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.
― Dan Perry, Tuesday, 3 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― Kerry Keane, Tuesday, 3 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― Joe, Tuesday, 3 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
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.)]
― rebecca, Tuesday, 3 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― Graham, Tuesday, 3 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― duane, Tuesday, 3 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
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!!!"
― Joe, Wednesday, 4 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― Tom, Wednesday, 4 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
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.
― masonic boom, Wednesday, 4 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― Josh, Wednesday, 4 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
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.
― The Dirty Vicar, Wednesday, 4 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
Latin in general = Classic, if for no other reason than refusing to die.
The part of Latin I was taught = Dud.
― Graham, Wednesday, 4 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― Lyra, Thursday, 16 August 2001 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
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?
― Nick, Sunday, 19 August 2001 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
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?
― Tom, Sunday, 19 August 2001 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
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.
― Nick, Monday, 20 August 2001 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
Also where would Italian come from?
― Pete, Monday, 20 August 2001 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― Tom, Monday, 20 August 2001 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
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
― mark s, Monday, 20 August 2001 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― Greg, Monday, 20 August 2001 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
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...
― james launders, Friday, 28 September 2001 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― Fliss, Saturday, 29 December 2001 01:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
Anthony, you bongo, Kyrie Eleison is Greek.
― DV, Saturday, 29 December 2001 01:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
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.
― kingfish, Friday, 27 June 2008 23:10 (fifteen years ago) link
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.
― Cathy, Friday, 27 June 2008 23:31 (fifteen years ago) link
Good luck with your class and nill illigitimi carborundum!
― kate78, Saturday, 28 June 2008 02:01 (fifteen years ago) link
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.
― Casuistry, Saturday, 28 June 2008 04:27 (fifteen years ago) link
dorkus malorkus
― burt_stanton, Saturday, 28 June 2008 05:01 (fifteen years ago) link
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.
― burt_stanton, Saturday, 28 June 2008 05:02 (fifteen years ago) link
Ancient Greek is even better for insufferable snobbery than Latin. It has a different alphabet, that seems to impress people.
― Maria, Saturday, 28 June 2008 09:33 (fifteen years ago) link
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.
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 ?
― Cathy, Saturday, 28 June 2008 12:12 (fifteen years ago) link
Often wonder what a translation of Finnegans Wake would look like.
― Noodle Vague, Saturday, 28 June 2008 12:18 (fifteen years ago) link
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?
― Cathy, Saturday, 28 June 2008 12:33 (fifteen years ago) link
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.
― Noodle Vague, Saturday, 28 June 2008 12:36 (fifteen years ago) link
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.
― Cathy, Saturday, 28 June 2008 12:43 (fifteen years ago) link
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.
― Casuistry, Saturday, 28 June 2008 18:19 (fifteen years ago) link
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.
― Casuistry, Saturday, 28 June 2008 18:21 (fifteen years ago) link
)
― Casuistry, Saturday, 28 June 2008 18:22 (fifteen years ago) link
hungry for a snob
― conrad, Saturday, 28 June 2008 18:30 (fifteen years ago) link
Well I studied it for eleven years, it fkn oughta be classic
― Just got offed, Saturday, 28 June 2008 19:04 (fifteen years ago) link
Dude I did RE for umpteen years and I'm fucked if that was classic.
― Noodle Vague, Saturday, 28 June 2008 19:09 (fifteen years ago) link
Hahaha! To be fair, for the last seven of those years it was purely out of choice! Definitely the best foreign language I've attempted to study, and the only one I did as part of my final degree.
My brother is considering Philosophy or Theology for uni but I think it's coz his RE teacher is fairly lax with the whole setting work thing...
― Just got offed, Saturday, 28 June 2008 19:12 (fifteen years ago) link
Akshully I used to love doing RE mostly but it's still a load of old bollocks.
― Noodle Vague, Saturday, 28 June 2008 19:12 (fifteen years ago) link
Rhetorical flourish and nuance in the language is what really makes a lot of this literature, and it's difficult to replicate perfectly ... of course, it's the same with -any- work in translation. Ancient Greek rhetoric is like ... building these amazing machines with just with language, it's weird.
My favorite example of lost nuance in translation is how philosophy has mangled the concept of 'eudaimon'. 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. It can sometimes mean something along the lines of being born with a good supernatural entity looking over you or something like that and has all sorts of underlying meaning lost when people just call it 'luck'.
A better translation would be "blessed", but for some reason philosophy translations totally miss that mark. Or at least the Ivy League blowhards who lecture on philosophy I've heard who never bothered to read the stuff in the original.
― burt_stanton, Saturday, 28 June 2008 22:11 (fifteen years ago) link
Basically all ancient Greek philosophy in translation is completely wrong and any Western philosophy based on translated ancient Greek philosophy gets it wrong. But it doesn't mean it lacks value.
― burt_stanton, Saturday, 28 June 2008 22:17 (fifteen years ago) link
raeda in fossa est!
― clotpoll, Saturday, 28 June 2008 23:00 (fifteen years ago) link
ferte auxilium!
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?
― Noodle Vague, Saturday, 28 June 2008 23:11 (fifteen years ago) link
latin is easily the subject i studied at school that i use most regularly in quotidian life. easily!
― lex pretend, Thursday, 3 November 2011 00:01 (twelve years ago) link
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.
― lex pretend, Thursday, 3 November 2011 00:02 (twelve years ago) link
^ You said that in 2008.
― Josefa, Thursday, 3 November 2011 03:59 (twelve years ago) link
Yeah, Ecce Romani! Did they ever get out of the ditch?
― JoeStork, Thursday, 3 November 2011 04:46 (twelve years ago) link
That entry on Messi is v short!
― xyzzzz__, Thursday, 3 November 2011 05:43 (twelve years ago) link
― 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
― all i see is angels in my eyes (lex pretend), Thursday, 3 November 2011 08:31 (twelve years ago) link
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.
― The Eyeball Of Hull (Colonel Poo), Thursday, 3 November 2011 08:51 (twelve years ago) link
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"
― thomp, Thursday, 3 November 2011 09:16 (twelve years ago) link
gaius more like GAYus amirite
― thomp, Thursday, 3 November 2011 09:17 (twelve years ago) link
if it was good enough for monty python...
― ceci n'est pas un nom d'affichage (ledge), Thursday, 3 November 2011 11:40 (twelve years ago) link
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
― mark s, Friday, 15 February 2019 17:50 (five years ago) link
so the iconic Molesworth image of Kennedy hunting some grammar is a LIE
― imago, Friday, 15 February 2019 17:53 (five years ago) link
the daughters wrote the revised primer of blessed memory but BHK had previously hunted down the grammar for an elementary primer
― mark s, Friday, 15 February 2019 17:57 (five years ago) link
Kid's in her second year. She loves it. Old Greek not so much her thing.
― nathom, Friday, 15 February 2019 18:15 (five years ago) link