/lit/ - Literature

Χαίρετε
almost finished Athenaze part 2, probably going to start going through Anabasis as first real work
I've been slacking with Latin, not gonna lie, I'm reading the second book of the Aeneid and Livy

My goal is to read Frankish epic poetry and translate it

Currently reading Loeb classics Enchiridion for recognition.

ngl, i have not enjoyed reading greek and latin these past few weeks

>try to read any actual latin
>supposedly easy author
>first sentence i read is made of overlapping weird exceptions and rare forms

did any one of these fucks just write a normal sentence sometimes

>>20359592
Yes. Skip the proems and get into the meat of the books, they tend to be more clear there.
Alternatively read more and eventually most sentences will be normal to you.

An exercise for /clg/
Tacitus' Germania, section 9, wherein he describes the religions of the Germans.
Post your translations and compare with others.

>>20359592

Listen to this anon >>20359751. I have had so many experiences reading Cicero or Augustine or what have you where the sentences like in De Oficcis which are way more difficult than the text:

Quamquam te, Marce fili, annum iam audientem Cratippum, idque Athenis, abundare oportet praeceptis institutisque philosophiae propter summam et doctoris auctoritatem et urbis,

>>20359781
>Among the gods Mercury is the most revered, to whom it is licit during specific days to even make human offerings. They placate Hercules and Mars with appropriate animals. A part of the Suebi makes sacrifices to Isis as well: the origin and reason for this foreign cult are hard to come by, if not through the very symbol in the shape of a Liburnae(ship) indicating its origin abroad. Furthermore they don't consider it appropriate either to attach/depict gods to walls or to imitate them in any anthropomorphic form due to their celestial greatness: they consacrate groves and forests and call with the names of the gods that arcane, which only by reverence they see.

>>20359845
actually, this one is pretty easy. The one in De amicita is way longer and arduous

>>20359781
>Of all the gods they most honor Mercury, to whom they deem it proper to offer human sacrifices on certain days. They appease Hercules and Mars with offered animals. A part of the Suebi also sacrifice to Isis; the cause and origin of which (?) I have scarcely been able to ascertain, except (for the fact) that the emblem itself, in the form of a ship, testifies to (?) an imported religion (i.e. to its being one). Moreover, they do not think/presume (?) to contain (their) gods with(in) walls nor to imitate (them) in any sort of human countenance, on account of the greatness of divine (things): they consecrate groves and glades, and address with the names of the gods that secret (mystery?) which alone they regard with reverence.

I got filtered hard

Can someone who is intermediate or higher in Latin describe what their first month of study looked like in great detail?

I feel like I'm doing this wrong.

>>20359956
can't remember anything exactly but I was mostly following Wheelock, wrote the paradigms by hand, did the exercises, etc..., it takes time

>>20359956
Read LLPSI and learned I knew absolutely fucking NOTHING about grammer. It was mostly learning grammer

>>20359956
Just have faith in the process and keep drilling. I would recommend a first year student not think about their progress at all or trust any thoughts they have of "how the fuck can anyone possibly remember this." I felt that way a million times.

You can't see it from the right perspective yet, especially in the first month. One of the great things about learning a language properly (like you have to with classical languages) is that you will learn unexpected things about how your memory works and what it's capable of. There are multiple levels or kinds of memory and they all interact and support one another.

As you are learning the basics, your brain is saying "how will I remember this" because its only "category" of what memory "feels" like is conscious remembering. But after a few months you'll start to notice you remember shit you don't remember remembering. Then you will learn that conscious remembering is only a small part of the battle, and in the future you won't feel so bad about learning a new strange thing, because it will have become built into the way you "see" remembering things to just "know" that you'll absorb it over time. Can't explain it better than this, but it really does become a built-in instinctive assumption.

What happens is that all the stuff that seems hard now will just get absorbed and become instinctive, and then you can focus on the really weird and difficult stuff consciously, and then even that will become reflex memory, and then only the really weird/difficult things will still "stand out" as needing to be thought about consciously. You just can't know how this feels until you get there. So my advice is don't bother worrying until you've had at least a taste of it.

Also, and this is just as important, you don't anticipate at this early stage how much "cheating" you can do via context. Right now your brain is thinking how the fuck will I tell if it's this or that ambiguous form, but in actual texts it's almost never ambiguous, or if it is, the ambiguity stands out strongly and you can think about it intelligently. Again, you just can't know what this feels like until you get there.

>>20360040
Paradigms by hand is great and something you can do every day. Eventually though you will just synesthetically "feel" what the endings are. I remember when I was like "THAT'S NOT FAIR, HOW WILL I KNOW WHETHER IT'S FUTURE OR SUBJUNCTIVE" for ambiguous forms, and in practice that almost never happens.

Also I remember being so intimidated by sequence of tenses and conditional clauses and then spent like five days writing emails in Latin for fun and having to learn the conditions, and never forgot them again. Just have faith in your brain's ability to absorb.

Does anyone know about the history of teaching to speak and pronounce Latin since it's re-emergence in the Renaissance up until now?
Essentially I'm wondering things like could the posh boys and politicians of the 19th/early 20th centuries verbally communicate purely in Latin if they wanted to?
Or, was it always considered a purely literary language, and teaching spoken Latin a relatively recent development.

>>20359845
why is te... audientem in the accusative?
also I'm trying to read through de officiis myself right now and it's killing my motivation, I need to give up and switch to something else. it's not the hardest text, I struggled a lot more with some of his letters, but fuck am I bored

>>20360238
agrees with oportet, impersonal

>>20360238
oportet is the main verb and impersonal
>it behooves you to...
If you are that bored and struggling then read something else. There are so many surviving works of Latin in the classical era alone that there is no need to spend time reading something you dislike. Don't think of it as giving up and don't actually give up, put it down and go read something else more interesting for a while. Come back to it in a few months and see how much easier/more interesting it has gotten. It will definitely get easier, but if it still bores you then drop it again for something else.
Your tastes may change in 1,5,10 years, maybe someday that particular subject matter will appeal to you, but for now no sense in grinding through something utterly boring.

Based or no?

>>20360250
ah thanks.
>>20360257
yeah that's what I've been thinking. I've been set on reading through the wheelock's latin reader sequentially but have hit a motivational wall with de officiis. maybe I'll start on caesar or read some catullus for awhile. I've at least kept up reading the vulgate and while it's not high latin it's provided some consistent inpoot and vocabulary.

>>20360120
>could the posh boys and politicians of the 19th/early 20th centuries verbally communicate purely in Latin if they wanted to?
No. After the Renaissance almost everyone who studied it in an academic setting outside of Vatican City has had a weak ability to slowly read with a dictionary and not communicate at all.
>was it always considered a purely literary language
No. Up until the early modern era with the printing press, you wrote in Latin and used it as an international lingua franca like modern English. After the printing press, people used vernacular languages to read and write, so speaking Latin seemed pointless and French became the new lingua franca.

>>20360291
What about all those church councils drawing clergy from all over Europe, at a time when learning other vernaculars was only possible if you spent time in that country? Surely they spoke medieval Latin at the Fourth Lateran.

Montaigne is the famous case I can think of who was supposedly raised speaking Latin.

>>20360276
Not bad, could do much worse.
I went through this book after Wheelock back in college. It has a few things Wheelock doesn't, though I don't recall what exactly they are.
It is intensive. Not many example sentences or passages and explanations are short and straight. Wouldn't use for a high school class.
It will be best if you supplement it with other readings, example sentences and texts.

>>20360312
No. The last few centuries the Pope has had a Latinist who wrote all his speeches for him and the Clergy just spoke Italian or Spanish.

>>20360321
I am talking about the 13th century.

>>20360323
I was talking about post 16th century

>>20360280
Yeah just skip that, read through other parts of the reader that are more intriguing. I wouldn't bother with the sequential part, read what you feel like each day, just make a goal to read all of it eventually.
I recommend you check out Isidorus. He wrote on everything so there are bound to be topics that are of interest. Later author but still solid classical Latin. He will give you lots of input and vocab, a good amount of grammar and be rather enjoyable.

>>20360314
I did like half of Wheelock, but I recently bought Moreland because it's usually expensive, but I found a used copy cheap.

I was thinking about just starting that instead of finishing Wheelock. I read the first chapter and a bit of the second for Moreland. It introduces the subjunctive almost immediately which supposedly helps you start reading real texts sooner. Also I've heard from people that completed Wheelock, that they still don't really get the subjunctive.

Should I finish Wheelock or jump to M&F?

>>20360328
Oh ok nevermind then. Found some interesting things for anyone interested.

>‘When, around AD 800, Medieval Latin came to be clearly differentiated by speakers of Romance languages from the Late Latin assemblage of various written and spoken forms, it ceased to be perceived as a language spoken for everyday purposes. Spoken Latin was hereafter used only by the most educated classes, even though it might still be used by them in casual conversation. It was still spoken by such men until the end of the Middle Ages and after, though how often and in what contexts would vary. There were probably a good many churchmen who could adequately follow a sermon or a speech delivered in Latin but who could not have carried on a conversation. In the universities of the later Middle Ages it was naturally used in lectures and debates, but its use as the language for chatter between students at mealtimes had to be artificially maintained by rules. The value of speaking and understanding spoken Latin was preserved, but as a learned tongue, most often used for formal purposes and never with the same colloquial fluency as the vernacular languages.’ (Richard Sharpe, Medieval Latin: An Introduction and Bibliographical Guide (1996), p. 315)

>When Latin ceased to be a first language with native speakers it continued to be learned as a second language, as Medieval Latin and later from about 1300 as Neo-Latin. Both were based on and derivative of written Classical Latin, Neo-Latin more so than Medieval Latin. Throughout this period Latin was also spoken as well as written. But the Latin that was spoken was no longer the first language of anyone, but a form of the written language that was learned as a second language.

>There were probably a good many churchmen who could adequately follow a sermon or a speech delivered in Latin but who could not have carried on a conversation. In the universities of the later Middle Ages it was naturally used in lectures and debates, but its use as the language for chatter between students at mealtimes had to be artificially maintained by rules.

>It is questionable though whether the Classical Latin that we are familiar with was used much in everyday conversations, even among the educated elite. ‘’Quintilian at least (12.10.40-43) remarks that people like him tend to use the everyday language of the ordinary people when speaking with friends and wives (and with slaves, note), and that this language is different in its nature from that of an eloquent man, i.e. a highly educated person like himself: quae sit cotidiano sermoni simillima, quo cum amicis, coniugibus, liberis, servis loquamur … nam mihi aliam quandam videtur habere naturam sermo vulgaris, aliam viri eloquentis oratio. (And Tacitus (Dialogus 32.3 — a work probably published within a few years of Quintilian's), has Messalla saying of cotidianus sermo that it contains foeda ac pudenda vitia.)

>>20360343
>When Latin ceased to be a first language with native speakers it continued to be learned as a second language
The situation was more like with modern French where the spoken language evolved, but the spelling was stagnant. So people in Italy wrote to people and Spain and could read what they wrote, but when they spoke it was harder to understand eachother.

>>20360335
Wheelock's doesn't do a great job teaching independent uses of the subjunctive. They introduce the jussive subjunctive and continue to drill it with examples but pretty much entirely skip the deliberative/optative/potential subjunctives. Since finishing Wheelock's that's been my biggest complaint with its preparation.

>>20360360
So should I do Moreland & Fleischer instead?

>>20360335
Moreland is like a distilled grammar. No fat, just pure info dumps.
If you have a good grasp of grammar in general then Moreland and Fleischer will be great.
If you have understood everything in the first half of Wheelock it will be a good transition.
It packs a lot of information and vocab into each chapter so don't expect the pace to be the same as Wheelock. Take your time and go through it correctly meaning make sure you understand everything before moving on.
I suggest starting Moreland and keeping Wheelock's handy to reference in case there is something that you don't quite get or need more explanation. Alternatively you could use both books together and do a chapter of Moreland for every two or three of Wheelock. They are more or less complementary texts, just one being more densely presented than the other. Having the sample sentences and reading exercises from both is far better than either on their own.

>>20360365
I don't have experience with M&S, and I generally enjoyed Wheelock's and would still recommend it with the caveat that you spend a bit of time expanding your knowledge of independent subjunctive clauses when you've finished.
See https://dcc.dickinson.edu/grammar/latin/subjunctive-mood
Otherwise I was quite happy with it. If you do use Wheelock's be sure to make good use of the adapted readings - don't neglect actual input in favor of the self-tutorial exercises and grammar drilling.

>>20360395
>>20360399
I am also on chapter 14 of Orberg right now. I'm considering doing all 3 books at the same time. I have the free time to do so and I'm a recovering coomer who needs to stay productive when I'm not working.

>>20360120
Even in the middle ages you had to prove you are worthy of your title in front of a group of scholars by answering questions in latin with answers in latin.
So yeah, everyone who did go through classical education could read it, many spoke it, scholars even semi natively (as much as you can say it about a dead language).
The idea of only being able to read latin while looking up every third word in a dictionary is fairly new.

>>20358928
buummpp

I'm a native Portuguese speaker and also know Spanish. Since those are romance languages, I suppose it must be easier to learn Latin through them, so do you have any recommendations of Latin textbooks on Portuguese or Spanish?

>>20360619
Kids started learning Latin all the way from the age of 7 or so in grammar schools back in the Middle Ages and deep into the Modern era. They weren't even allowed to speak their native language at all in class, so clearly they must've had a lot of exposure and time to practice it throughout many years.
Nowadays, students only take Latin or Greek in either the last two years of high school or somewhere during college as an elective course (if at all), and never get to see any books written in classical languages aside from a few dusty Loebs at their university's library.

>>20361658
Check out CulturaClassica dot com
for Spanish stuff

>>20360100
>I remember when I was like "THAT'S NOT FAIR, HOW WILL I KNOW WHETHER IT'S FUTURE OR SUBJUNCTIVE" for ambiguous forms, and in practice that almost never happens.

I feel like this happens to me all the fucking time.

Is it possible to learn to learn more ancient languages than modern languages?

Meaning, would it be easier to have a decent reading ability with a dictionary for 10 ancient languages than to be fluent speaking 10 modern languages?

Or is it harder because you have less input and less resources?

>>20362020
Depends on your goals and standard of fluency. I can read way more languages than I can speak. Speaking is a whole different game. I know Arabs whose first language is English and they can read Classical Arabic well enough to write a dissertation on it but they refuse to learn a dialect of modern Arabic, or willfully let their knowledge of their parents' dialect wither.

But I also know people who are masters at "learning languages" well enough to hold basic conversation, but they always plateau at that level and can't read or communicate advanced ideas worth a damn.

I think most /lit/ type people would probably find it easier to read a classical language than attain true fluency in a living language. Mostly because reading just takes patience and theoretical knowledge, while spoken fluency requires lots of real life practice, especially to get beyond that everyday basic bitch tourist conversation level.

>>20362118
Basically I ask because I really only want to learn a few modern languages like German, French, Spanish, & Russian. Mostly just to read, but I guess I want to have functioning Spanish ability.

Then I have a long list of ancient languages that I want to study and I'm worried that the list is too long and unrealistic. So I'm wondering if I can get really good at Latin, Greek, & Hebrew and then have a competent reading level in Coptic, Sanskrit, Arabic, Aramaic, & Syriac.

>>20362118
this; learning to READ is easy, its the speaking and writing part that's hard

>>20358928

>greek

>tower of babbles

Is it Macedonian greek? Ionian greek? Dorian greek? Thessaloniki Greek? Achmenian greek?

>>20362144
Based on my own experiences of doing languages as a hobby, it's doable as long as your goal is mainly reading, and you don't mind making it a long term thing (3-7 years maybe).

Lots of classicists have to know German, French, and one or two other modern languages in addition to Greek and Latin. Learning romance languages when you already know one is pretty easy. So knowing all those is evidently doable, or it wouldn't be so common/standard in academia.

The others are more difficult.. I can speak from experience with Russian, if you want to learn it for reading purposes, you should start as soon as possible and be content with fairly slow reading for the first two years or so (at least, if you only casually study and it isn't your uni major or main focus). The grammar is easy if you already know Latin/Greek, but the problem is vocabulary acquisition if your first language isn't a Slavic language. You can only really do it slow and steady over a decently long period of time, or I guess more hardcore study if it's your major or something.

Hebrew is hard if you want to learn modern Hebrew, since that's just a whole language, but Biblical Hebrew isn't so bad, especially if you already love the Bible. Since you'll be focused so much on the Bible you can basically just fake it until you make it, there are vocabulary frequency lists and Torahs that gloss every word under a certain frequency rate on every page, so you are half "learning Hebrew" half just memorizing the fucking Bible basically, but it works if you already like that. Writing it, especially writing modern Hebrew, is a whoooole other ball game. Hebrew verb construction is fucking hard.

Don't know about Coptic, but I have seen posters on here saying that once you have Hebrew, Aramaic and Syriac aren't so bad. I don't know about Arabic, but I know someone who studies MSA/Classical in addition to their Latin/Greek and they enjoy it.

I don't know much about Sanskrit either but I hear learning the Devanagari script is a much more significant hurdle than, say, the Hebrew script. But I downloaded a Sanskrit textbook off libgen once and wasted an afternoon on it and frankly it doesn't seem like it would be too much different from the difficulty of, say, learning Greek.

I don't think any one of them is impossible, it's more the time you're willing to put in. The other big problem is that you lose languages if you don't use them. So whenever you plan on learning something you should be thinking in terms of bodies of texts you actually want and plan to read, and being realistic about whether those will sustain you for years of practice and be actual fun. That's why learning Biblical Hebrew through the Bible is easy enough, and learning Russian is even okay despite the initial wall of difficulty (because there's at least lots to read in Russian), but if you're just learning Sanskrit for the sake of it and you don't actually have a love for Sanskrit literature, it may be unrealistic.

>>20362186
First of all, thank you for taking the time to write all this.

Believe it or not, my list of languages I wanted to learn was even bigger and I have been reducing it over the past few days trying to be more realistic.

I started Russian earlier this year and got absolutely filtered. The grammar didn't seem that bad compared to Latin, but the vocab like you said has been absolutely brutal. I cannot remember this shit for the life of me.

I am relieved to have someone tell me that my goal isn't stupid and that I can actually achieve it. Thank you sir. Now all I gotta do is get my shit together.

>>20362211
Glad if anything helps. The one thing I wish I did differently was not getting discouraged so easily and procrastinating when I was younger. Seriously, fake it til you make it works. You are always making progress even when you feel like you're stalling. If you burn anything into your mind while you're still young, make it not to underestimate yourself (especially the power of unglamorous everyday hard work), and also, not to assume you have infinite time to screw around until you do it "right." Do Russian 30 minutes a day semi-seriously and even if you have slow periods or periods where you can't tangibly feel any progress being made, you will know Russian in a few years. It will just sort of happen.

Same with Latin and Greek. Most people lose one or the other in grad school as soon as they aren't forced to practice it anymore, because they are past the classes/tests part of their training, and can focus on their research topic. It's sadly even common for people's research to be mostly reading secondary sources in English, and analyzing a small set of texts they already know well in their research language, so they actually lose BOTH their "off" language and much of their research language as well. Just do SOME every day to make sure you never lose it.

I think you can do the polymath thing, but you have to be honest with yourself and have real dedication, some way of keeping yourself honest and realistic while just putting in the hours every day. I think 80% of progress is just sticking with the thing, only the other 20% is the conscious parts you remember like memorizing forms.

The secret trick for me with Russian was to focus on a text I actually really want to read, and I don't care whether it's a page a day or 10 pages a day, and I don't care if I'm remembering the words I'm reading or learning anything, I'm just here to actually read this text that happens to be in Russian. Obviously you want to be smart and pick something readable. But this way you aren't constantly feeling discouraged that you are looking up внyтpи for the tenth time.

Another trick is to make something a perennial part of your life instead of getting hung up on progress. I like reading Hebrew because it's fun, not because I have some set date I have to "know Hebrew" by.

But it also pays to pick the languages you need or care about the most and go hardcore with them. You don't want to be like those people "learning Japanese" for fifty years who can still only pick out a few high frequency words while watching anime.

>>20362172
Yeah I fucking suck at speaking, I'm just lazy and irresponsible about making time for practice. Composition is amazing though if you find a way to make it fun. It really makes you remember shit to have to use it, rather than processing it passively.

bump

>>20362180
Only Epic Greek has significant literature and is influenced by Attic.

>>20362247
>>20362186
Good poasts anon.

I can echo this. I struggled with Latin after going to vivarium for like a year because I only studied like 1 hour every other week even after a good intensive. When I did 15 minutes a day, even when it felt like I learned nothing some days, my Latin exploded over the course of a few months.

>>20363549
Tell us about Vivarium

What is the gender/are the genders of the letters of the Latin alphabet? Like, how would I say "The letter C is stupid"?

>>20364038
littera is feminine, so it would agree with it
littera C stulta est

>>20364048
Okay my bad how would I just say "C is stupid"? Like what is the gender of the individual letter? Neuter indeclinable?

>>20364065
if it's understood to be the letter C, then it will be feminine, regardless of whether you include the noun or not in the phrase, there's no reason to turn neuter
of course the letter itself is indeclinable, but any adjective referring to it will agree with its gender
e.g magnam vidi (litteram) C in tabula inscriptam(I saw a big C written into a piece of wood)
I mean works the same in e.g Italian

>>20364089
Thanks, anon. New to heavily inflected languages.

>>20359330
Basé et Merovechpillé.

>>20358928
http://pitaka.ch/ignotacadath.pdf

How close to classical latin is this translation from English?

Is Greek harder than Russian?

>>20364247
I am Russian, and it's definitely hard for me to learn Greek.

>>20364272
Oh my god

wasn't there a compilation of resources in the OP at one point?

how should I begin Greek if my intention is to be able to read Aristotle within the next five years?

>>20364869
https://mega dot nz/folder/9o4QEIIK#P3piz8Bfw-z7jgb7Q8NWDg
>>20364981
hard to say because you can only learn greek for the first time once and i wouldn't recommend the method I used. the italian athenaze seems to be the least painful book I've seen. if you have already studied latin or some other dead language then you should have some idea about what will work for you and what won't. if greek is your first language then just remember that you'll never be fluent. the good news is that you don't have to wait five years reading shit you're not interested in to get to a level where you can finally dip you toes into aristotle. if he's the only reason you want to learn greek then i'd suggest you try to read him immediately after you're done climbing the grammar mountain (which should take about 6 months unless you're one of those lazy fucks who insists it takes at least a year).

How fast should I be reading various textbooks like Wheelock, LLPSI, etc? How many chapters a day for a normie?

>>20365670
I heard someone recommending one section of LLPSI per day. Every chapter has 3 sections usually.

>>20365670
Until you understand them. There is no one answer that works or everyone. Read as much as you can ully comprehend. Might be a chapter a day, might be a chapter a week. Speed is not important, understanding and absorbing is.

Need some advice, how would you translate the last part:
Senatores notitiam receperunt istam, consulem in provincia a inimicis mortuum fuisse, ...

struggling a bit with the infinitive

>>20365688
Looks like acc + inf for indirect speech.

>>20365688
>The senators had received the notice, that the consul had died by the hands of the enemies in the province.
I think it can be a bit confusing because it's almost like a pluperfect infinitive construction which isn't standard e.g he had died before the time of the main clause i.e when they received the notice, which is itself in the past.
Mortuum esse would sound more natural I guess.

>>20364247
Different kinds of difficulty in my experience. Greek has an initial wall of difficulty since there is so much memorization, then it hits a plateau where it's surprisingly easy within the parameters of what you've memorized, then it gets hard again when you try to read challenging authors like Thucydides, poets in general, and late Atticizing authors, all of whom will have you spending half a day on a single page with a dictionary and grammar open.

Russian is piss easy to get started reading with a dictionary, if you already know grammar/syntax well, but the hardest part is the slow vocabulary acquisition unless you do a shitload of daily rote memorization with flashcards or something.

The difficulty curve for Greek is like a steep cliff followed by a plateau, followed by hilly country with occasional highish peaks. The difficulty curve for Russian is like a gentle 5-degree slope that takes fucking forever to get to high altitude.

Greek will discourage you in the beginning but Russian will discourage you in the mid game when you are still dictionary/google translating like a bitch despite having been doing it for a year. I said in a post above that the best secret to learning Russian is to just start doing it ASAP. Accept that it will take a couple years, accept the grind, start early, and stay consistent. Better to start learning at 25 and know Russian at 28 years old than to still be looking for secret techniques for learning Russian at 40.

The other secret with Russian is to balance reading with speaking. Different skills but they will mutually support eachother past a certain point. But you absolutely have to commit to long immersive reading, until your lizard brain starts just brute force remembering things at a level you can't even detect but it's happening anyway. The other method, like I said, is flashcard brute forcing, which I have seen anons here report led them to fluency in just a couple years.

By comparison you can start reading even difficult authors like Thucydides in Greek well within a single year, it will just be slow. Especially if you already know Latin you can easily be reading advanced Greek within a couple months of solid studying.

>>20365670
Whatever works for you as long as you actually learn it, like the other guy said. Any textbook is just the ladder you will kick out from under you later. Whenever I learn a new language, because I already know Indo-European grammar/syntax decently well (just from studying Latin/Greek, not a linguist or anything), I just skip right to the morphology sections and try to get a sense of how much I can brute force rote memorize, how much is already obvious/intuitive (e.g. because similar to other shit I already know), and then I skim through the chapters as fast as I can.

Sometimes I do make a plan like a chapter or two a day, other times I try to get past the lame early chapters all in one chunk. The only metric for deciding what you can and can't do is your own understanding. Plenty of people don't even use textbooks, they just get a grammar like Allen & Greenough and start digesting it.

You should also definitely re-do chapters anyway. Studies of learning through input seem to indicate that rereading something isn't superfluous or redundant, it's almost like your brain "confirms" the thing and commits it to memory better. When I was learning Latin I used to do all the preceding chapters' readings, up to the one I was reading for that day's class, drilling all principle parts and vocabulary. Probably excessive but it works. Also do a paradigm a day or whatever. You can skip ahead and learn morphology you haven't gotten to yet. Again there's no necessary order or pace, all that matters is you're absorbing the whole eventually.

>>20364981
Just start. You could easily be reading Aristotle slowly and sloppily within a year. So make your goal two years to give yourself a break and start doing a chapter a day of whatever textbook you like.

My Greek reading only took off after 1 or 2 failed attempts at the language. Eventually what made it click was that I just started reading Plato and Aristotle in parallel Greek/English editions and spending as much time looking at the Greek as I was at the English. At that point my Greek was quite rusty but the constant motivation to know the exact Greek they were using made me naturally absorb 10x as much as I was by sticking with the textbook training wheels method, which in turn sent me back to the textbook with more motivation.

Just do 10 chapters of the textbook and literally start reading a parallel Aristotle. Even if all you're doing at first is learning critical vocabulary like autos and prepositions and shit like that, little by little you'll also be distinguishing the most obvious conjugations and verbs, basic declensions. This will fuel your motivation to keep the textbook learning going 100x more than any "plan."

Sorry I keep spamming the thread with longposts.

>>20365757
>Sorry I keep spamming the thread with longposts.
You are doing the lord's work. It's a hell of a lot better than the usual shitposts about textbooks.

Here, have a cute cat

>>20365757
>re-reading

My book has short chapters so I study and review a chapter in the morning then skim review that mornings and the previous days chapter in the afternoon, seems to do it. Then on the weekend I review the chapters from that week.

>catch myself using an ablative to make my answer more elegant
>wtf I love ablatives now

>>20364163
I ended up finding out about it through a book about the Early Carolingian armies, and there was a few poems that the author translated with military value which I really loved. Especially one man expressing his grief how many of his friends had died in a battle and how he struggled with it.

What's everyone's opinion on spoken language programs for classical languages?
>Polis Institute
>Vivarium Novum
>Paedeia Institute
>Schola Latina
>Ancient Language Institute

bump before going to bed.

>>20369358
It sounds like a waste of time and money. There are no native speakers of Classical Latin left, and there are very few classicists who can even speak Latin at an intermediate (>A2) level, so I imagine that they'd just be meetups of beginner-level students together with ones who are just slightly more advanced than them, the latter spending most of their time correcting the former on extremely basic mistakes than actually being able to make progress of their own.

>>20370007
I don't think you know what you are commenting on. Polis Institute is not a meetup group, they teach classes for languages like Hebrew and Coptic for Master's and Phd students.

>>20370062
>they teach classes for languages
A learner with a teaching position is just a learner with a license to tell lies before a class without being called out for it.

>>20370116
>A learner with a teaching position is just a learner with a license to tell lies before a class without being called out for it.
Oh no, are you one of those people who thinks school is a globalist conspiracy set up by the lizards to brainwash people? Can you go to /x/ or /pol/ or literally anywhere else?

>>20370136
I'm still banned on /pol/ so no.

>>20370136
I’ll stay here just to make you seethe

The Latin Vulgate was easy enough to grab off ebay. I was able to get the Etymologiae from Luke Smith's online storefront. But where can I get a Latin edition of Lombard's Sentences? Is my only hope to get an edition printed for myself through Lulu or something? Have no experience with that.

Reading Pindar's Odes in parallel just to lol at how I will never ever be reading the Greek raw

But I do look over at it and appreciate it when the poetry is beautiful at least

>>20370343
Also the progression of the lyric poets is interesting, Stesichorus is kind of halfway between Homeric and Simonides, Simonides' nephew is Bacchylides, who was Pindar's rival.

Also, why the FUCK didn't I know about Aeschines Socraticus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeschines_of_Sphettus

Along with Antisthenes, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisthenes who also wrote dialogues, why isn't it generally taught that Socrates apparently inspired a whole movement of dialogue writers? Also interesting that the ancients considered Aschines more to have realistic depictions of Socrates, but Burnett says his dialogues are closer to Plato's than Xenophon's

https://antigonejournal.com/2021/03/music-of-sophocles/
>The day may indeed come when scholarship has made sufficient inroads into our understanding of ancient music and dance for the Ode to Man, sung in the correct metre and appropriate mode by a male-voiced chorus of fifteen accompanied by a skilled aulete, to be performed in a way that gives modern audiences a true taste of the awe-inducing magic of ancient theatre.

>Returning, then, to Sophocles’ Ode to Man, we can imagine that this wonderful piece of writing came across even more impressively to spectators when it was sung and danced, accompanied by the evocative sound of the aulos and the rhythmical swaying of the dancer’s bodies. It would have been something that listeners could learn (with the subsequent help of a text) to repeat to others, – perhaps in symposia (evening parties) where the aulos generally featured as the musical instrument of choice – not just by quoting the words but by singing them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zB49E2ozEPM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOMCw6Hxxdk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZppWeq8bUQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IlZgj2FAHA

>>20370285
Trawl used bookstores. Abebooks doesn't seem to have any. The Franciscan Institute might.

How do I start with Greek?

>>20370007
this is Luigi Miraglia from Vivarium Novum https://youtu.be/a61Dc_EFuI4

Chapter 16 of LLPSI was brutal.

>>20370007
>>20371566
It seems to work well enough. The black kid is like 15 in these videos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rujsIyjjNIA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fK2JCCYBoQ0

>>20371147
Get a textbook and study

>>20371997
What are some good ones?

>>20372188
Athenaze
An Introduction to Attic Greek - Mastronarde
Reading Greek series (3 books)

βλέπω πρός τὸν αἴλουρον και λἐγω: "πσσστ, πσστ, πσστ"

>>20372197
Thank you anon

>>20371639
I'm on 13 bro...

σωστέον ὅδε τὸ λίνον

>>20374422
I only read Latin and not very well.

>>20372396
>>20374422
Why are the letters all wrong how are you doing that?

>>20374680
Greek can form a verbal adjective like Latin's gerundive with one similar meaning of "must be ...", -τέον = -ndum
σωσ-τέον τόδε τὸ λίνον
serva-ndum hoc filum
Καρχηδὼν φορθητέa ἐστίν
Carthago delenda est

>>20374422
what does that mean fren

>>20374422
The thread must be bumped?

BVMPVS MAXIMVS

Latin is very easy if you know Japanese.

>>20376357
does this work the other way around too?

>>20376357
Rectissime, anon-san. Konichiwassemini semper, fratres

I'm trying to make my way through LLPSI Familia Romana as effectively as possible, so I bought the english companion that explains grammar in more detail

Would it be most effective to read a chapter, read the accompanying chapter in the companion book, then re-read the chapter in FM again?

>>20376481
How I'm doing it, I read the chapter a few times, read the companion, go back for a bit and by the end of the week move onto the next chapter.

>>20376415
In my experience yes. When I was studying Japanese I would frequently tell my one classmate that this or that are very similar to quite common constructs in Latin and try explaining how they functioned using the Latin counterparts as a comparison of sorts.

>>20376555
did she suck your dick after that?

Pernicies Iudaeorum necesse est. (In Minecrafte, carissime CIA)

>>20376616
That was just rude. You know what? I don't even like you anon.

Any anons here interested in Classical Chinese? I just picked up the Van Norden textbook, what am I in for?

>>20377437
why are you avoiding the question?

>>20377489
I'm not the same guy, I just wanted to tell you that you are a not nice person and I'm not sorry if that hurts your feelings. This is a real post, it isn't a joke. I really think you are a poopy head.

>>20377437
You ARE on 4chan, anon… we’re you really that taken aback?

it's slowly coming together bros

>>20377555
Based.

bros... in a few more days i will have all the latin paradigms committed to memory, then i move on to lingua latina.

so excited

>>20358928
#Question
Are there dictionaries specifically for classical, and also medieval Latin? I'd prefer to know standard dictions per era, and I guess I may have no choice but to bluntly go through texts per era themselves, if this kind of sorting hasn't been done yet.

>>20377555
where do I find a child to explain to?

>>20377665
make one with ranieri's wife

>>20365726
>By comparison you can start reading even difficult authors like Thucydides in Greek well within a single year,
how would you recommend it?

>>20377653
Most classical dictionaries will cover 95%+ of all Latin.
>Oxford Latin Dictionary
>Lewis and Short
>Cassell's Latin Dictionary
I recommend the above. Be warned, the first one (OLD) is the best of all but also ridiculously expensive and huge. If you are starting out one of the others is perfectly fine. Cassell's got me through my Bachelor's in Classics.
Avoid any Latin dictionary that does not provide example sentences taken directly from ancient texts. They tend to be less thorough and in the long run will not be of much use to you. See pic related for an example, it is from Cassell's listing for pello. Apologies for shitty image quality.
When it comes to Medieval Latin the above will suffice for almost everything. There are dictionaries that focus specifically on medieval terminology but they are all lacking in one respect or another. Here's a quick rundown of a few options though again I highly recommend at least one of the aforementioned due to their versatility and depth.
>Souter's A Glossary of Later Latin to 600 A.D.
Covers from 200-600. Good for ecclesiastical words not found in classical dictionaries
>Niermeyer - Mediae Latinitatis Lexicon Minus
Covers 500-1150. Focus is on juridicial and institutional vocab, less so philosophy, science, literary terms.
>Latham - Revised Medieval Latin Word List from British and Irish Sources
Covers early Medieval up to the sixteenth century. Only words from British and Irish manuscripts yet is quite useful for texts from anywhere. Good source for medieval Latin peculiarities.
I have Latham's. It is just a word list - Latin word and one or two definitions. Souter's is excellent for what it covers. Never seen Niermeyer in the wild.
Again, just to emphasize, your best bet is to start with Cassell's or Lewis and Short. Supplement that with others based on your interests.

is latin or greek easier?

my vulgata arrived today nice

>>20377886
Hope this explains.

>>20377814
These dictionaries can be found for free online. You can use sites like Perseus and Logeion too (highly recommended)

>>20378111
>implying greek gets easy and fun at some point

>>20378330
Greek is easier to read than Latin with it's fucking retarded syntax and omitted words. With greek your biggest hurdle is learning the specific vocabulary for the text/author.

>>20358928
What are good apps for Latin?

Bros, I'm learning Ge'ez now. Wish me luck.

Imagine you are a straight man. You've got a wife and kids. One morning after a night out, you wake up naked and in bed with a man. That's what it feels like for me to be learning Ge'ez right now. What the fuck have I gotten myself into?

Bros, I'm learning Ge'ez now. Wish me luck.

Imagine you are a straight man. You've got a wife and kids. One morning after a night out, you wake up naked and in bed with a man. That's what it feels like for me to be learning Ge'ez right now. What the fuck have I gotten myself into?

>>20378728
>I'm learning Ge'ez now.
Incredibly based. Hope you get to read the Book of Enoch soon. I wish we had more Old Nubian or Meroitic texts to read as well.

Don't give up, based Ethiopic reading gigachad.

>>20358928
I really appreciate the completeness it gives me when i read a complete text but my ancient greek textbook only gives me fragments.

What texts do you recommend for a greek beginner whose main interests are philosophy and mythology?

>>20378993
What do you study? I'm learning Ge'ez because of the wealth of unpublished manuscripts (and ones that are digitized too), Beta Israel, and Enoch and Jubilees. I'm taking a summer course online, which is EXPENSIVE. If you're interested in learning Ge'ez (I think there are cheaper courses available), we could talk over email or continue here.

>>20379210
Have you tried the Reading Greek series? It's a reading focused course with real texts, also they have annotated readers for different authors and topics. If you type "reading greek" into amazon, you should see the whole series. It's a lot.

>>20379333
I'm struggling through Latin rn homie. I gotta do Latin, Hebrew, Aramaic, & Syriac first. I may never get to Ge'ez.

>>20376555
What would you compare gerunditives to in Japanese?

>>20379531
How long have you been doing Latin? If you're doing self-study and it is available to you, I highly recommend taking classes to learn languages. The only language I will teach myself, at least for the foreseeable future, is Syriac, since I've already gotten Hebrew and Aramaic down. Those two are really fun; I highly recommend them. Why no Greek? Greek has been the hardest language for me, can't speak to Ge'ez yet, but it is very useful, perhaps the most important classical language.

>>20359781
Out of all the gods, they chiefly worshiped Mercury, to whom they believed they must offer human sacrifices. They please Mars and Hercules with less barbarous offerings. A portion of the Suevi make offerings to Isis as well: I have yet to determine either the origin or the cause of this sacred practice, except the figure of a vessel which indicates that it came from afar. To imprison the gods within walls or to represent them under a human form seems to be less dignified than their original celestial form for the Germans. They consecrate particular places and forests; under the name of these divinities, they worship here what their eyes cannot see.

I'm sure I butchered somethings here and there. Fuck you Tacitus.

>>20379821
>How long have you been doing Latin?
I don't know how to count because it's been on and off for a while
>already gotten Hebrew and Aramaic down.
You are an inspiration
>Why no Greek?
I just forgot to write that

>>20371566
>ecclesiastical pronunciation
When will these outdated boomers get with the times? There's no reason to speak like this anymore unless you're a priest or a lazy italian

>>20380891
yeah it sounds awful

>>20358928
>Omnium gentium mores, legis, et ritus
I can't read this at all, but I'm trying

how do you get physical copies of books in Latin? do you have to be in academia and just use university libraries?

>>20381060
Loeb's or others like Vulgates.

>>20381060
Second hand shops in college towns, online bookstores, abebooks, etc. What are you looking for? I have a couple dozen or so almost all secondhand. Mostly OCT, a few Teubner, Reclam and Loebs, then a few others from here and there.

Same Anon as >>20379596
Japanese Wikipedia says it usually means "されるべき" (Ex: "Traditor carnificandus est" - "裏切者は斬殺されるべき。."), but that there were certain adjectives that were formed from verbs through the gerundtive (Ex: sequo - I follow -> sequendus - to be followed -> secundus - second/following)
I guess Wikipedia answered my question this time.

>>20379821
>the most important classical language.
What about Sumerian and Assyrian? Or Vedic Sanskrit?

>>20381428
Are all of them super-expensive +50 year old books, or are any of them cheap ones? I remember my university's library had a copy of Aristotle's On the Soul with parallel Greek-Spanish text that was printed back in the 1970s and was already falling apart.

Currently reading sophocles antigone, why the fuck cant he write coherent sentences??? Its like he writes a sentence, then randomly throws all the words into a new order making it almost unreadable. Am i getting filtered?

>>20381829
Depends on what you mean by cheap. You are talking about niche books printed in small quantities for a niche audience.
OCT (Oxford Classical Texts) run about $20-30 on average secondhand. They are quite good quality, even the older ones. I have some that are around 80 years old and have handled ones over 100 and they hold up well.
Teubners go for around $50 apiece and the quality is awful. Lots of binding and spine issues. Funny thing is Teubner was originally founded to be a cheap alternative for classical texts and now they are the most expensive.
Reclams are $5 or so. They are paperbacks yet hold up well enough for simple reading copies.
Loebs vary the most. Some are $5-10, some are over $60. Rarer authors and works cost more.
University and library books get beat up because people do not care about things that are free. Books in bookshops typically are not. Often Latin books come from professors and universities who are cleaning out their shelves and tend to be in quite good condition.
Pic related is an example. Complete works of Virgil OCT, good condition, $12 plus shipping. Age is less important than condition.
Again, what are you looking for? Do you need facing translations? If so Loeb, Bude or Reclam. Pure Latin with excellent critical appendices? OCT or Teubner. Beginner's texts with lots of glosses and commentary? Pharr's Aeneid or Bristol Classical Press.
What you should avoid at all costs are the shitty print-on-demand services. Amazon is full of them and the books are shoddy and cheap.

>>20381829
All my OCT's and Loebs from 50-70's are still in pretty good condition while my newer editions are falling apart. Also what do you count as "super-expensive?" Paying 25-35€ isn't honestly that big of a sum for a classical text considering the amount of time you will be spending with it.

>>20378111
how true is this?

>>20382350
Very
Greek and Latin have inverse learning curves.
Greek frontloads difficulty with 6 principal parts for verbs, accents, contraction, crasis, duplicated stems, particles, participles, unfamiliar moods and tenses, conditions etc. None of those are particularly difficult, they just seem daunting at first when all thrown at you at once. The upside is Greek's myriad forms and the definite article make reading actual Greek more or less straightforward.
Latin is more beginner friendly with a recognizable vocabulary, 4 principal parts of the verb, fairly simple declensions and conjugations, grammar familiar to Romance speakers. But reading authentic Latin presents difficulties hard to imagine when first starting out. The fewer moods, tenses and forms of the verb means each pulls double or triple duty, relative clauses abound, authors tend to nest clauses within nested clauses, relations of words and phrases to each other are muddled, etc.
For a simple and poor analogy Greek is like being handed a palette with a hundred different colors on it and being told to paint. It takes a while to get used to each hue and tone but once you do you can paint anything with ease. Latin is like being handed a palette with red yellow and blue. Easy to paint a house, maybe even a rainbow, but to make anything complex takes lots of time and effort.
That said you can learn either or both, just set your mind to it and start studying.

>>20380891
Considering most young people and academics don't learn it and Catholicism is in decline, in 50-100 if anyone bothers to still study Latin they'll be using the classical pronunciation. These boomers won't change, but they will go extinct.

It'll be interesting to see if Erasmian pronunciation for Greek falls out of favor in the West.

>>20382350
Pretty accurate as >>20382473 said.

I would add that the main issue is reading. First year, you don't do as much reading, but second year you get thrown in the deep end. For Greek, you are usually well prepared, for Latin, you have almost nothing that is easy to read outside of the Vulgate or medieval Latin, which is probably not what you are interested in if you study classical for secular purposes.

BVMPVS RVRSVS

Has anyone successfully learned Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, & Coptic? (all of them)

If yes:
1. Are you planning on learning anything else like Arabic, Persian, or Sanskrit?
2. Do you speak any modern languages as well like German, French, Russian etc...?
3. Do you have a degree, or just self study?
4. Are you religious?
5. Do you work fulltime?

>>20382350
Greek sentence looks like this
>A b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z
where every letter is a thing or form you gotta learn

Latin sentence looks like this
>A a A A Aa aa A a A A A A aAb b A A A A Aba AAaaA
where every thing is a thing you theoretically learned in week 3 but somehow it's doing 19 levels of nested shit you have no idea how to untangle

What's the difference between /clg/ and /cgl/?

The bitches on /cgl/ at least get dressed up nicely before screeching at eachother about slightly different ways of doing the same things

I am having a great time learning the Castellio Latin bible NT. It’s a different register, but seems so “elegant” like if Cicero was tasked with translating the Greek.

>>20384383
I'm the one who told everyone on /clg/ to use it.

>>20358928
post Latinam, nesciō quid linguam discam.
I feel like if I don't study Ancient Greek after Latin I'll never learn it, but i could achieve fluency in any romance language in the time it'd take me to be even slightly okay in greek.
quid faciam, amicī?

>>20384813
>i could achieve fluency in any romance language in the time it'd take me to be even slightly okay in greek.
You can learn French or Spanish in 3 months without Latin, let alone with it. Greek will take you several years regardless.

>>20384383
learned this word from llpsi

>>20384885
I've heard of people who could ask for directions to a place and order a hamburger after studying a living language for 3 months, but I've never heard of anybody being able to read Cervantes after that same amount of time.

>>20381819
Those languages have much less content to read than Greek. The impact of those languages on moderns is not as much as Greek. If you took all the Hindus in the world, you won't have as many as there are Christians, the people who follow a book written in Greek. Everyone in this thread is within the sphere of Western Civilization. Greek is by far the most relevant classical language to the West.

>>20385251
3 months of somewhat intensive study is more than enough to start reading literature in a Romance language. Not if by "study" you mean taking a college course that only has you saying "Ou est la bibiliotheque" after 6 months but actually studying. I only know a bit of Italian and I could read the first few paragraphs of Don Quixote in it, only thing that was difficult is all the proper nouns but that just increases the tedium, not the difficulty.

>Quod nisi domī cīvium suōrum invidiā dēbilitātus esset, Rōmānōs vidētur superāre potuisse.
what kind of conditional is this? esset is imperfect subjunctive but potuisse is perfect indicative

>>20385735
the main verb of the apodosis is videtur, and that sounds regular to me
esset expresses an hypothetical which is known to be false(had he not been weakened by ....), videtur is in the present because "it's clear(now) that he could've defeated the Romans"

is italian athenaze really so good?
where can I find it online?

>>20385997
personally, I really enjoy it, both as tool and also the story is nice, though I come from a solid knowledge of Latin as well and I'm a native Romance speaker
if you can point to me to a free quick hosting website, I'll upload them to you, though there's always libgen, I don't remember where I downloaded them, plus I used a tool to crop them into single pages since the versions I had found were double paged

>>20385868
thanks, i feel like a retard now

quick question for Hellenists:

μολὼν λαβέ

famous phrase. wikipedia spends a bit too long parsing out the participle, and rendering it different ways. i assumed that it was a parallel participle as cued by the imperative, meaning that both can be understood to be a command, hence the modern translation “come and take,” not the needlessly corny “after coming, take”

thoughts

>>20385997
https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=4D4B1C03A13CC1F465040C83244FFC06

I'm sorry bros.... I've stopped reading Lingua Latina and have started reading Wheelock.
I hope you can all forgive me, I just couldn't figure out what the fuck modo meant

>>20386031
I guess the "after coming, take" is influenced by our forma mentis and focus on tense rather than aspect, myself I have to kinda force myself not to think that way. Greek does this with other verbs, using the participle of another verb together with certain main verbs, e.g another famous one is λάθε βιώσας, and the idea is that "λάθε" has to be interpreted as "not being seen", so "don't be seen (while) living", hence "hide yourself and live/survive"
it may be hard for us to perfectly translate an aorist participle of a verb of motion like βλώσκω without constantly making it about tense due to mental habit

>>20384383
>>20384662
where can I find it?

>>20386211
https://la.wikisource.org/wiki/Biblia_Sacra_interprete_Sebastiano_Castellione

Not that poster, but this is the version I've been using. The NT seems pretty complete, though the OT is lacking.

>>20386068
should have felt it out

>>20386223
Thank you

>>20358928
Should I learn Coptic first, or start straight with Ancient Egyptian? How different/intercomprehensible they are?

>>20384662
I've been learning from it for over two years, not from you, though. It is good that you are making people aware of its existence.

https://bibliasacracastellionis.wordpress.com/ is also a macronised version of the 4 gospels and Genesis

Been trying myself at Aquinas' Ethics commentary. Feels very concise and enjoyable to read.

>>20386068
the methods aren't nearly as opposed as people on /lit/ seem to think. LLPSI is far from a straight input approach, and wheelock's is far from straight grammar-translation. wheelock's actually has more authentic latin input, but LLPSI is nice for the immersion and drilling permutations of basic constructions.

>>20385715
Where do you find living language courses that have the same intensive, systematic approach you might find in an old Latin grammar?

>>20386396
Most Egyptologists say start with Coptic and go backwards.

For people asking about Castellion's Bible:

Sebastian Castellio translated the Bible into classical Latin in Ciceronian style. Here are the best available links depending on what you need:

>Transcribed w/ macrons, Gospels & Genesis complete, rest incomplete
https://bibliasacracastellionis.wordpress.com/
>Transcribed w/o macrons; NT complete, OT incomplete
https://la.wikisource.org/wiki/Biblia_Sacra_interprete_Sebastiano_Castellione
>Full complete text w/o macrons, pdf scan of original
https://archive.org/details/bibliasacraexseb01cast

I've got all these books but my latin is very week and my knowledge of these authors is next to nothing.

Can someone tell me which of these are easier to read vs which ones are very hard?

Maybe also some pointers on what these authors books are actually even about (but I can do that on my own by reading wiki articles about them I guess but it would be nice if someone would spoonfeed me)

>>20386811
>Easier
Eutropius, Phaedrus, Caesar, Cornelius Nepos, Catullus, Plautus, Augustus, Sallust, the Vulgate.
>Debatable difficulty / Mid-Tier / Hardish / I don't actually know
Suetonius, Seneca, Cicero, Ovid, Vergil, Livy
>Brutal
Tacitus & Horace.

what's the best route of study for Greek?

>>20386839
Either 'Greek: An Intensive Course' if you can handle the grammar and want a trial by fire or 'Athenaze' if you want to go the INPOOT route. Also I hear good things about the 'Reading Greek' series of books. I have the Reading Latin series, but can't speak to the Greek version other than the Latin version was inspired by the success of the Greek (same for Latin: An Intensive Course).

>>20386618
This is what I would do, but I have a professor who teaches Middle Egyptian and Greek and, for the life of him, he says, he can't learn Coptic. With this in mind, learn Coptic with great discipline and patience, patience for your mistakes.

>>20386839
>>20386847
I did Athenaze at my university and hated it so much. It is the worst textbook I've studied with. If a prof wants to teach inpoot, as I have been successfully taught before, use a traditional textbook and bend it to your will. Before too long, I wanted Dicaeopolis to die. Never did I want the girl who gives rose to the sailor to die.

>>20378111
>>20382350
On this, does anyone have that image of the page where Cicero (I think) starts the sentence at the top and after the massive A4 page-long sentence kept alive by chaining his clauses, finally puts the verb to finish the initial sentence at the bottom? I think it was unironically the most annoyingly based thing I've seen from a Latin author, I'm certain it was from one of these generals

Has anyone used Zuntz's book for Greek? I was going to start with JACT's Reading Greek but saw some recommendations for this. I heard it was more of a passion project. In my experience, that sort of enthusiasm from the author of a text tends to make it more engaging to use, compared to those that are produced by a committee.

I plan to use this as a primary text and Athenaze as a supplement. Any thoughts?

>>20387175
>If a prof wants to teach inpoot, as I have been successfully taught before, use a traditional textbook and bend it to your will.
This. Every the resources created for inpoot courses suck ass when used alone. They are good suppliments, but trying to forced CI on people who don't understand the structure of such an irregular language like Greek just seems absolutely maddening.

>>20386068
>I've stopped reading Lingua Latina and have started reading Wheelock.
Go back and forth with them, that's what I'm doing. If you are hitting a wall with one, then you should take a break and make some progress on the other.

>>20383839
>Has anyone successfully learned Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, & Coptic?
I doubt there is more than 100 people on Earth that have

>>20387641
I personally know two of them who have been completely successful and one who would have great trouble with Coptic and minor trouble with Syriac. I think there has to be more than 100 people.

Has anyone used the Henle Latin textbooks? Any thoughts?

>>20388029
Nope, from what I understand they are popular with Christian schools and homeschooling. If you look on YouTube, there are some people who make homeschooling vlogs or "classical education" videos that have reviewed it.

>>20387641
>>20387918
I am willing to dedicate the rest of my life to this pursuit. I have nothing else that interests me.

>>20385556
id disagree there is more ancient Sanskrit literature than greek

>>20388244
Sanskrit
>written for longer than Latin.
>has more works than Greek.
>important to more religions than Hebrew/Arabic

I'm not saying it's better or more important, just defending it from reckless slander.

>>20387267
Have to be more specific, that is not uncommon in Cicero

>>20388274
>>20388244
I would be interested in reading further into this subject. Can you provide some authoritative sources, as in whites without a vested interest or corruption by political correctness and leftism? When you say it has been written for longer than Latin, what I care about is seeing actual literature written for that long. It is an error to conflate the earliest poems and the earliest writing with written literature.
Regarding your last point, I don't think it is very significant that Sanskrit is important to more religions than Greek. And if you wanted to play that game, we could take every Christian denomination, Jewish denomination (Septuagint), and Greco-Roman cult. They would massively outnumber every flavor of Indian/Sanskrit religion.
I'm not saying Sanskrit is not worth studying. I don't know very much about it and should learn more. However, jeets and jeetaboos (jeet weeabos) do tend to make outrageous claims about various Indian things.

>>20389314
>some authoritative sources, as in whites without a vested interest or corruption by political correctness and leftism?
Oh that's what this is about. You think saying Sanskrit has more literature that it means brown people are superior to whites?

>And if you wanted to play that game
I'm not playing a game, I don't give a fuck about India or Greece. I was just stating the objective numbers of works. Greek was only dominant for a brief period in a specific region of the Mediterranean before Latin took over the west and it was soon taken over by Arabic and Turkish in the East as Byzantium fell apart. Sanskrit was not politically linked to a single regime and thus lasted up until a few centuries ago really. Greek evolved into a modern language.

>jeets and jeetaboos
I don't even know how you can study world cultures and be this racist, but apparently there are some people willing to give it a go. Godspeed

>>20389333
>You think saying Sanskrit has more literature that it means brown people are superior to whites?

At the end of the post.

>be this racist

You are a neoliberal opinion discarded.

>>20389393
>You are a neoliberal
Neoliberal? I think what you are trying to call me a progressive sjw (who by the way hate neolibs even more than conservatives). But no I'm not a either. I don't care what people skin tone is, all I care about is whether or not they wrote and built cool shit.

>opinion discarded.
You're going to feel real dumb when you dedicate years of your life trying to learn ancient languages, only to find that you are going to disagree with most of the outdated stuff that you are going to read. And since you are in the habit of discarding opinions based on the (perceived) ideology behind them instead of analyzing them in themselves for what they are worth, I'd say you won't get much out of this pursuit. Try stem instead.

>>20389333
1. You completely missed my points. I am willing to believe that there are more works in Sanskrit than there are in Greek, but you have yet to provide any evidence. Based on my encounters with Indian people and scholars, as in people from India, they are very biased towards India. The same goes for Indophiles. White scholars from the late 1800's and early 1900's seem pretty well-grounded. But I would imagine that some of the things they wrote that are incorrect, in light of more recent discoveries. Instead of just blindly reading what is likely outdated scholarship, I was hoping that someone could provide me with some good books that are up-to-date.
2. Hahaha. Your description of the history of Greek is extremely poor. If Greek had succumbed to Latin, then why did a Roman emperor in the late 2nd century write his book in Greek? Greek was more widely spoken in the Roman Empire than Latin was. Then, when the Arabs rise in prominence, they were obsessed with the Greeks too.
3. Everything in your reply, your objections, your outlook, your spacing, indicates that you are just a tourist. If you were an actual 4chan user, you wouldn't have been distracted by muh racism. It simply has to do with one group of people who is unable to remove themselves from their patriotism, dogmatism, etc. and another group who doesn't really have a vested interest in proving something one way or the other. I was actually looking forward to getting some proper good books on Sanskrit, but that's out of the question now.

>Want to read ancient classics in their original language
>Learn latin because it's easier than greek
>"I can't read any of the Greek stuff but that's okay, there's still plenty of Roman stuff"
>All the best stuff the Romans wrote they wrote in greek

>>20389647
What about all the Medieval and Renaissance shit, that's all in Latin.

>>20389654
I don't read the works of schizos

>>20389721
you're missing all the best stuff

Can one of you help with this question?

qui futurus est iam vocatum est nomen eius

I understand the first part "He who will be" but the 2nd is confusing. I don't understand why vocatum is acc. and not nom.

So why is it "vocatum est nomen eius" instead of "vocatus est nomen eius" ?

>>20388274
>>written for longer than Latin.
That's false.
The oldest written Sanskrit is from around 300AD

>>20390070
I think vocatum goes with nomen, neuter
lit. the name has already been called of him, who will be

>>20390091
Yeah that's it thanks I kept thinking stupidly it was masculine.

are there other general rules to somewhat predict whether a Greek adjective is two-ending with equal masculine and feminine endings or not?
i.e I already know that compound ones tend to do that e.g ἄτομος, -ον
mnemonically imho it's not easy to remember, unlike Latin two ending ones

>>20389333
>I don't even know how you can study world cultures and be this racist
Studying world cultures turns you into a racist

There's this Latin poetry contest in my country and it seems one of the two categories got no applications or worthy applications this year, no one won. I can apply for this category so I was thinking I could try to win next year's. But what could I write about?

>>20391005
Write about fucking prostitutes. That's what all the Byzantine poets got paid to do.

>>20391022
What Byzantine poems are about prostitutes?
I'm not doing that because I have a minimum of pudor to uphold and it would probably not be accepted

>>20391005
Get that Anon who wrote the story about a wolf traveling the empire bedding maidens.

>>20391037
Read the Golden Anthology. One of the poems is the original 'flat is justice' meme.

>>20390002
Recommend some.

>>20391124
sauce?

>>20391131
>original 'flat is justice' meme.
kek please post

>tfw you get a boner while reading llpsi
hoc modo nihil me discere potest!

>>20391209

>>20391202
I don't have it on hand but the poet talks about how other people insult his favorite prostitute for being skinny and lacking of chest. He goes on to say that it doesn't bother him because when he cuddles her it makes him closer to her heart.

>>20391220
kek based

>>20391209
niceeeeeeee

how would you translate

ipsa se audiebat

She was listening by herself? to herself? She was listening herself?

>>20393085
or 'She herself was listening (listened) to herself'?

>>20393085
I would think audire is more in the sense of hearing here? She was hearing herself

Imperfect can have various senses too, not just "was ___ing." It's simply non-finite or incomplete, i.e. im-perfect, action. So it could be she began to hear herself, or she would (back then) hear/listen to herself.

>>20393098
Thanks.

>>20393098
>she would (back then) hear/listen to herself.
This is a correct translation, but for future reference, to keep things clear, "she used to listen" works well for that sense of the imperfect. You don't want to confuse it for the subjunctive.

>>20393267
>she used to listen
Wouldn't this be "ipsa se audire solebat"?

>>20393404
that's "she was wont to listen" or "it was her custom to listen" or something like that, the imperfect "used to" is more like a neutral factual statement that the action simply took place non-singularly/finitely in the past

>In those days, the tide would / used to reach up to here
it's just neutrally conveying of an action that it happened and not in a single finished way

>>20393436
Okay, thanks dad.

>>20384383
share Anki deck pls

uhhhh greek bros? is there no ablative case in ancient greek?

>>20394412
I just found out there's no ablative case in English either.

>>20394480
There are no cases in English.

>>20394412
yes dative does the job

>>20394755
does this make greek more or less based than latin for not having an ablative case?

>>20394807
considering Latin ablative and dative are usually the same form it doesn't make too much of a difference. Some of Latin's ablative uses are found in the Greek genitive as well, particularly the absolute.

>>20394807
i started learning greek before latin and back then i just accepted it to be of the dative's functions. after taking a break from greek and focusing on latin it felt a bit weird going back to rereading my greek textbook.

..

>>20394755
Isn't it mostly the genitive
https://dcc.dickinson.edu/grammar/monro/uses-genitive
>146. The Greek genitive, as appears at once by comparison with Latin or Sanskrit, stands for the original or "true" genitive, and also for the ablative. The uses of the genitive may therefore be decided (theoretically at least) between these two cases.

EGO MORTEM VOLO

>>20395459
That's "I want death" not "I want to die"

If you meant to say you want to die, you should have said "Sum apud amicos, hic bene amor, superstabo meos turbores"

>>20395475
nunc volo magis mori

>>20395457
haven't touched a grammar book in a while and by now i might be blind to this sort of thing but sometimes when i encounter a dative used in an "unusual" way it takes the place of the ablative. maybe when i circulate these things through greek, latin and my native finno-ugric tongue something gets lost in the translation, i dunno

where to find greek texts online

>>20395868
perseus
zlib
archive dot org
google
use your head

>>20362186
>Hebrew is hard if you want to learn modern Hebrew, since that's just a whole language, but Biblical Hebrew isn't so bad, especially if you already love the Bible. Since you'll be focused so much on the Bible you can basically just fake it until you make it, there are vocabulary frequency lists and Torahs that gloss every word under a certain frequency rate on every page, so you are half "learning Hebrew" half just memorizing the fucking Bible basically, but it works if you already like that. Writing it, especially writing modern Hebrew, is a whoooole other ball game. Hebrew verb construction is fucking hard.
I can attest to this. The initial hurdle is getting the alphabet down, but after that, Biblical Hebrew grammar is shockingly easy and straightforward...for prose, poetry is a nightmare sometimes. But there's so many repeated roots, once you learn the verb system you can usually guess what it means if you recognize the root. Modern Hebrew, however, uses so many loanwords from so many languages, and the fact that usually vowels aren't notated makes it a real hassle. Grammar is still easy though.

>>20370396
>why isn't it generally taught that Socrates apparently inspired a whole movement of dialogue writers? Also interesting that the ancients considered Aschines more to have realistic depictions of Socrates, but Burnett says his dialogues are closer to Plato's than Xenophon's
Largely because of the unfortunate circumstance of their loss, making it hard to say much on any of the other Socratics writing dialogues. There is, however, a nice edition from the Focus Classics/Philosophical Library by David Johnson,"Socrates and Alcibiades", that contains both Alcibiades dialogues and the speech in Symposium by Plato, but also the remaining fragments of Aeschines' Alcibiades, and it does resemble Plato much more than Xenophon.

>>20381882
Maybe? What Greek are you already familiar with besides Sophocles?

>>20395942
Does this make Aramaic even easier if you are just learning for Daniel & Ezra?

>>20396517
Yes. There's different suffixes, prefixes, vowel patterns, but still solid consistency grammatically and with most roots (there are some differences, but you take em case by case).

I'm less confident about non-Biblical Aramaic, but the Aramaic of the Bible isn't any issue once you have Hebrew down

>>20396647
What about Syriac. I haven't seen much talk about it here. It looks cool as fuck and most of it seems untranslated.

>>20396652
Ah, unfortunately I've never touched Syriac, so I can't say. If I had to guess, it'd still have commonalities insofar as the root system is pretty similar among Semitic languages, maybe similar in basic sentence formation? Big thing might be verbal system.

>>20395942
How did you learn the verb system and how it works? Can you do it by rote?

>>20396714
I pretty much just had to grind it out via Lambdin's grammar, but there's so much regularity for the four most common forms, that once you get the regular active and passive down, the other stems come easy. I studied it formally over a decade ago now, and only the rare ones (used a handful of times) trip me up, and more put of not being sure which rare form it is, since they don't look like any other verbs.

>>20397198
>mfw i was secretly hoping you would say "just use this one page cheat sheet bro"

>>20397198
I hear good things about his Sahidic Coptic and Gothic grammars!

>>20395559
That pepe on the right is such a nice guy that left pepe is crying. Right pepe is luring tasty bugs with the flashlight and then swatting them for left pepe. Like at a restaurant when it's time to pay the tab, right pepe refuses to let left pepe pay.

ἑν τῶ οἴκω ἡσυχἀζω

>>20397332
ἡσυχάζω*

>"clg"
>90% Latin shitposting
I see these generals are still mediocre

>>20397380
what an insightful contribution

>>20397380
It's honestly mostly pretty good this time. A lot less Latin shitposting up until like yesterday. The best way to improve it is to not interact with those people. I've asked real questions about other languages here and gotten some real in depth answers. Sounds like you are looking for shit to complain about.

>>20385715
>I only know a bit of Italian and I could read the first few paragraphs of Don Quixote
What does adarga en astillero mean?

>>20397380
Yeah that remaining 10% is driving people off.

death to dicaeopolis

>>20399578
τ. ὁ τοῦ τῶν Π*ρσῶν βασιλέως πρέσβυς

can I learn Italian in a few months so I can use Athenaze?

mfww drilling

>>20399650
Is there a discrepancy between the English and Italian versions?

>>20399999
god damn it australian satan

>>20400000

>>20399925
same

>>20397380
How many people would be learning Greek or the highly obscure stuff without starting with Latin?

>>20399650
I've been learning Italian for no more than 5 months at 30 minutes a day and can understand 98% of Athenaze. The rest can be looked up in a dictionary which will make it a bit slower but not too bad. Realistically, too, if you work at Italian diligently for an hour or more a day, you can probably be reading the Italian parts of Athenaze in 2-3 months with a dictionary look-up here and there.

>>20399999
Italian has more INPOOT material than the English version

>>20399650
Use the English one for the grammar and cultural explanations. Use the Italian for extra INPOOT. They line up chapter by chapter.

crazy how im not even half-way done with llpsi and can already read most of the latin corpus without a dictionary

>>20401007
Yeah because the common most 1000 words make up for 80-80% of text. If you want 99%+ comprehension of most Latin texts you still have to learn nearly 20000 words kek.

>>20401007
Cap

>>20401024
FR FR NO CAP DIS SHIT BE BUSSING SHEEEEH

Just finished translating the arrival of the sybilline books in Rome in Attic Nights by Aulus Gellius. It was pretty easy, and a fun story.

>>20399578
Hear! Hear!

>>20400946
I did. I know multiple people who did too. In my Greek class, there were several people taking it to fulfill their language GenEd requirement. They, obviously, never took Latin.

>>20399650
>>20400973
My God! You faggots are so incredibly, unfathomably retarded. Input textbooks are trash. There is no good reason to learn a second-tier language like Italian in order to learn another language.

>>20401160
>second-tier language
It's actually quite standard for classicists to know Italian for various reasons. There's a fair amount of scholarship in Italian and one should probably not learn an ancient language like Latin without knowing one of its descendants well and some of the only good modern Greek resources are in Italian. Let's not even mention Dante...

>>20401193
Yes, there is a lot of scholarship in Italian, older scholarship and scholarship focused on Latin authors, neither of which are reasons for why you should learn the language in order to learn Greek when you already know English. If he was learning Italian to read commentaries, that would be perfectly fine. Instead, he is learning Italian for a meme textbook, which is hardly different than learning Italian so that you can say "My name is Giovanni Giorgio, but everyone calls Giorgio." in Italian.

>>20401228
Given the sorry state of Greek resources, expanding one's linguistic horizons can only help, regardless of Athenaze. What your saying is really petty.

>>20401228
>learning Italian so that you can say "My name is Giovanni Giorgio, but everyone calls Giorgio.
based desu

>dead before bump limit
don't think so pal

>>20401160
>Input textbooks are trash
What kind of books would you recommend for Latin & Greek?

>>20360082
Yeah, any kind of progressive reading approach should be supplemented with separate study of grammar. I memorized the paradigms before starting LLPSI and that really did the trick. On chapter 3 of Roma Aeterna now and it's rolling smoothly aside from new vocab. It just leaves vocabulary to be learned. I went balls deep into French without the grammar study and now I have to do grammar study after getting a feel for the language, so you just gotta do it.

Reading Moriae Encomium (1500s) by Erasmus in Latin and this guy is a riot. Definitely would be a /pol/tard if he were alive today. It's just barely above my level, but I hope doing it in tandem with my main study will boost both.
>Quemadmodum, iuxta Graecorum prouerbium, simia semper est simia, etiam si purpura uestiatur: Ita mulier semper mulier est, hoc est, stulta, quamcumque personam induxerit.
>Just as, by the Greek proverb, a chimp is a chimp, whether garbed in purple: so too is a woman is always a woman, that is, foolish, no matter the mask she dons.

>>20402466
>>Just as, by the Greek proverb, a chimp is a chimp, whether garbed in purple: so too is a woman is always a woman, that is, foolish, no matter the mask she dons.
Wise words.

>>20391131
>>20391220
I can't find any Golden Anthology...

>>20389314
sanskrit is quintessential aryan lit, fucking /pol/tard

new?

>>20403570
sorry for shit bake
was speedy

>>20403580
whoops
>>20403579
forgot link kek

>>20403587
what a shitty OP, where is the Mega link, where is the description

>>20403593
suck my toes retard

why make a thread if you cant even be bothered to copy paste the description you low iq subhuman

>>20403600
I hope you choke in your sleep you scrotum sniffing spastic