Latin: Classic Or Dud?

We-eeell, despite what I said about Latin being a swizz upthread, I have been unduly impressed by person-desiring-me-as-an-object's mad general etymological skillz in the past. Though I can't honestly claim that was the sole reason I went to bed with them later.

I didn't realize there were so many language tarts out there! Had I known, I'd've gone for that linguistics degree. ("Dude, when you go to school, study linguistics. You'll have to beat them off with a stick! [insert lame joke about beating someone off with a stick here]")

I always wanted to learn Latin because I'd heard that it helped your vocabulary. I didn't have the opportunity to study it until college, where many people warned me off of it because they way it was taught made the class IMPOSSIBLE TO PASS. (I knew a kid who had 7 years of Latin who took the second year course for an easy A and almost failed it. He regularly did his homework, too.)

There was another guy who enjoyed singing homoerotic poems that were written in Latin and ancient Greek, but that's a very silly and tangential story.

Learning Welsh would be cool, as would Estonian, and I've accumulated teach-yourself books on Polish, Icelandic and Norwegian from various charity shops. I should get back to learning Finnish, since I seem to have abandoned any intention of doing any university work before I go back (due to illness I'm currently in the middle of time out of a course I'm not very interested in, atrociously bad at and very behind on, and next year will be my final year like this year just finished should have been, so I have a lot of work I should be doing, but... bleh). I like to think that one day I'll go there and visit Stupido Records and Oskun Divari in Helsinki and buy loads of records by Circle and Karkkiautomaatti and Aavikko and YUP, then go up to Lapland, singing "Caribou" by the Pixies and that Monty Python "Finland" song all the way. Of course, I'll probably never learn Finnish and never go to Finland, and even if I do I'll be too embarrassed to say a word of Finnish and be immediately recognised as foreign and addressed in English anyway, and it's probably best not to visit the places you have an irrational daydreamy fondness for because they'll only be horribly disappointing, but hey.

[Am worryingly tempted to offer to buy that Latin Alice in Wonderland, if Tom still has it. Would obviously skipread first page, realise I couldn't translate any of it, and put it on my bookcase next to my Latin Asterix book, never to be read again, but hey. (At least Asterix in Latin has pretty pictures to gawp at and the occasional dead obvious and almost quoteable bit, e.g. lovelorn Obelix: 1. (gemitus altus) / 2. ...gemitus altior... / 3. *gemitus altissimus*, which I think every Latin teacher across the country should photocopy to base their lessons on comparatives and superlatives on. Then again, I thought Moleworth's gerund cartoons - as found here, follow the link in the left margin - would be an invaluable aid to learning about gerunds, but my Latin teacher merely seemed bemused by them when I brought in a photocopy.)]

The thing I miss most about Latin class is forming random, antiquated sentences like "Amant puellas agricolae" (They love the daughters of the farmer).

Does anyone else laugh their ass off at that scene in Life of Brian? "The Locative, sir, THE LOCATIVE!!!"

I tried to learn Finnish and Irish Gaelic as well (Welsh confused me, too many consonants) but gave up, and decided that making up my own obscure dead language was far more interesting. I created a whole runic-derived alphabet for it, as well. And if I didn't want to hand in any papers at school because the nun teaching the class was a cunt, I'd write the paper, translate it into my own secret language, and hand it in.

Apparently it wasn't that difficult, because eventually my grandfather (OK, he was very clever) broke the runic code, and we started writing postcards back and forth in it.

Latin is great. Basically it's great because it's great to learn languages, and it's great to learn languages that you are never going to use in every day speech. It just broadens the mind, makes you able to think more, and stuff. Also, studying Latin means you get to read Julius Caesar's showoffy accounts of conquering people, which is always good for a laugh.

That said, Ancient Greek is wayyyy better than Latin. People are more impressed with you learning it, because, although it's no harder as a language, it's not in the script we use now. And the literature of the Ancient Greeks represents a far more impressive contribution to the cultural and intellectual capital of the world than that of the Romans.

Latin in general = Classic, if for no other reason than refusing to die.

The part of Latin I was taught = Dud.

Isn't there some evidence that it was only ever really a written language, and that in Roman times people actually spoke some folky Italian-Latin hybrid?

This has actually bugged me before - when we did Chaucer at A-Level our English teacher played us a tape of the whole thing in a frightening voice somewhere to the left of The Wurzels which he alleged was a 'middle English accent' and how Chaucer would have read it. How could they possibly know? Or was the tape merely some way of usefully filling the time of a lunatic?

I don't think it's really out of the question that there could be documentary evidence of the language people spoke 2000 years ago, Tom. I mean, historians are clever, so I'm told.

Also where would Italian come from?

Wot woz literacy rate? Did eg plebes and/or slave classes have diff languages (ans = yes, somewhat, surely)

Plays of Plautus make Latin skits in Molesworth look like Oscar Wilde btw

Incidently this fact was brought to my attention by a chinese professor on a bus to Shanghai - he spoke excellent english because he has to publish all his work in it...

Anthony, you bongo, Kyrie Eleison is Greek.

HAve just started taking a non-credit Latin class at the local CC for the summer. For Fun. Have pity on me.

Just the first block in trying to assemble my own classical education.

Good luck.

I did Latin at school for six years - the biggest benefit for me was that it vastly improved my grasp of English grammar and my base for learning other languages. But perhaps that is more a reflection of the way I was taught than the language itself.

For me though the main point of learning a language is 1) to communicate with more people in the world and 2) to be able to read more widely, and with Latin I didn't get either because no-one really speaks it and there are good and readily-available English translations available for pretty much anything I'd want to read in Latin.

Good luck with your class and nill illigitimi carborundum!

there are good and readily-available English translations available for pretty much anything I'd want to read in Latin.

Many of them are better in Latin, though. And there are still a few things worth reading that aren't translated yet. (If not, I am about to waste a massive amount of my life -- well, arguable even if there is, I'm about to waste it!)

Latin is pretty frickin' classic but only if you're reading it because you like it, not as a national schooling policy.

dorkus malorkus

The interesting thing about dead languages is when you read the literature in the original, you realize that no translation is correct and everybody who's ever talked about the work in translation is totally wrong.

At least that's the case I learned with ancient Greek, but even less people bother with that than Latin.

Ancient Greek is even better for insufferable snobbery than Latin. It has a different alphabet, that seems to impress people.

Many of them are better in Latin, though.

Quite probably, but you have to be able to read at a very advanced level before you can even begin to pick out subtleties lost in translation. I certainly never achieved that with Latin prose (and in poetry it is only the succintness/sounds/rhythms that I could appreciate, not really any differences in meaning which were lost in translation.)

Because of all the inflection, Latin is a slog to read. In small doses I found it quite rewarding, perhaps on the same level as working out a crossword puzzle. But I always had to check my own reading against an English translation, and it was the translation that I actually took in and processed - so I may as well have just read that and not bothered trying to graple with the Latin.

The interesting thing about dead languages is when you read the literature in the original, you realize that no translation is correct and everybody who's ever talked about the work in translation is totally wrong.

Could you explain that? I'm not sure what you mean. I've had the experience that when you study a work in Latin/Greek, the editor says "some people think this word means this, other people think it means this, we don't really know" -- but that's not me reading in the original and going "Ahhh, that is a completely different idea that words cannot express in English and I can understand only in language X".

Perhaps this brings us into quite a fundamental linguistics debate, but do any of you really believe that other languages contain words representing ideas which are actually inexpressible in English? I understand that there are words and expressions that may require a lot of explanation due to cultural differences/context, but besides puns and poetry, is there anything really untranslatable ?

Often wonder what a translation of Finnegans Wake would look like.

Yeah, well something like Finnegans Wake poses the same kind of stylistic translation problems as poetry, except on a greater scale. Its untranslatableness would stem from it being very heavily stylised and hard to make sense of even in English.

But I haven't read it. Does it contain untranslatable ideas?

lol that would depend on consistent agreement about what its ideas are.

It's the extremity of its punning - virtually every word is a tri-lingual pun - that would make it such a pig to translate. I don't know if it has been translated or not, I kind of imagine it might have been. The pun is perhaps the hardest rhetorical element to translate? I've been re-reading Walter Kaufmann's translation of Nietzsche for the last few weeks, and most of the time Kaufmann either doesn't try to make the puns or he fails miserably when he does.

Yes, puns admittedly are difficult to translate, but you actually can explain them -- it just usually takes a paragraph and is rather cumbersome and inelegant, which is why a lot of translators tend to miss them out.

I suppose humour in most forms is difficult to translate on account of being such an elusive, complicated thing anyway, but again you'd have to be practically fluent to appreciate humorous writing in a second language.

FW has been translated a few times, but you know, it's not the same. There's a really great webpage you could google up that compares two translations of FW into Japanese.

I found that almost immediately with Latin I was coming across sentences that had effects that got demolished in translation. But I also generally don't find that a given text's "meaning" usually resides in its "meaning", but rather in its rhetorical choices etc. You don't, to give an obvious example, read Cicero for what he says, but how he says it -- that's almost entirely where the meaning lies. I have no clue why anyone would read Cicero in English.

No, I wouldn't think there are any untranslatable ideas, allowing enough time to explain nuance.

Also, things are much funnier in foreign languages, I find, in part because you're reading so slowly and are so hungry for a reward that you'll laugh at anything that's given you. (On the other hand, I often had to explain the puns and wordplay to my friends in our reading group when we were reading Isidore, so maybe I'm just good at that sort of thing. Hopefully I am. Otherwise grad school will be frustrating.

Unless you're a native speaker of a language, doesn't your reading a text in the original amount to a translation? And doesn't that imply everything that you find unsatisfactory in published translations too?

Well, no. I mean, no. It is something other than reading it as a native speaker, but when you read something in a foreign language, you don't go about translating it into your native language first. At least, you shouldn't. But even if you do, the ambivalence and the rhetoric of the original are still in your mind, not replaced by the translator's rhetoric.

People go on about it meaning luck or fortune, but if you take apart the words it's eu - good and daimon - a minor supernatural being.

Except, you know, that's not quite how words work. They start off getting formed that way, maybe, but compound words quickly take on a life of their own. I think this sense of Ancient Greek compound words really easily breaking down into their constituent parts is weirdly common and people say things like that all the time. But it's like saying "Oh well it's a blackboard which is a black board so it must be black, you're crazy for thinking you had a green one in your classroom" or "Oh it's rush hour so people are rushing and there's no way rush hour traffic could be at a standstill". I don't know the story behind eudaemonia but there's no immediate reason there why it couldn't have come to mean "luck or fortune" by 450BCE -- you'd have to look at contexts, not etymologies.

latin was hands down the most actively useful in quotidian life subject i studied in school (you know, once i'd learnt to read and write and so on) (i would add basic maths but it transpired the other day that i have actually ~forgotten my times tables~ wtf). just in terms of understanding unfamiliar words or phrases, getting by in other countries etc, plus my latin teacher turned out to be right in how it helped you think logically! i never believed him at the time. shoulda done it for A-level instead of maths, because all of that shit is gone from my brain now.

I think ancient Greek is very evocative in a way that doesn't come across in translation, there are little things about the language I really love. Like how the placement of articles can change the meaning of a phrase, it's so small and subtle and beautifully effective! And words that are translatable, but require a paragraph rather than a word or phrase to do justice to, so they pack more of a punch in the original. I haven't had that experience so much with Latin but if you love the language more than I do I can see how you might.

Also, Casuistry is in one respect quite OTM about the compound words, although I don't know about eudaimon in particular, or how much they changed in classical times...when I attempted to learn a little modern Greek, I got horribly confused by words that clearly had roots I knew in ancient Greek but mean totally different, if related, things now.

I have no idea what made me think of this but did any Americans who took Latin use the Ecce Romani books? I can still remember all the names of the characters. Gaius Cornelius! Flavia! Latin was my favorite class in HS for a while. I really enjoyed it but I like language classes in general so that's not too surprising.

oh god we used those

they were pretty good iirc

lol maybe they're the only Latin textbooks in the whole world!

our first latin teacher had a cane and dished out after school detentions if you smiled

our second latin teacher was a mr. p enis

i would just like to register my distaste for the latin wikipedia and its unforgivably dorky (and inconsistent in wikipedia terms) latinizing of forenames

http://la.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephanus_Gerrard
http://la.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonillus_Messi
http://la.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcellus_Proust

we used ecce romani too! marcus and cornelia and sextus!

latin is easily the subject i studied at school that i use most regularly in quotidian life. easily!

and i only did it up to gcse - so so so stupid of me to choose maths over it for a level on the basis that it'd be "more useful". i could not have been more wrong.

^ You said that in 2008.

Yeah, Ecce Romani! Did they ever get out of the ditch?

That entry on Messi is v short!

^ You said that in 2008.

― Josefa, Thursday, November 3, 2011 3:59 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

haha latin did not teach me to read threads before posting obviously

We used Cambridge Latin Course textbooks (I had to google the names of the people to figure that out - Caecilius, Metella, Grumio etc). I dropped it at 13, didn't want to do GCSE.

i did not study it but acquired those later, i wondered how they ever got through any high school classroom without hours of ppl going "SEXtus? snort"

gaius more like GAYus amirite

if it was good enough for monty python...

Day 1: Kennedy's Latin Primer. I've had this copy since I was a teenager and still teach with it today. Despite being published under Benjamin Kennedy's name, it was secretly written by his daughters, Marion and Julia. See Stray 1996 https://t.co/eon4yNYMdW pic.twitter.com/Z1mlw81ykh

— Dr Hannah Čulík-Baird (@opietasanimi) February 14, 2019

so the iconic Molesworth image of Kennedy hunting some grammar is a LIE

the daughters wrote the revised primer of blessed memory but BHK had previously hunted down the grammar for an elementary primer

Kid's in her second year. She loves it. Old Greek not so much her thing.