/lit/ - Literature

>>22307751
>Learn programming language
I already did. Programming started as a hobby then became my day job.

I'm still bored, so I also work on Latin (and Greek).

if I'm unfamiliar with the New Testament in English, is it worth reading it in Latin/Greek as reading practice? I hear it's as basic and brutish as Greek literature in particular gets

>reading Beeson's medieval latin primer after thoroughly doing wheelock's and llpsi and understanding less than I should
I thought I was supposed to be able to understand the words in here?? I'm at a loss, anons. Where do I go from here? Should I read Steadman's annotated Caesar?

>>22306719
Thanks for the response, but there's a cantillation mark in מִבֶּ֣טֶן. This indicates that also here the first syllable is stressed, no? Then I don't understand how the verse indicates that absolute and construct state should be pronounced differently.

Nine Corrupt Pillars of Classical Greece

https://www.garynorth.com/public/14403.cfm

Maybe you are a Christian parent looking for a curriculum for your child. You are considering a school that costs $5,000 a year. It offers what it calls a classical Christian curriculum.

Save your money. There is no such thing as a classical Christian curriculum. There never has been.

There is a fake hybrid of two rival systems of thought, politics, and culture. They are at war with each other. It is sold to gullible Christian parents by poorly educated school masters who either do not understand classical Greece or who are deliberately deceiving parents.

The Greece of classical Christian education is a whitewashed Greece. It never existed.

Let us say that I come to you with an offer. I tell you that I have a curriculum based on the ideals of classical Greece, meaning Athens. This is what "classical Greece" has always meant in the West: Athens.

>>22307906
Vocabulary is going to be a major issue for a long time.

You should read Nepos and Eutropius before even attempting anything else. After that, if you can read Nepos and Eutropius, then you can struggle through Ceasar. If you can read Caesar, you can read Sallust. If you can read Sallust's Catiline War, then you can read Cicero's oration against Catiline. If you can read an oration by Cicero, you can try a few letters. If you can read Cicero's letters, then you can read Pliny's. After that, go into whatever direction you want.

You say you are interested, but first you want to know more about the worldview of classical Greece. What did they believe in? What were the foundations of classical Greek civilization? I offer you this list.

1. Pederasty. This is the homosexual union of an older married man with a teenage boy. The men often met the boys on their way to the gymnasium, the building in which the boys danced and played sports naked. The men then became the boys' lovers and teachers.
2. Demonism. The Greeks were polytheistic. Greek family life rested on a system of sacrifice to demons that masqueraded as the spirits of dead male relatives. So did clan life, which became political life. These demons also presented themselves as underground gods and spirits, who demanded sacrifices and special rituals to keep from destroying people. On this point, see the works of the early 20th century archaeologist-historian, Jane Ellen Harrison. This never gets into the textbooks, although specialists are well aware of it.

3. Warfare. At the center of the literature of classical Greece was Homer's poem, The Iliad. It is the story of how Achilles' resentment against King Agamemnon raged because the king took his kidnapped concubine for himself. All the other men had concubines for the ten years they were at war. But no children are mentioned by Homer. Now that's real Greek mythology! Their wives stayed home and kept the ritual home fires burning -- to placate the family's departed male spirits. Athens destroyed itself in Pericles' needless imperial war against Sparta. Then the Macedonians conquered war-ravaged Greece. But the textbooks praise Pericles as a pillar of wisdom, reprinting Thucydides' posthumous version of Pericles' suicidal imperial oration.

4. Slavery. At least one-third of Athens was enslaved. The figure was as high in Sparta. Every household owned a slave. This provided leisure for their owners, who despised physical labor as beneath them -- servile. Slavery was a universal institution in Greece.

5. Autonomy. Greek philosophy was based on the ideal of man's mind as completely sovereign -- no personal God allowed. Well, not quite. Socrates claimed he was given guidance in his thinking by a demon (daimon). But rationalistic scholars, beginning with Plato, have always downplayed this. They have sometimes said this was just hyperbolic literary language. Socrates could not really have believed in a demon. After all, they don't.

6. Welfare State. At least one-third of all male Athenians were on the government's payroll in the time of Pericles.

7. Human Sacrifice. This was a basic theme in Greek literature. It was part of Athenian religious liturgy. There was no widespread movement to decry the earlier practice. The great expert here was Lord Acton, who wrote a long-ignored essay, "Human Sacrifice," in 1864. It is online here. It is included in Volume 3 of Selected Writings of Lord Acton, published by the Liberty Fund. From the day he published it in order to refute the great historian Macaulay, historians have refused to incorporate it in their narratives. It is way too embarrassing.

8. Cyclical View of Time. The Greeks did not believe in long-term progress or a final judgment -- just endless cycles forever: rise and fall, rise and fall. According to the historian of science, Stanley Jaki, this was why the Greeks never developed science, only technologies.

9. Female Inferiority. Wives were only for procreation. They could not be citizens. They had no legal rights. A man needed a male heir to perform the ritual sacrifices to feed him after he died. Women had no political influence except as prophetesses and mistresses.

You say that this is not what you had in mind for your child?

Yet for 1,800 years, well-educated Christians have returned over and over to Greek philosophy, Greek art, and Greek mythology as the basis of formal education. They have mixed together rival views of life -- God, man, law, sanctions, and time -- and have called it classical Christian education.

These well-meaning but terminally naïve Christian educators have always argued that the bad aspects of classical Greece were not part of this classical tradition. In other words, "by their fruits ye shall not know them." In other words, Christians should adopt a cultural tradition that was built on the nine pillars of classical Greece society, but then reject all nine pillars. They say -- but never show how -- the Bible can be substituted for these nine foul pillars.

Humanists teach that Western civilization grew mainly out of Greece and Rome. Western Civilization textbooks have always spent most of their early pages on Greece and Rome, not on Israel and the early church. There is a reason for this. Ever since the God-hating Renaissance ("rebirth"), humanists have sought to substitute classical culture for Christian culture.

Beginning in the eighteenth century, and accelerating in the nineteenth century, scholars began translating classical texts into English. The publishers sold these translations to the educated public. Because of the sexual perversity of Greek texts, and because of the debauchery of Latin texts, the publishers faced a problem: laws against obscenity. So, the publishers told the translators not to translate the salacious passages. Only highly educated readers could enjoy these passages. The censors went along with this: "no harm, no foul." This arrangement also applied to translations of early Christian texts in which the authors exposed the perversity of the classical authors by quoting them verbatim. So, in a translation, whenever you see Latin, you know that this is the debauched stuff.

For centuries, Christian parents who did not speak Greek or Latin were unaware of all this. So, they had their sons taught Latin and maybe Greek from age six in costly private academies, so that their sons could get into Ivy League colleges in order to waste four more years reading classical texts in the original languages. Why did parents do this? Because of academic tradition. Generations of Christian parents had been doing this ever since the late Middle Ages.

It was all a gigantic con job. It was partially a case of humanist wolves in Christian sheep's clothing. But mainly it was a way to screen out applicants for bureaucratic jobs in both church and state. It was a way to limit the number of applicants. This kept wages above-market for bureaucrats. In short, it was a form of occupational licensure.

It was a way to create an oath-bound guild of oligopolists. The practice is still in force in academia. But at least it is no longer based on a reading knowledge of Latin.

These days, only American Protestant evangelical parents fall for the myth of classical education -- a baptized form called classical Christian education. In contrast, non-fundamentalist parents do not want their children wasting years learning Greek and Latin, which are skills without any application in the modern world. The Ivy League schools figured this out, beginning in the 1870's. But Christian parents with third-rate educations are sold a bill of goods: classical Christian education.

I ask you now: Do you really want your child to spend a decade studying a curriculum based on classical education? If so, why?

>>22307928
>Nepos and Eutropius
Are these guys really doable after only 2 textbooks?

>>22307931
>>22307934

wtf, I love Greece now

The Problem With Seminaries

https://www.garynorth.com/public/15392.cfm

The seminary was invented in the early nineteenth century by a small group of Presbyterians who correctly concluded that the colleges of America had gone sour theologically and could therefore no longer be entrusted with the task of training ministers. This was Princeton Theological Seminary. They began this project in 1811, just before the War of 1812. (Princeton Seminary was always separate from Princeton College.)

The seminary was a makeshift addition to American higher education because the established colleges, one by one and without exception, by the nineteenth century were becoming humanistic, i.e., Unitarian. They went Greek, in other words. I don't mean Greek letter fraternities and sororities, a later development; I mean they went Greek. They became consistent with their classical presuppositions. They abandoned trinitarian theology as an unnecessary hypothesis. Then, in the years after the Civil War, they went Darwinist. They abandoned even the Unitarian god.

The scholars who taught theology were themselves graduates of colleges, and their methodology had been learned in college. The college curriculum of the West had always been tied to classical literature. Plato and Aristotle, Cicero and Tacitus, always had a place in the classrooms at least as prominent as Moses and Jeremiah, a fact that can be seen in the debates over the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. The pamphleteers adopted names like "Brutus" and "Publius," not "Joshua" and "Lazarus." From the invention of the university in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the dominant methodology had been a form of baptized Aristotelianism.

The seminaries did not make a clean break with Greece. The log college Presbyterians were evangelists, leaders in the second Great Awakening. Their successors were less enthusiastic about revivalism. They were more interested in scholarship. So were their many imitators. The seminary was set up to give men the courses that the colleges were no longer equipped to give: biblical languages (especially Hebrew), systematic theology, preaching skills, Bible exposition, and similar training. The problem was, these skills were highly specialized, and the professors who were equipped to impart them were even more highly specialized. Professors of Hebrew tended to know a dozen other ancient languages, and they preferred learning additional languages to teaching Hebrew to students whom they knew would never remember any of it three years after graduation (or three months). Thus, there was an inherent tendency to go in the direction of antiquarianism: knowledge for its own sake.

Similarly, professors of systematic theology tended in those days to be specialists in the technicalities of philosophy, meaning humanism, and they mixed their theological expositions with the arcane insights of dead pagan philosophers. A good example is Charles Hodges three-volume Systematic Theology, which sometimes seems to be as much a debate with Sir William Hamilton as an exposition of Scripture. This makes for intolerable reading. The book is still being assigned. (Can you think of any other contemporary academic discipline that relies on an 1873 textbook?)

Classical Christian Education Is Like Marxist Christian Education, But a Lot More Subtle

https://www.garynorth.com/public/3155.cfm

What if I came before a group of Christian mothers at a home school convention and asked this question?

Would you spend money to buy a curriculum program based on a philosophy of education that assumes the following? (1) The legitimacy of homosexuality, especially the seduction of teenage boys by men over age 30; (2) warfare as a man's supremely meaningful activity; (3) polytheism; (4) a personal demon as a philosopher's source of correct logic; (5) slavery as the foundation of civilization; (6) politics as mankind's only means of attaining the good life, meaning salvation; (7) the exclusion of women from all aspects of public religion; (8) the legitimacy of female infanticide.

Preposterous, correct? On the contrary, at least a third of them have already decided to adopt such a curriculum. It's called the Christian classical curriculum -- also called the classical Christian curriculum -- and it's all the rage these days in Christian home schooling circles and day schools. Parents line up to give their children the education they never had. Christian Parents don't know how blessed they were not to have had to endure it.

Not having to go through through the unstable hybrid known as the classical Christian curriculum is an advantage every Christian high school student deserves.

Greek society and Greek wisdom were based on all eight of the characteristics I listed above. Classical culture, which flourished for about two centuries, 600 B.C. to 400 B.C. Its primary religious and cultural document was the Iliad, and during the Peloponnesian war, the city-states fought themselves to exhaustion. Greece was easily conquered by Alexander the Great in the 330's. And why not? His tutor had been Aristotle, who taught him all about Greek culture. Alexander learned its weaknesses, and he took advantage of this. But Christian parents don't know its weaknesses, so they encourage their children to have respect for the culture that Paul called to repentance in Acts 17.

Parents who know nothing of Greek history and culture think they are doing their children a favor by assigning them the classics. What they are doing is to repeat the errors of the Middle Ages: mixing two ways of thinking into one unstable mass. Renaissance humanism triumphed culturally in Italy by scrapping the Christian aspects of that unstable mixture.

We should make a latin only discord vc group
(vc only so as to not lose text posters in the thread)

What is the benefit of learning Latin? Also what languages are easy to learn for ESL? I've heard Spanish and Portuguese are practically very similar, I wanna try learning Spanish. How hard would it be for me? Any language experts here. I didn't find a proper thread to ask this so just chimed in here. Hope you don't mind.

The Trivium: Pagan vs. Christian

https://www.garynorth.com/public/12672.cfm

There are academically legitimate uses for a systematic knowledge of Latin. These uses are related to the study of untranslated documents: Latin Christian fathers and Renaissance humanists. If you want your child to become an unemployable specialist, whose only hope of employment is in a major university -- a job he will never get -- it is a good idea to learn Latin. It is important for a few specialists to understand the development of Renaissance thought (pre-1600). Academic education was in Latin, because it was international in scope. But this is not the sales pitch for these trivium-based programs: "Give your child a head start in understanding Renaissance thought." I am not opposed to this. As an avocation, it's a good idea -- as long as the student is coming to the topic as a critic, not as a cheerleader. But this is not how Latin is being peddled to naive homeschool mothers.

We are never told any of this by promoters of the medieval trivium as the basis of a Christian curriculum. We never read about the importance of learning the medieval Church fathers, and the importance of doing this translation as part of the educational project. We are never told about the importance of learning about late medieval and Renaissance scholarship, as taught by the universities. Always, we are told that it is important to learn Latin in order to understand the fundamentals of language. This is utter poppycock. If you want to understand languages, you should concentrate on an intense study of the spoken version of the language, as any child would do, and then move to the simple literature of that culture. Anyone who tells you that you have to learn Latin in order to better understand modern European languages is telling you to waste a lot of your child's time. If you want to understand a modern European language, study the language, but don't waste time on Latin.

>>22307973
> for ESL
how about you tell us your first language?

This focus on Latin is part of a holdover of Victorian upper class social positioning. This was in turn a holdover of the history of Oxford and Cambridge, or maybe Harvard in the early years. A person was able to distinguish himself from the common classes of people because he had learned a little Latin when he was in preparatory school and at Harvard or one of the two major English universities. This screening was almost entirely social. It was only barely intellectual. It was a way of putting yourself in a higher social class, from which the recruiting for the European bureaucracies would take place.

This social climbing based on a rudimentary understanding of Latin ended in the United States in the 1870's, when almost nobody read Latin anyway. Social climbers liked to pretend that they did read Latin after they went off to college. In the 1870's, Charles Elliott, the president of Harvard, introduced the elective system, in a systematic attempt to abandon the old Latin-based curriculum. This was one of the best moves that Elliott ever made. This was his great legacy to modern education. It was on target, and it should have been done 200 years earlier.

I have yet to see a commercial curriculum that promotes the trivium, and then recommends a study of Hebrew and Koine Greek, beginning in the first grade and second grade. I have seen one such curriculum, and it was taught to my children three decades ago, but it was only taught in one school, and that was because I was one of the advisers to that school. It was never made into a commercial curriculum. Our children learned Koine Greek, beginning in the second grade, as I remember. It did not stick, because unless you follow through on these studies on a permanent basis, they don't stick. None of these curriculum programs stick with Latin, either. This is a good thing.

Latin is a matter of bragging rights. It is a matter of marketing. It is a matter of invoking Victorian humanism in the name of Christianity. It sells, but it sells only to Christian parents who have rotten educations, who know nothing about Victorian humanism, and who are convinced that they ought to pay high prices to get a curriculum that is based on something other than the Bible. Yet it is sold in the name of Christianity.

As you can imagine, I regard this as one more example of poorly educated people teaching poorly educated people how to give their children theologically schizophrenic educations.

If you want to teach the trivium, use the King James Bible. Show how in church history, certain passages have been exposited in terms of one of these three categories: grammatical/historical, theological, or symbolic. Teach the history of Christian hermeneutics, not the history of pagan Latin classics, most notably the militarist and power-seeking Julius Caesar. He came, he saw, and he conquered . . . republican Rome. He crossed the Rubicon, violating Roman law, and that was the end of the republic.

If you want a Christian curriculum, teach Koine Greek, not Latin, unless you are training up a true historian, who will devote his time to untranslated Church fathers or Renaissance humanists. Or just use the King James Bible. The language is magisterial.

The Academic Case Against Latin

https://www.garynorth.com/public/14405.cfm

Up until the early 20th century, entrance into higher education in the Ivy League was Latin-based. By requiring Latin to get into these colleges, the elite screened out common people from access into the elite. This had been going on ever since Harvard was founded in 1636.

Most college-educated men could not speak Latin in 1900 -- or 1800 -- nor were they expected to. But they were forced to have a reading knowledge it at age 18 if they wanted to enter into the elite. This had been true ever since the late Middle Ages.

It was snobbery. It was also a form of occupational licensure.

The charade ended before World War I. Other entrance requirements were substituted for Latin.

Yet today, Christian homeschool mothers have sided with the long-abandoned charade. They are trying to keep the old flame alive: a dictionary-based, slow reading knowledge of Latin at age 18, never to be used again. They have adopted a hybrid called the classical Christian curriculum.

>>22307976
Third worldie here. I don't wanna give more info than that. But English is practically forced from a very young age so you could say it's technically EFL-ish as well. I haven't learnt a separate language since becoming an adult. Most I've gotten is trying to learn Japanese because of anime. I didn't last a week.

What is the obvious sign of this surrender today? The futile attempt to revive Latin. Why force a child to master Latin rather than New Testament Greek? Greek will enable him to read the New Testament in the original -- an obvious benefit. But what is the benefit of Latin? Except for an historian of the ancient or medieval eras -- for whom there will be no paying employment -- Latin is peripheral. Yet it is seen as the mark of true learning.

Latin was the universal language of the Western Church, i.e., Roman Catholicism and early Protestantism. But that learning was deeply compromised with Renaissance humanism. At best, Latin will enable a tiny handful of highly skilled, highly motivated, and poorly paid Christian scholars to read fragments of the Latin Church fathers.

Parents should abandon the futile boast: "My child is receiving a classical education, just like the good old days." The good old days produced the bad new days, step by step. The assumption of intellectual neutrality is the Church's great enemy. Latin education was the primary agency used to spread this lie.

I see home school mothers who cannot read Latin, who have no intention of reading Latin, who are utterly uninterested in anything written only in Latin, buying Latin grammars to inflict on their hapless children. Why? Because somebody they trusted told them that "Latin is basic to a well-rounded education." To which I reply: "Latin was basic to the initiation process of pagan and/or deeply compromised academics to gain control over the training of each generation of Christian leaders in England and America."

Latin was a wedge used to separate Christian children from their parents. In the same way that the sex education fanatics today devise ways to keep parents from finding out what teachers are really teaching the children, so was Latin for six or seven centuries. To open the doors of ecclesiastical office and government patronage to their children, Christian parents had to surrender him to the Latin-based curriculum, a curriculum that rested squarely on the autonomy of man. The child was initiated into classical humanism by way of Latin.

What is nothing short of astounding is that there are dedicated Christians today who insist on doing this to their children. They insist on reviving the tool of their ancient enemies in the name of traditional education. But traditional education was Satan's own tool for capturing the souls of Christians as well as their inheritance. Satan's agents abandoned that tool only late in the nineteenth century, when it became clear that mass education was going to make the traditional Latin school obsolete as an initiation process for the elite. At that point, the humanists substituted the modern curriculum, based on Darwin, in which Latin plays no role. Latin has become a lost tool of learning. Let's keep it that way!

Is there a role for Latin? Only historical. If there were a self-conscious effort on the part of dozens of Christian schools to create a cooperative program for translating the 217 volumes of J. P. Migne's collection of the Latin Church Fathers, I would approve. Until schools adopt this project, it is foolish to indulge in the waste of time that a Latin curriculum involves.

The vast majority of children so initiated will learn only the equivalent of pigeon Latin. If a child cannot sight read a foreign language without a dictionary by age 14, then whatever benefits he has received from the exercise of learning that language are indirect, e.g., learning the rules of grammar. If someone is going to be forced to do this, then he should learn a language useful to Christians: Greek, first; Hebrew, second, and Latin only a distant third. But what do we see? Mostly Latin, with no Greek and no Hebrew. This is Renaissance pride in action.

Classical education begins with a premise: the student must learn the classics. The classics are pagan: Greek and Roman literature and philosophy. They were based on the premise that man is the measure of all things, that man's reason is ultimate. The rational side of the Renaissance was based on the same premise. (Its irrational side was also a revival of Greek and Roman religion: occult, magical, and either chance-based or fatalistic.)

Medieval Scholasticism was as committed to the classics as the Renaissance was, though without classical occultism and pornography. The Scholastics were committed academically far more to Aristotle than to the Bible, especially in their political philosophy. They worshiped at Aristotle's shrine. Prior to the eleventh century, medieval theologians had worshiped at Plato's shrine: neo-platonic mysticism. The Scholastics substituted Aristotle for Plato. There was some gain -- Aristotle at least was not a communist, as Plato was -- but not in the realm of men's presuppositions. For humanism, man is the measure, and man's mind is the sole valid instrument of measurement. The Bible denies this view.

>>22307990
well, it's one of the most important pieces of information for telling you what language will be easy to learn. (another is personal motivation, which we also know about in your case.)
otherwise you'll have to refer to what's easy for EFLs, for better or worse.
pic related

>>22308002
Thank you for the chart.

>>22308002
> we also know about in your case
know NOTHING about, ofc

>>22307944
What else are you going to read besides the Vulgate and shitty novellas on Amazon?

>>22308022
I thought you knew based on his third world status

Chudjak of Odysseus in the cave with the Cyclops, anyone? Can't find it.

>>22308362
>ἀλλ’ ὅτε δὴ τάχ’ ὁ μοχλὸς ἐλάϊνος ἐν πυρὶ μέλλεν
>ἅψεσθαι, χλωρός περ ἐών, διεφαίνετο δ’αἰνῶς,
>καὶ τότ’ ἐγὼν ἆσσον φέρον ἐκ πυρός, ἀμφὶ δ’ἑταῖροι
>ἵσταντ’· αὐτὰρ θάρσος ἐνέπνευσεν μέγα δαίμων.
>οἱ μὲν μοχλὸν ἑλόντες ἐλάϊνον, ὀξὺν ἐπ’ ἄκρῳ,
>ὀφθαλμῷ ἐνέρεισαν· ἐγὼ δ’ἐφύπερθεν ἀερθεὶς
>δίνεον, ὡς ὅτε τις τρυπῷ δόρυ νήϊον ἀνὴρ
>τρυπάνῳ, οἱ δέ τ’ἔνερθεν ὑποσσείουσιν ἱμάντι
>ἁψάμενοι ἑκάτερθε, τὸ δὲ τρέχει ἐμμενὲς αἰεί.
>ὣς τοῦ ἐν ὀφθαλμῷ πυριήκεα μοχλὸν ἑλόντες
>δινέομεν, τὸν δ’αἷμα περίρρεε θερμὸν ἐόντα.

>>22307890
Regardless may as well go with the easier option for just that.

>>22307917
I guess I meant 'not' in regard to the stress ever changing, which you began your question with, rather then them remaining the same, as you ended it with.

>>22308465
Oh, alright, that's reassuring to hear. Thanks.

>>22308469
no prob

>>22308002
So Hindustani and Persian are easier than Arabic. I can't imagine how Ethiopian Semitic languages could be easier than the more ubiquitous Arabic.

>>22308573
> So Hindustani and Persian are easier than Arabic.
For English speakers, they surely are. Persian grammar seems chill.
> I can't imagine how Ethiopian Semitic languages could be easier than the more ubiquitous Arabic.
Don't know much about those, but for one, they are written in a syllabary, instead of in an Abjad like Arabic.

> ubiquitous
I think the hour totals on this map are for one long-ass intensive course, so ubiquity and availability of media doesn't play a part. Something to keep in mind if you're self-learning.

So I need to learn 3 different kinds of Greek if I want to read Homer, Aristotle and the New Testament? Fuck that!

>>22308679
>I need to learn 3 different kinds of Greek if I want to read Homer, Aristotle and the New Testament?

No, you need to learn all archaic Greek dialects just to read Homer

>>22307808
What does /clg/ think of Isocrates?

>>22308687
What the fuck? That's really discouraging...

>>22308573
>I can't imagine how Ethiopian Semitic languages could be easier than the more ubiquitous Arabic.
I know Ge'ez, and the friend who taught it to me says it's much easier than Arabic. From what little I know of Arabic, that seems very true. Ge'ez is often said to be the easiest Semitic language, which I'm inclined to agree with.

>>22308695
he's kinda messing with you, once you learn Attic the transition is usually fairly smooth, they aren't that different, Homer is largely on Ionic base, which is a very closely related dialect to Attic mostly mutually intelligible, and the non Ionic elements are not that hard to get used to, Homer's gonna filter you mostly because of the lexicon, the grammar quirks with the Aeolic/Mycenaean shenanigans is something you get used to fairly quickly
Koine is essentially Attic but kinda simplified

>>22308696
Can you compose in Ge'ez? Explain why Sneed's Feed and Seed is funny in Ge'ez.
The invitation is open for Greek and Latin bros too.

>>22308881
>Can you compose in Ge'ez?
Can you?

HOLY FUCKING SHIT

I just got BTFO by Nepos. It took me half an hour to decode the preface, even with the help of a bilingual text. It's never been so over as now. How am I going to transition from dumbed-down textbook Latin to real Latin?

>>22308933
There is no way anyone in this thread knows Ge'ez

>>22309016
looks like you need to read more fella, ain't a way around it except maybe through graded but not "real" Latin texts
have you taken a look at Lhomond's(pbuh) reader? give it a shot, it's not too long and should be easier than Nepos without being too much babble
http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/lhomond.viris.html

>>22309151
This looks amazing. Are there any print editions?

>>22309189
idk, back when I used it I had my dad print it on A4 paper at the local shop(although I told him, if it costs too much, don't bother), kinda got scammed because the guy printed it on single pages, but at least I had the white space behind to write my own translation
wouldn't recommend it

I don't care anymore, I'm jumping straight into Ovid. Wish me luck.

>>22309329
Godpseed. I tried and got filtered after a few hundred lines.

Do you guys actually use Anki to study Ancient Greek vocabulary? I have a few pages of it from the Athenaze written down and thought it might be useful to transport it to Anki, that way reviewing is a little less effort. However, trying to find the keys on the Greek Polytonics keyboard, then having to switch back to English on every card to write the translation seems like maybe too much compared to paper. Also, I'm pretty sure the Windows Greek Polytonics keyboard doesn't have a circumflex, just a tilde that it calls a circumflex.

>>22310209
yes I made my own deck for Athenaze, both books, for nouns and verbs + example phrases for each, took its time but was worth it and was essentially an exercise in itself, requiring me to re-read the chapter, write the Greek, etc....; eventually you should get used to the polytonic keyboard
plus I also made my deck for Morice's Stories but without examples

>>22310209
Anki is a meme. Don't rely too much on spaced repetition:

https://youtu.be/--Hu2w0s72Y

>>22307931
>>22307934
You're full of shit, but that's what libshit education does to a human being.

I am a Germanic from Middle Europe who wants to learn Gothic in order to revify Germanic culture in my Germanic country that is becoming increasingly Romanized and Americanized. It's a shame that Gothic isn't taught in school anymore these days. Instead they teach Latin, Greek and English because they have forgotten their Germanic roots. Any good sources and materials to start to learn Gothic?

>>22310764
there's not that much to read in Gothic unfortunately aside from Wulfila's bible, comparing it to Latin and Greek is nonsensical
east Germanics entered history boldly and left it just as quickly, you'd probably be better off studying old west or north Germanic dialects

>>22310790
Gothic was, after Latin, the most studied language among French and German intellectuals until the early 19th Century.
Wtf are you talking about?

>>22310818
it's very important for philological reasons for sure, but not because as with Greek or Latin you'l have much literature to dabble into or immerse yourself in a Gothic literary universe to "revive Germanic culture"

>>22310824
I want to be able to speak in Gothic though

>>22310844
well that's definitely cool, and I considered the idea of studying Gothic too, but I'd rather go for old Norse in that case simply because the material to read; studying Gothic to read the bible is a boner killer

>>22310764
>>22310844
You're just young, that nationalistic phase will pass as you grow older, trust me. Don't waste your time.

>>22310844
No one speaks Gothic. No one can. No one knows what spoken Gothic really sounded like. At best you will produce a choppy, unnatural, stilted pidgin that resembles the original only in fancy. LARP if you will but be aware that it is a LARP and everyone who hears you will know it.

>>22310887
Yeah learning a language is such a waste of quality Fortnite time.

Can I just ignore all these accent marks in Greek? Other than rough/smooth breathing, I mean. I can't replicate a pitch accent, and I'm never going to be speaking Greek anyway.

I dreamt that I had a physical copy of the Vulgate and read it alongside a translation

>>22311340
No one here argues against learning a language. Reviving one is a pipe dream.

>>22310757
> libshit
Anon, I don't think this is who's to blame for a delusional screed about about the value of Latin/Greek in Christian homeschooling.

>>22311411
?

>>22311330
it changes the meaning of the word in some instances

>>22311481
Isn't that the sort of thing you can pick up from context? Like the difference between femina and feminā? Ignoring macrons has worked out ok for me so far.

>>22307808
If anyone wants Classical Chinese stuff, reply and I’ll post as many reccs as I can. Plus I’ve got some stuff on Chinese historical linguistics.
I have too many opinions about translating Classical. Any orger sinologists here?

>>22311432
Sorry, meant to reply to >>22311306

>>22311495
Some time ago I asked the thread about the difficulty of (any of) the Twenty-Four Histories, but I guess no one competent in CC was around.
They should be massively easier than both Confucius' aphorisms and Tang poetry, no? But I've never seen anyone start with history instead of with philosophy or poetry.
(I know about a hundred characters, so I can't evaluate the claim for myself.)

I'm going through Collin's Ecclesiastical Primer and have been at it for about a week now, but am I supposed to be having a much easier time translating Latin to English instead of vice versa? The book is obviously going over grammar rules, things like declensions and the case system, etc., but I struggle a lot with English to Latin outside the most simplest sentences.

>>22311555
This is normal, active use of a language is always harder than passive.

>>22311561
so it's just a matter of really drilling in the grammar to git gud? I largely thought that I just wanted to having reading comprehension and not care if I'm not writing Latin, but being unable to write it really feels like a waste

>>22311608
There are textbooks focused entirely on composition. For example: https://archive.org/details/north-m.-hilladr-a.-latin-prose-composition-1913

>>22311330
to each its own, but I don't see why ignore information that is available right in front of you and can make reading easier, it's not like with Latin where e.g macrons are a relative novelty for didactic purposes and most printed editions have none, so indeed one shouldn't get too used to them, the accents will typically be in every edition of a Greek text you get your hands on, so use them

>>22311655
I'm basically tone deaf so trying to learn a pitch accent from a book feels like a waste of time that could be better spent actually learning to read. And one of the books I'm using says pic related. I was just wondering if I'm the only one too dumb for accents.

>Anglos can't understand accents
Kek, thank God my mother tongue is a romance language.

>>22311721
I mean they didn't even use spaces or minuscule for that matter because they were native speakers, but you aren't, that's kinda the point. You could even read the Iliad in this format(pic related) if you wish, I wouldn't recommend it though.

>>22311731
I will come to your country on vacation, speak your language poorly, and inflict my accent on your ears.

Is this a good book?
Are the translations any good?

>>22311850
I have it just to have all the dialogues in one hard copy at home

>>22311850
Do you know who John Cooper is, idiot?

>>22311876
ok but are the contributors any good in their translations and commentaries?
What's a reasonable price to pay for it?

>>22311850
I can't read anything without the Greek text accompanying personally

>>22311881
err yeah, he did Evidently Chicken Town??

>>22311881
No. Why call me an idiot though.
I'm thinking of buying this book and it is quite expensive, so I'm simply asking if its worth the money.
>>22311888
That's a good point actually. That's why I keep asking about the quality of the tranlsations.

>>22311901
it's not worth it for the commentary, it's worth it to have translations of every dialogue at a far lower price than if you were to buy critical editions of every dialogue

>>22308410
I was able to phonetically pronounce this and even understood some of the words. My brain is getting gooder.

Speaking of Plato, where the hell did the english pronunciation of his name come from? You wouldn't say playtonic would you.

>>22311945
idk, presumably it came about due to the English necessity to stress one of the syllables, and PLAYto came most naturally.

>>22307989
The 20th-21st century's contribution to history and human culture has been "I DON'T WANNA!!"

Well too fucking bad, eat your vegetables and learn your Latin or I'll beat you and torture your nipples

>>22311539
Same anon back on my PC now, so I have my stuff. The length of the passages will help you to figure things out via context, but the structure will largely be similar.
I've largely focused on philosophy, but I'm looking at the histories now. I also can tell that distinctions between clauses seems a little more easily seen, as CC doesn't originally have punctuation.
If you wanna dive deeper into CC, check out the books by Fuller, Dawson, and Van Norden (I have issues with how westernized some of his translations come out.) Maybe look into Chaofen Sun's Linguistic Introduction to Chinese because although it mainly covers Mandarin, it covers the development of the language from CC onwards early on.

>>22311945
I think it has to do with similar pronunciation standards. Very low brow comparison, but potato is what comes to mind. In the case of platonic, look at laconic. I can't say why we came to these rules because I don't know, but that's the general trend I'm seeing.

>>22312101
Thanks. Already read Van Norden.
Really weird how the histories are being ignored in learner material, as it's the one thing in authentic CC you could use for extensive inpoot (even though it's a lot more boring than philosophy and poetry, but who cares?).

>>22312125
The closest big book like that I've read is the Huainanzi. It's a good middle ground between the histories and the obtuse philosophical texts.

>>22312134
Interesting. I'd be worried to start with that before having a grasp of the underlying philosophies. The histories, in my mind, would have the advantage of not having any prerequisites.
Probably an approach I will only see the problems with when I actually try it myself.

>>22312145
Oh yeah, for sure. I'm used to studying the most obscure shit in the Chinese canon. I've been laser focused on Yang Zhu, a philosopher we don't have any texts of but only mentions and vignettes of in other texts.

>>22311850
no
no

>>22311945
Filtered through Latin like everything else from Greece.
Compare with Cicero.

>>22308881
I composed my first Ge'ez a couple weeks ago. I translated (Don't Fear) The Reaper, and I did a pretty good job of it too. Composition, by the way, is not the only sign of knowing a language.

>>22310764
Thomas Lambdin's Introduction to the Gothic Language. Really well designed

>>22311608
Your composition skills will suck for years. In some instances, it may be ok to skip English to Latin exercises if they are slowing you down that much. But if you do skip them, be sure to finish a composition textbook like North and Hillard or Bradley/Arnold's.

>>22310209
use Linux. mine is open bracket. yes i use anki decks and i blast like 100 new cards a day. works well. don't make your own deck that's a retarded waste of time, i just write notes for the etymology of the word where its not clear, which helps understanding and makes it easier to remember. for reference, i already can read latin and i started studying 4 months ago and im about to finish reading athenaze and read herodotus or xenophon.

>>22307808
Where do I start with Biblical Hebrew, Aramaic, and Biblical Greek?

>>22313457
Greek, Hebrew, then Aramaic. If you are asking textbooks, then stop doing that. Get Koine textbook and work through it. This is not rocket science. Here's some free resources:
https://www.textkit.com/greek-latin-forum/viewtopic.php?t=70592
http://lexicity.com/language/greek/
You can also check Archive dot org or Google Books.

>>22313457
>>22313510
I don't see why Greek has to come first. The only important thing is to do Hebrew before Aramaic, because almost every Aramaic resource assumes some familiarity with Hebrew.

>>22308696
>>22313077
> Ge'ez is often said to be the easiest Semitic language, which I'm inclined to agree with.
Really, easier than Hebrew? In what way?

>>22313628
>Really, easier than Hebrew? In what way?
I dont know the reasons why semiticists have come to this conclusion. I can say that there are much fewer verbal forms in Ge'ez than Hebrew. There are several lexical/underived stems that have no semantic meaning. Then, there are several derived stems that do have semantic differences. Those are the c (causative), t (passive), and ct (no predictable meaning). A couple quirks about Ge'ez that come to mind at the moment are the converb, a Cushitic import, and the not-so-functional participal. Participals are basically nouns and don't have nearly as much function as they do in Greek or other Semitic languages. The infinitive is also quite similar, tending to function as a stative than an actual infinitive. Ge'ez likes to use purpose clauses to achieve infinitive meaning. Back to the converb. I was translating some Matthew last week, and instead of using the Ge'ez participle, they used the converb. The converb has a meaning like "when/after doing x" and cannot function as the main verb.

>>22313800
Interesting, thanks.
I wish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aramaic_Enoch_Scroll would surface one day, then I could finally let go of the idea of ever learning Ge'ez.

>Symmachus Diodoro "Tune" inquit "eius pueri es magister?"
is there a reason eius was chosen here instead of huius/illius?

>>22313916
the boy in question is physically present before them in this context

>>22307931
>Slavery. At least one-third of Athens was enslaved. The figure was as high in Sparta. Every household owned a slave. This provided leisure for their owners, who despised physical labor as beneath them -- servile. Slavery was a universal institution in Greece.

Wrong.

>Greek slaves had opportunities for emancipation, though all of these came at some cost to their masters.
>In Ancient Athens, about 10-25% of the population were slaves; the system in Athens encouraged slaves to save up to purchase their freedom, and records survive of many slaves operating businesses by themselves, by making only a fixed tax-payment to their masters.
>Athens also had a law forbidding the striking of slaves – if a person struck an apparent slave in Athens, that person might find himself hitting a fellow-citizen, because many citizens dressed no better.
>Pausanias states that Greek slaves fought together with Athenian freemen in the Battle of Marathon, and the monuments that memorialize them.
>Spartan slaves could win freedom through bravery in battle. Plutarch mentions that during the Battle of Salamis, they did their best to save their "women, children and slaves".
>After manumission, a slave who had belonged to a citizen enjoyed not only passive freedom from ownership, but active political freedom (libertas), including the right to vote, though he could not run for public office, as his duties wouldn't allow him to.
>Teachers, accountants, and physicians were often slaves. Greek slaves in particular might be highly educated. Unskilled slaves – those condemned to slavery as punishment for criminal offenses, worked on farms and at mills.
Also consider the fact that most slaves were only so because if they hadn't been slaves they would've been homeless, many such people who had ended up in these positions were only so due to excessive debts; for many young people who lacked access to wealth it was also like a sort of rite of passage, whereby many earned not just their freedom, but their first business opportunities; the great thing is also that most people really didn't have to do any work – even concerning personal affairs for that matter, and those who did only had to do so for (mostly) a fixed amount of time.

>>22313847
I'm pretty sure there's an Aramaic reconstruction, if you wanted to read that. There are some extant Greek and Aramaic fragments you could read.
Generally speaking, it is only worthwhile to learn a language if the broader textual tradition is meaningful to you. Ge'ez is far deeper than a single book. But do keep in mind that there are very few Ethiopian compositions in Ge'ez. Most of it is translations from Greek or Arabic drawing on Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Syriac originals.
t. Ethiopianon

latin or greek?

>>22314945
Koine and Byzantine Greek. Latin is useless.

>>22315015
>Latin is useless.
why do you say this?

>>22315022
Because his brain is fried by imageboards and he needs the dopamine hit he gets by a bunch of (you)s.

>>22315022
What do you read in Latin?

>>22315045
is latin literature lacking?

>>22315056
likely

>>22315045
luv myself some Plautus, simpel as

>>22315056
nah

>>22316148
whats some good latin literature then?

>>22316164
ovid

PVLSVS

>>22307808
>https://mega dot nz/folder/FHdXFZ4A#mWgaKv4SeG-2Rx7iMZ6EKw
اللغة العربية الجميلة ليست هنا فأشعر الحزن

>>22317236
that's the
>Ἑλληνιστί/Ῥωμαϊστί
link
try the other

>>22317236
כי אין איש אשר שלח ספרים לשפת ערבית אל־מֶגַה

>>22317236
Maybe making an Arabic mega would make you feel happy

Can someone post the link to that website with practice questions for every chapter of Wheelock’s? I can’t remember it.

>>22317647
this one?
https://web.uvic.ca/hrd/latin/wheelock/contents.htm

> In Biblical Hebrew, there were approximately 7,000 words. Modern Hebrew has approximately 33,000 words.
Insane. Even the OLD (and that's Classical Latin only, a language that's often said to have a small vocabulary) has 40,000 entries.

>>22318581
>In Biblical Hebrew, there were approximately 7,000 words
Gonna need a source for that ridiculous statement

>>22318771
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/culture/the-israeli-academy-continuing-the-unprecedented-revival-of-the-hebrew-language-542822

It depends on how exactly you count, but Strong's concordance also has only 8,674 entries, and that includes Aramaic words and a lot of proper names.
I wouldn't have expected THAT part of my quote to be controversial.

>>22318787
>Jerusalem Post

What's the consensus on oxford classical texts?

how different is homeric, attic, and koine greek REALLY?

Is LLPSI a good textbook? I want to truly acquire the language and not just learn boring grammar terms. I heard the story is pretty exciting too.

>>22318996
Attic just feels like high brow, fancy Koine
Homeric is the most different and even then, not that much, you need to get used to Ionic peculiarities like κεν instead of ἄν and full shift of ᾱ to η as well as non-contracted forms(good reason to not get carried on and learn only contracted Attic forms), some Aeolic endings like -εσσιν, some Mycenaean stuff like occasional instrumental -φι or archaic genitive in -οιο
vocabulary is the biggest hassle

O non sorores Romani, nimis superbi facti sumus.

>>22319201
>Is LLPSI a good textbook?
No, because it's not a textbook. It's part of the genre of Natural Language Learning where it starts from very basic vocabulary and grammar and slowly introduces you to more advanced material over time. It's a very good Natural Language Learning text as such, and does its job fine.

Given that Latin is a very fusional language you should familiarize yourself with the grammar and how it functions at a technical level alongside actually consuming content. The author of LLPSI recommends you use Wheelock's Latin, which is a textbook and a very good one.

You should be doing spaced repetition, AKA flashcards, alongside the above two. This is how you learn vocabulary and memorize the inflectional suffixes. You are an adult, so you HAVE to memorize them through brute force, you cannot just pick them up naturally, and even in children correct production and usage of inflectional suffixes is the absolute last step in language acquisition.

>>22318984
Great editions. Sometimes Teubner surpasses them in terms of commentary but in terms of quality and layout OCT are superior.
Buy used. Older ones are fantastic quality, newer ones slightly less so. Sometime in the 90s or so they changed the binding method.
For me they are the perfect size. I have a few dozen, newest printed within the past year, oldest in 1908

>>22319395
>no Welsh

it's me, the wheelock scrub, back with more confusion.

Ōtium est bonum, sed ōtium multōrum est parvum.

I translate this as "Leisure is good, but the leisure of many is small."

My confusion stems from the fact that it seems multorum is in plural genitive, but nothing that it can modify is plural in number. I have it paired with orium, which is singular. Since to my knowledge adjectives always have to agree in number with the nouns they modify, it would see that this sentence is necessarily grammatically incorrect. So what's really going on here, do adjectives like multorum not always have to agree in number or is it a mistake in the book?

>>22320104
I have it paired with *otium* which is singular in number

>>22320104
That's a substantive adjective, aka an adjective used as a noun. You might find it useful to think of the modified noun as implied, as in "multorum hominum/virorum/quiritum", though it's not really correct. Substantive adjectives have general force, meaning your translation is perfect.

>>22320172
ah I think I see, so multorum isn't actually paired with leisure at all. It's more like:

"leisure of many (people) is small" with people being implied.

seems like it's generally a good idea to assume that I'm looking at a substantive adjective whenever I spot an adjective that has no pair, would you agree with that?

>>22320189
>it's generally a good idea to assume that I'm looking at a substantive adjective whenever I spot an adjective that has no pair, would you agree with that?
Yes. But you should keep all possibilities in mind, because Wheelock's Latin does have a few sentences from Ovid or Virgil with significant hyperbaton, where pairs exist but are a pain to find.

>>22320189
Also keep in mind that there are two categories of substantive adjectives:
- General, can be specified by a noun, e.g. "multi (viri) sunt qui pro patria ferunt arma"
- Already specific, as in omnia (all), maiores (ancestors), etc... Those are pretty much nouns in usage.

But Latin is useless...

>>22320937
Potius disce linguam Chaldaeam.

>>22308002
>Chinese is easier to learn than Japanese
I'm calling bullshit

>>22321345
That map says the opposite.

>>22321345
>>22321387
Nvm, misread your post.
I have no opinion on this topic.

>>22321345
Chinese is easier than Japanese if you only speak English, but if you already speak a highly inflecting language then Japanese is easier

>>22311945
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_English_vowels

>>22321345
they both are only hard because of their writing languages it seems. chinese because theres so many characters and japanese because each character has like 2-8 readings depending on context. overall, chinese is probably more difficult to read, but japanese grammar is somewhat more complicated, though regular and logical (100% head-final, almost no irregular verb/adjective forms, agglutinative). chinese grammar is easy but there are a lot of homophones due to the combination problems with its simple phonotactics (1 word = 1 syllable or sometimes two, only 1-2k possible syllables). this makes chinese rely very heavily on idioms for just about everything.
but really, chinese is difficult because its hard to get into a language which is so unwieldy, stupid, barbaric, and ugly to hear.

>>22322423
>a language which is so unwieldy, stupid, barbaric, and ugly to hear
kek true

bump

Classical languages are only hard because most surviving literature is written in very high registers. Imagine if ESLs had to start by reading Shakespeare.

I kinda wonder if there was more nuance when talking about ancient Greek or even non-Greek philosophers that considered "water" ὕδωρ as the principle of things, considering the trajectory that instead the word ὕλη took into our "matter" through Latin 'materia' which also had a more down to earth meaning as well, like ὕλη.
Like, if we say "matter is the foundation of things" this sounds far less primitive and more profound than saying "water is the foundation of things", albeit we ultimately drive both from ancient Greek/Latin "primitive" words relating to wood and water.
So when Thales for examples is said to have considered "water"/ὕδωρ the principle of things, was there maybe some deeper nuance to it, e.g motion/change as opposed to ὕλη indicating the substrate universal "goo" from which things are formed

>>22325613
Thales considered water to be the prime element because of his observations that things originate from moist seeds, the nature of moist is water, therefore water is the origin of all things. It was very much based on water doing watery things.

However this was just an empirical restatement of a pre-existing belief found in Homer which says Oceanos and Tethys are the origin of all things.

>>22325089
> only
Also less inpoot in general.
And there's a cultural distance, even if you know all the individual words and grammar in a sentence.
Otoh, classical languages have a relatively small vocabulary, where for living languages it just never ends.

>>22325748
> where for living languages it just never ends.
except with Hebrew, it seems: >>22318581

just got this in the mail, what am i in for?

>>22325808
Br ou Pt?

what's the most romantic poem in the latin corpus?

>>22326097
CIL 4.5296

>>22326200

>>22326226
what is her fucking problem

>>22311850
It's a very convenient edition, but the translations tend to be either serviceable at best, or revisions of Jowett's older translations, which tend to take frequent liberties.

>>22319395
NEQUEO SPIRARE

>>22327169
EXSPIRA IGITUR

wheelielock vs lispi: which one?

Fratres I'm going to study in Mexico (Texas) this semester, could you recommend some latin singers and youtubers to start getting in touch with the culture?

>>22307808
Can anyone recommend books for learning Italian?

>>22327342
Both, duh. Why would you think that you have to pick? You learn every other language using multiple guides.

>>22328504
I'm not using two books to learn a mutt language

>>22328648
Then don't
You'll never master it anyway

>>22328708
nah just started reading the commentarii de bello gallico straight away with a dictionary and a reference grammar and already figured out the first two paragraphs (or whatever shit those divisions made by editors are called)

>>22328402
just learn latin and speak it as if you were speaking a pidgin

What language to learn if I want to get access to a large amount translated literature? I only know English.

>>22328888
French or German

Is the comprehensible input method a meme (specifically for classical languages)? Would it be more efficient for language learning reading 100h of easy content (the i+1 thing, ideally) than 100h of difficult content where looking up every other word and grammatical construction is required?
Also, what do you think it's better: spending maybe 1h a day using a SRS or employing that time immersing/inpooting instead? (assuming you have only a limited amount of time to study)

>>22311721
what book ??

>>22328941
It's German still relevant? I know no authors currently living that are worth reading. French at least has Houellebec.

>>22329006
You said a large amount of translated literature, and these are the languages that translate the most foreign language works besides English.

>>22329023
Got it. Thanks fren. I'm leaning towards German because I assume it also has a lot of philosophical works.

Why did nobody tell me that Plato was so easy?

>>22329006
>still relevant?
what does that even mean? how many famous active german authors are out there? you think goethe or kant aren't relevant?
also german has the greatest amount of secondary lit on classical literature out of any language.

Why sometimes people refers to long syllables in Latin as 'heavy'? Aren't long syllables simply longer in time (aka deductae) because they have more morae?

>>22329156
Vowels are long or short. Syllables are heavy or light.

>>22329178
But they literally last longer. tata tata = tan tan = tau tau = tā tā = 2 morae + 2 morae. Isn't that the definition of mora timed languages, that all morae tend to last the same amount of time?
Why is calling them what they are supposed to be wrong? Just because Indians used a different terminology?

>>22329212
It's just less confusing, as the other Anon's excerpt explains.
(I have even "educational" institutions use macrons and breves over vowels to denote syllable weight, it's insane.)

>>22329367
>It's just less confusing, as the other Anon's excerpt explains.
ah I guess I get it now, thanks
>(I have even "educational" institutions use macrons and breves over vowels to denote syllable weight, it's insane.)
Indeed. Personally I dislike a lot when a macron is put over a vowel before a semivowel i to indicate the syllable is long/heavy "by position". Why not just using a j, macronized texts for learners already use the u - v distinction anyway.

how do you fit in lang reading with other reading? If I read something in English I don't feel any motivation to switch to reading some Latin, and if I read Latin I feel mentally fatigued after a short while

>>22329686
The only solution is to read more in that language until it's no longer mentally taxing.
Can't claim I'm at that point with Latin, but I'm ESL and reached that level in English.

>>22329686
depends on what you read, how complex
the Bucolics have been kicking my ass so I've gone very slowly, one(max 100 lines, often 60-70) each time I decide to read(not often as I'm doing more Greek these days)
but back with the Aeneid I could go to 400-500 lines with less effort, and if it were a more prosaic historical/political work I reckon I'd go even faster, but that's not why we do it, accept you're going to be reading slowly for a very long time compared to your native language or english(unless you just stick to the most linear, clear prose imaginable)

How hard are the Church Fathers?

>>22329686
unironically stop browsing this godforsaken laotian angling aggregator.
and other form of social media for what it's worth (reddit, youtube, tiktok if you're a zoomer, etc)

>>22330015
Surprisingly hard for their age, just ask all those buckbroken altar boys

bros I am studying Business Admin. In 4 years I will make 60k (minimum) directly out of uni, almost double the median salary. Problem is the subjects don't spark my interest as much as the classics do. Can any oldanons advise/admonish me? I am tempted to swap to a study of Greek/Latin, although the job prospects will be much worse, the quality of education is top 10 respective to the field.
Should I just finish my degree and get a high-paying job?

>>22330089
>In 4 years I will make 60k (minimum) directly out of uni
The fact that freshman still believe this is breathtaking. You would think after hearing millions of graduates whining for decades that they can't find a job and can't pay their loans that people would stop borrowing hundreds of thousands of dollars just to major in generic and oversaturated fields like "communications" or "business administration". You will settle for working at Walmart or move to an Asian country and teach English since they don't give a shit what your Bachelors degree is in. Sorry but you got swindled by bankers.

>>22330343
my uni publishes the job statistics of each master degree they offer. as a business uni, the salaries rank from 50-60k on average. the program I am interested in is coincidently the 60k one. Also my uni is a "top" business school in Europe, so there is a lot of demand for graduates. All the big banks, consultancies, tech companies, etc. are affiliated with top b-schools, and an internship with one of them is a part of the bachelor and master program.
Business Administration (bachelor) ranks in the top university programs for job outlooks every year.

>>22330417
>the salaries rank from 50-60k on average.
Anyone can look this up, that's the pay for a job. That's not evidence that graduates are actually getting these jobs "straight out of college" like you say.

>>22330474
>people of year 2022 graduate
>they give their employment data in 2023
>a report is made for 2022
somehow this isn't representative? Only 1 year of grads are included in each report. Those that graduated beforehand aren't included and are earning way more.

>>22330089
>I am tempted to swap to a study of Greek/Latin
Do it, coward
>but muh money

>>22330343
>move to an Asian country and teach English
I did this and I have a degree in Classics

bump

How big is the Old English corpus?

I really want to learn Gothic but know it would be a waste of time

>>22330023
checked

>>22333168
So is posting on 4chan, and yet...

anyone here actually read the books in Latin/Greek? If so how long did it take you to get to that level? I am tempted to study Greek/Latin at uni just for this purpose. There are so many kino books up till the middle ages I want to read untranslated...

>>22333909
what books are you referring to?

>>22333920
read books*, it originally said "the classics".
Just any books from plato to augustine

>>22333948
haven't started greek yet, as for latin I've read quite a bit of catullus' poems
I'm currently struggling through ovid but I will finish it no matter what

>>22333909
these questions make little sense, depends on effort/predisposition, etc..., if you are working or have total free time, etc...
in uni of course you should be getting quite the full time commitment + help from professors, that of course will facilitate things
alone as an amateur few years give or take depending on the texts too

I just started and am at week two but I already feel like I'm getting filtered with (ecclesiastical) Latin, which is demotivating. I think I saw a post here that said to just go through a grammer primer even if I hate it, but going through learning grammar is something I hate. I just want to read the Vulgate. I won't quit, but I just hope I can eventually say that I am making progress.
>>22334136
>few years
man...

It is physically impossible to pronounce "Urbs"

>>22334506
A few years is nothing in the long term. Bite the bullet, learn some grammar and study while reading every day. In a few years with determined study you could be able to read Latin, a skill that you can utilize for the rest of your life, or you could not study and in a few years still not read Latin. You have nothing to lose by sticking to it and much to gain. The choice is yours.

>>22313250
This dude must be legendary. It seems like he also wrote the best book for biblical hebrew (which I will try to convince my friends to do, but it's not looking good)

χαίρετε πάντες. μαθητὴς τῆς Ἑλληνικῆς Ῥωμαϊκῆς τέ εἰμι. μάλα ἁμαρτήσω, ἀλλὰ ἐθέλω διαλέγεσθαι ὐμιν έν ταὶς παλαιαὶς γλωσσαίς.

>>22312885
sissyro

>>22334800
His Ge'ez and Coptic primers are also regarded as the best.

>>22334800
I want to start learning biblical hebrew (I have no knowledge of modern hebrew). Would you recommend that book?

>>22334875
χαίρ' ἠθεῖ', ἔρδ' ἀτὰρ οὐχ ἡγοῦμαι πολλοὺς πέλειν ἐν τῷδε τῷ νήματι δυναμένους Ἀττικίζειν ἢ ἀληθῶς τοὐλάχιστον Ῥωμαίζειν· πυκν' ἀυτὸς ἐπείρων λέσχας καθιστάναι ἀλλ' ἄπρακτος, καὶ δὴ καὶ παραχρῆμα δεῖ με μισθαρνίαν ἀρέσθαι, τουτέστι τέλος τῆς μελιχρῆς σχολῆς, φεῦ δυσμόρου μου!

>>22334583
I hope you know it's really "urps" fella, so like ps-eudo, don't try to put voiced b next to s

>Sed cūr sanguis dē nāsō fluit Mārcō? Sanguis eī dē nāsō fluit, quod Mārcus ā Sextō pulsātus est
But why blood from the nose did flow for Marcus? Blood for him out of the nose did flow because Marcus is having been hit by Sextus.

>>22336031
eugepae

>>22336031
Aber warum fließt dem Markus Blut von der Nase? Blut fließt ihm von der Nase, da der Markus vom Sextus geschlagen worden ist.

>>22334875
Μάθε νέα ελληνικά βρεεεεεεε!!!
Κανείς δεν καταλαβαίνει τι λές!

Between german, classical greek and latin, which one is harder?

>>22334506

>be me, studying Wheelocks
>chapter 8: hic, haec, hoc, huius, huic, hunc, hanc, hoc...
>ille, iste...SO MUCH SHIT IN JUST ONE CHAPTER
>next chapter: the same thing with something else
>ch 11: ego, tu, vos, nos, vos, is, ea, id...
>"I have no idea what I'm doing."
>can't remember macrons, mixing up conjunctions
>same drill for 30 more chapters
>meanwhile my brain is magically learning Latin more or less

tldr: fuck your feelings. Just pound your way through it and be aware of diligence traps. Semi-retarded medieval monks learned this shit, so will you. Never forget you're learning an ancient language, probably teaching yourself, which is based as fuck.

Pic related.

>>22336727
Why would anyone pick wheelock's over oerberg's is beyond me.

>>22336727
Wait really? Wheelock's chapters seemed really easy to me, used to do three each day.

did romans really go around ecce'ing everything?

>>22336825
ywnbaw

>>22336639
I learnt Latin, German, and Russian. In terms of difficulty from most to least as a native speaker of English:
Russian
German
Latin

Vocabulary was the biggest issue, not grammar. Latin vocabulary is small relative to English and German, so you to learn fewer words than the other languages. English has borrowed many loanwords from French and directly from Latin, so that helps. German has many cognate words with English. Russian vocabulary is completely alien to an English speaker, so it takes longer to learn words with anki/whatever flashcard system you're using.

Once you learn one language, learning another won't be too difficult. The first is always the hardest.

>>22336948
Why are you mad?

>>22336825
do only do the main book? I (not op) have Wheellock's Latin + Workbook + Scribes and scribblers.
Every 3 days I will have completed a chapter from each book. Takes between 60-120 min per chapter

>>22336959
I seem to be a similar person to you in vocabulary being harder than grammar but interestingly enough I've met a lot of people who find the grammar harder. I assume these people tend not to end up discussing classical languages for the most part.

>>22336959
>learnt
Looks like you just forgot to learn English then.

>>22336959
How long did it take to learn each?

>>22337304
learnt is proper english???

>>22337364
It's learned.

>>22337394
mmmmmmh

>>22337256
Yes, I only did the main book. But I was also reading through LLPSI on the side.

anyone here have experience tutoring/teaching classical languages?

>>22307808
Any anons here trust Peter Avery's translations to get across the meaning of the Farsi while maintaining it's poetic beauty? I'm reading his translation of The Conference of the Birds and I'm getting the feeling it's a tad more focused on getting the exact meaning across than maintaining the poetic flair, which is better than dumbing the meaning of the poetry down to remake it in your substantially less compelling vision of course.

>>22337403
>African-American Vernacular
sad what the world has come to

>>22338180
Yes, I tutored for a while in university

>>22334800
His translation of the Gospel of Thomas has been among the most notable.

>>22337364
I feel T-ending verbs are more appropriate as adjectives as with "burnt". Similarly I prefer the commonwealth spelling of "centre" as a noun and adjective, and "center" as a verb.

>>22338488
AAVE is based

>>22337310
3 years for Latin, 3 years for German and 4 years for Russian.

>>22336959
> Vocabulary was the biggest issue, not grammar.
I feel this is a universal truth in language learning, once you get to authentic content. Learners who bitch about grammar just never got there.
At least in that one regard, dead languages are easier.

Any Arabic learners here?

I started learning Arabic (MSA) 5 years ago, stopped many times, and recently I switched to the Levantine dialect, because I was frustrated that no one wanted to talk with me in Arabic. I've been learning the dialect for a month, and I've been for one week in Palestine and Israel, and for the first time in my life, Arabs actually wanted to talk with me in Arabic, instead of switching to Hebrew.
Do you have similiar experiences? Did you return to MSA after mastering a dialect. How many dialects should I learn in order to communicate with most Arabs freely (is Levantine + Egyptian enough, or should I also learn Maghrebi)?

vita detestabilis hateful life
nunc obdurat first oppresses
et tunc curat and then soothes
ludo mentis aciem; as fancy takes it;
Why is the translation "as fancy takes it"? Is "ludo mentis aciem" an idiomatic expression?

>>22339880
translator took some artistic liberties

>>22339987
What would be the literal translation?

>>22319395

>>22340014
hateful life
first oppresses
and then soothes
the mind's sharpness in play
i.e. life tosses difficulties at you on a whim

>>22319395
>>22340033
> Realm of Syagrius
> Realm of Nepos
Nullum tintinnabulum audiebam.

>>22339427
based on what?

>>22340076
English, duh

>>22340071
Senes acuta audire nequeunt

>>>22340605
I'm going to undertake this in a few years if no academics get off their asses.

>>22329077
Truth. I find him easier than Xenophon because his vocabulary is smaller and he lingers on ideas longer than Xenophon who switches more often.

>>22329077
It's common knowledge.

>>22328967
I don't really trust the "read easy lit. in classical languages" meme because most of the people who advocate this seem to never get past this stage whereas people who learn the grammar and then start reading lots of the original authors know the language better.
Also imo there's just not enough literature to justify this. If you're learning it to read Plato or Homer, just start reading them once you can understand a good amount.
And if you learn it with CI you'll still have to look up tons of rare words anyway.

I am struggling with this sentence from D'ooge.

>Huic rursus circumvento auxilium dat Pullo

Someone translated it as

>Pullo gives him help again as he is surrounded,

And i'm not sure why, I assumed Pullo was a dative indirect object here.

>>22341098
> assumed Pullo was a dative indirect object here.
Pullo is 3rd declension, so the dative would be Pulloni.

>>22341138
So it is. So Pullo is the singular nominative so the other guy was right? Thanks Anon.

>>22341202
> So Pullo is the singular nominative so the other guy was right?
Yes, Pullo is the subject of the sentence.

I used haudquaquam in a sentence recently

bunp

>>22308008
>>22308002
that chart is shit
dont reference it

>>22338492
I was wondering how easy/hard it is or where would one start pedagogically speaking(since I never taught anything to anyone), I learned Greek and Latin to a decent level by myself and considering my more formal background in maths I could probably make some part time buck tutoring both STEM related subjects and some languages(english, classical languages)

is french considered a classy language

>>22344304
What's a classy language? Nothing about languages is inherently classy, we just associate them with certain cultures with varying degrees of refinement. And the truth is that we French are some of the most rustic people.

>>22344528
thought you guys were interested in the classy ones

Bump

>>22344134
>>22344134
It is easy if you have the correct mindset to teach and know the material well
Patience is key. Lead them to the answers but try not to give them outright. Facilitate their education, the focus should not be on you teaching but on the student learning. Each student will be different with their own ways of study and you should tailor your sessions accordingly.
the only place you are going to make (very little) money tutoring classics is on campus. Since you are self-educated it will be a very hard sell as tutors are usually undergrads and grads within the department. Go talk to some professors first, get in good with them and they might send some students your way. most likely they will not.

>Et tu, Brutsus?

Currently going over Lingua Latina per se illustrata. What are come cool entry level texts I could dig into? I've thought of reading some books from the bible.

>>22344304
To monolinguals sure.
To everyone else, it's an aberration of phonetics and obscure rules.
Still there are some pretty neat aspects about it. Like, to say you missed someone, you say "Tu m'a manqué" Which literally means "You were missing from me" Or some shit, translates better into other romance languages.

>>22346505
Common recommendations for authentic texts (besides the Vulgate) at this stage are Eutropius, Nepos, and Caesar.
You'll still need to look up many words, but take heart, it gets better.

>>22346505
>>22346518
> at this stage
I mean, after you finished Familia Romana. Authentic Latin is chock full with subjunctive verbs.

>>22346517
>aberration of phonetics
That's just meaningless pseud babble.

>>22346518
>>22346601
Thanks friends.

>>22307989
and pray tell what would Gary North think about an "academic case against English"?

>>22307989
>CONCLUSION
>Take Greek, not Latin
based

>>22347206
Gary North was a serious thinker, and his thoughts should be taken seriously.

>>22345901
thx for the answer
I don't aim so high though, I was thinking more about some gymnasia(Eurofag btw) in my local area where classical languages are still taught, thinking between the STEM stuff, help with english and classical languages at least some high school kids will maybe be in the market for that kind of tutoring

>>22348214
Again, uphill battle to prove yourself. You will probably have to get in good with a professor/teacher or take some students for free to show that you can A. teach and B. know the material. People are wary of autodidacts claiming to know a subject and asking for money with no proof.
Alternatively try doing something online or via app. Lots of people claim to know Latin on iTalki

>quamobrem
>whatonaccountofthing

>>22349371
Latin usually does not begin sentences or clauses with prepositions. 'ob quam rem' would be out of place and sound odd to Roman ears. As a postpositive it sounds much better. Eventually the phrase ossified into the form we know.

If I learn modern gayreek can I read classical gayreek?

>>22349401
no

>>22349408
What about the other way around

>>22349410
it'll take some adjustments. i haven't spent much time with modern greek because after you have familiarized yourself with attic it will sound like pidgin.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Xy7WahsS7I

Has anyone tried to learn Old English here? Or Old Norse?

What’s the estimated time to learn Old Frankish?

NOVUM
>>22349616
>>22349616
>>22349616

Novus Filum
>>22349615

fratres, I can't decide

>>22349626
Lawrence Alma Tadema is based therefore the latter

>>22349629
i kinda like this theme of anachronistic philosopher portraits too