/lit/ - Literature

>>23309872
Ah, right. Sounds good.

>>23309885
>>23309923
Well, you've certainly outdone my expectations by no small amount.
It does seem like those bilingual editions are a rather modern phenomenon (modern meaning post-1920 or so I guess), which doesn't line it up very well with the heyday of German Indology.
I'm just going to note everything you've mentioned here and browse through it at my leisure later. Thanks a lot.

As regards languages, I'm kind of a cheater. My native language is Dutch, and I learned English as a child, so that's semi-native and I use it most. German is, of course, very similar to Dutch so I have a significant head-start and also retain everything with ease (I just started reading German with basically no knowledge of it besides what I slacked up in high school in November of last year, read about an hour a day and most recently read Süskind with really no trouble at all).
I learned Pali some years ago, and have recently been messing around with Sanskrit; these two are highly similar as well. I know some French (did the Assimil course), which is also cheating because it has like half of its vocabulary in common with English and is grammatically speaking very unimpressive.
Greek is definitely the most hard-fought language I know, since it it extremely difficult, irregular and allows me no crutches like the others, and I can now read like one page per half hour (adding this because my "knowing a language" is fairly relative here).
Sanskrit is fantastic because of how systematically regular it is, it is like the polar opposite of Greek in this regard; knowing a Sanskrit verb in any conjugation will make the root almost instantly obvious to you, and a lot of nouns are simply regular derivations from said roots. It has a perfectly regular vowel gradation system and an intact case system (in contrast with Greek, which has to use the dative for what Sanskrit does with three separate cases) which makes syntax much easier.
All in all, I think the only one I'd need to consciously maintain (keeping in mind that I don't technically "speak" them, which significantly lowers the bar) is Greek, because the language is basically a slanted stack of idiom held together by gum and habituation.
I'd say, however, that it's fairly important for me personally to not start regarding these things as an obligation that I'd have to commit to upkeep on, as I'm definitely the type of person to overdo, rather than underdo, diligence, so I don't really look at it that way.

>>23003224
That's what it's for. There will always be effort posts, memes and recommendations worth sifting through to find. Try Junger's Glass Bees and CS Lewis' Space trilogy thereafter, for a scifi bent.

>>22618290

>reading some Platōn
>it's engaging
>I'm learning
>daily progress
>studying more than originally planned comes naturally
feels good bros. may you all find an author or work that brings you fulfilment

>>21670033
>>21662893
yeah it really just depends on the methods. granted it's with a reader, but after studying ancient Greek on my own for a year and then taking courses at a university for less than a year I can understand an unaltered dialogue of Plato. and as I've read it I've picked up on a lot of his tendencies. I think I put in more work than my Greek classmates, but I'm not studying 4 hours a day nor was I when I was studying on my own - though I did study almost every day

>>21445767
>εἰ γὰρ ξένος ἐν ἄλλῃ πόλει τοιαῦτα ποιοῖς, τάχ' ἂν ὡς γόης ἀπαχθείης
"For if you should do such things as a foreigner in a different city, you would quickly be taken away as a sorcerer" I feel like I got that right, but feel free to correct me anyone. my main concern though is the use of ξένος here. I'm just curious how you would describe it syntactically. I've seen this sort of thing done in Latin too, and in indicative clauses: there's no explicit syntax used with it (like a particle or something), but the noun refers to someone in a way other than the standard "I, you, they" pronouns or their own name or some other epithet. in English we normally use "as" (e.g., "As a boy I worked with my father on the farm"). I just wanna know if it has a formal name

I've read a handful of Plato's dialogues (republic, symposium, parmenides, euthyphro, crito, apology), but I've never studied them that deeply or tried to look into the context around which they were written. with the context, I specifically mean the intentions of Plato and the extent to which the dialogues really happened.

For instance, on the back of the Oxford World's Classics translation of Gorgias, the translator writes "The struggle which Plato has Socrates recommend..." and at one point in the introduction writes "At 463a ff. he has Socrates describe rhetoric as a..." - these would suggest that Plato is merely using Socrates as a character to promote (presumably) his own beliefs. I have seen more extreme versions of this view, saying that Socrates never even existed. I have also seen the reverse, though, where people assume the dialogues to be fairly faithful to real conversations.

I get these dialogues were written hundreds of years ago and that there's probably not much evidence (or if there is, it's dubious) as to the context around the dialogues, but how much can we confidently say about it?

yes