto must be, mechanical or lacking heart. Most Esperanto speakers find quite the opposite to be true. Esperanto inspires creativity in its use. Don't know the word you want? build one. You can stick roots and affixes together in new ways to create perfectly novel words that have never before been uttered and yet are instantly understandable to any Esperanto speaker. I enjoyed studying German in college, I love studying Esperanto. It's just fun. I could go on and on, you can tell I'm quite the fan. I'd say it's worth looking into at the very least. Your mileage may vary (some people really dislike esperanto for various reasons. If you give it a shot I hope you find it as much fun as I do. But either way, good look with whichever choice you decide :)
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