Latin: Classic Or Dud?

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.

)

hungry for a snob

Well I studied it for eleven years, it fkn oughta be classic

Dude I did RE for umpteen years and I'm fucked if that was classic.

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...

Akshully I used to love doing RE mostly but it's still a load of old bollocks.

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.

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.

raeda in fossa est!

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?

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.