/lit/ - Literature

>>16784432
Pretty sure it's the same as learning a living language. Grammar + inp00t

I'm actually in a weird position where I wanna learn an old language, but it's an old version of Spanish (and I guess modern Spanish but in an academic context)

I'm interested in Mesoamerican (Aztec, Maya, etc) history, and I've spent a few years now digging into it, but as somebody who exclusively reads and speaks english I'm running into walls since so many sources are untranslated and only exist in Spanish, or 16th century castillian, so I'd like to learn that to read old manuscripts and such. I'd also like to read modern Spanish sources from Mexican academics and researchers, but I figure that'd use a lot of words and terms not used much in the general language too, so in both cases just "learning Spanish" might not be enough

any advice?

>>16784432
It's really not all that different. Put the time into learning grammar and memorizing vocabulary, instead of speaking with a native speaker you read primary texts as soon as possible, preferably ones that have grammar notes, and do composition exercises.

I taught myself Greek doing this an hour a day. The primary texts keep you motivated to get through the hump of rote memorization. But desu I'm going to learn sanskrit next and will likely do this graded online course instead

The best Scottish Gaelic one is probably this but I think it's only available in pdf. remember it needs to be by this exact author.

>>16785683
Depends on what you want to do.
There has been modern nahuatl grammars published for teaching through english if thats what you want.

>>16785893
I mean I pretty much explained what my goals are: I want to be able to read Spanish language sources on Mesoamerican history, including 16th century manuscripts and modern academic papers in the language.

I'd love to learn Nahuatl too, but I feel like Spanish is the better place to start since there's a lot more things in Spanish but not Nahuatl then there is in just Nahuatl

>>16784432
I've been working through Wenham's "Elements of New Testament Greek" since March of this year and already I can read the Greek New Testament fairly well" albeit at a beginner level

>>16786058
I never understood why someone would delve into learning these minority languages from irrelevant cultures unless they have a great cultural, intelectual or genealogical tie with it; it’s seldom the case.
Learning a language is a hard, time consuming, gruesome activity that takes years to complete. While you could be learning a equally different language from your mother tongue that has real economic and demographic power, you choose to learn a useless communication tool of a society that was overhauled before they could even Middle Ages levels of technology.
Even if Chinese or Arabic or German are so hard, and Nahuatl so easy, wasting two years to learn Nahuatl is ridiculous since spending the same time to learn middle level of those three former languages would benefit you insanely more on a cultural and professional level.

>>16786179
Not only that, but you’ll never get an opportunity to practice those languages unless you want to live in a boring tiny city or village for a year at the very least; while with German, Arabic, Mandarin you can practice easily with so much online content and online people or travel and know the lively, full of opportunity places that are Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Emirates, Qatar, Oman, Shangai respectively

>>16785683
There's a difference for sure but I wouldn't say it's greater than the difference between say current Mexican and Argentinian Spanish. I don't think you would have any big problems reading one if you can easily read the other.

>>16785820
No idea how those courses are but Antonia is a good teacher.

>>16784432
>read a grammar book
>2 anki decks, one for declension patterns, one for vocab (can make another for non-Latin alphabets but often not necessary)
>do exercises in book
>repeat for a second grammar book
>begin actually reading texts

>>16786227
>anki decks
im sure the medieval churchmen used them...

>>16786233
Do a memory palace or whatever if it works for you but don't handicap yourself for the sake of a stupid /lit/ larp

>>16786179
>>16786213
Because I find Mesoamerican history interesting. If anything I'd say it's dumb to learn or care about something just because you happened to be born into that culture or nationality, then you're doing something thrust on you rather then something you picked with your own agency

Also, one of the world's historical hotbeds of complex civilization and high culture is hardly irrelevant, even if it's not in a position of predominant influence today.

And as I said, i'm trying to learn Spanish right now, NOT Nahuatl, and Spanish certainly is something that would open up real economic and professional opportunities even outside of niche academic stuff.

>>16786220
Even if the difference isn't big, though, there's bound to be differences here and there and if i'm reading very verbose, complex texts, I could easily see a misunderstanding of a single word or even just getting different connotations out of it leading to misunderstanding those sources.

Like i'm sure I should just worry about a "normal" spanish dialect first before worrying about this all, but ideally I'd at least like to find a program or a dialect of spanish that's closest to what i'm looking for to use that as my base

>>16786364
>one of the world's historical hotbeds of complex civilization and high culture is hardly irrelevant,
You should study more then, because the Aztecs were fierce warmongers, not scientist or philosophers. That was someone else, but people who finished high school should know that already

>>16786406
>aztecs were thinkers
How can anyone think this? No one ever had a thought in the Americas until the Spaniards arrived.

>>16785683
Head over to /his/ Mesoamerica anon can probably help you out if he's hanging around.

>>16786444
I am Mesoanon

>>16786406
>>16786439
Nah, you're both just ignorant.

The Aztec had a class of theologian poets called Tlamatinime who basically practiced philosophy. It wasn't quite Greciean philosophy, in that a Tlamatini would have also been a practicing priest and would have had various official duties generally, but they had intellectual circles where poems and theology and the like were exchanged, and taught at elite schools for nobility and skilled commoners where they taught religion, poetry, oratorical skills, ethics, etc. Pic related has some examples of Aztec poetry and explains some of the lyrical symbolism.

The theme of the transience of all things and life being beutiful because of it's temporary nature is a common motif, that ties into wider themes of life and death being two parts of a greater whole and the importance of cycles to the natural order, with the Aztec creation myth involving the world being cyclically created and destroyed and the gods giving up their own lives or effort to recreate it and humanity; and in turn this ties into the cosmological justification for sacrifice, which is that much how the gods were consumed to make the woirld and the sun, rain, etc; animals and plants consume the sun's rays and the rainfall, people consume animals and plants, and then the gods consume people via sacrifice in a cycle. Likewise a big theme in both poetry and moral adages is that the world is inherently cruel and shitty and the best thing you can do is to accept that and your inevitable imperfection, but do your best to help others through it's pitfalls and live a self-sacrificing (both litterally and metaphorically) life.

Also, in the excerpt I posted, one of the poems is from Nezahualcoyotl: He wasn't just a king and a poet, but also an engineer: He designed a dike to seperate the largest lake in the Valley of Mexico into a brackish and freshwater side, as well as redesigned Tenochtitlan's main aquaduct which sourced water from Chapultepec to have two pipes and a switching mechanism so one side could run while the other side could be cleaned (the Aztec were extremely autistic about hygine and sanitation; Tenochtitlan had a fleet of civil servents which washed and swept streets and buildings daily and also collected waste every day from the city's toilets to be recycled into dyes, fertliizer, etc).

1/?

>>16784935
Considering starting with this

>>16787031
>>16786406
>>16786439
cont:

Most impressively he designed the watering system for the baths and gardens at Texcotzinco, a retreat for the royalty of Texcoco (the city he ruled), which sourced water from a spring in the Sierra Nevada mountain range around 5 miles away, with the aquaduct transporting the water at times reaching 150 feet aboveground, and brought it to another adjacent hill where it flowed into a series of branching channels and pools to regulate the flow speed, with the water then travelling over another aquaduct over a large gorge between the peaks of that hill and Texcotzinco itself, wherin the aquaduct formed a circuit around it's peak, the water flowing into various shrines and displays, and being directed into artificial waterfalls to water the plants in the gardens at the hill's base, with different sections of the gardens mimicing different biomes with their specific plant life

These sorts of large royal gardens weren't unusual, and were also academic in nature: Different plants were experimented with in terms of the conditions they could grow and for medical properties, and were also used to stock medical herbs, and most impressively, into formal taxonomic systems, beating Carl Linnaeus to the punch on a binomial taxonomy scheme; see pic. We have multiple surviving documents on Aztec botany and medicine, and a large amount (over 85% per some studies) of herbal treatments are medically effective by today's standards. Their surgical and dental medicine was also pretty advanced, with them practicing both preventative denstriy with multiple instances of teeth brushing a day and multiple recipes for types of toothpaste, dental washes/rinsese, and breath freshners, but also corrective dental surgeries for a variety of conditions and ailments. In the context of non-dental surgeries, they had recorded surgical techniques for removing eye tumors and masses as well as the first recorded instance of intramedullary nails as a surgical treatment for broken/fractured bones, again before 19th century Europeans popularized the practice

The Spanish were pretty keen on documenting and adapting Aztec botany and Medicine, with multiple Spanish people asserting asserting it's superiority: Cortes claimed this, as did Francisco Hernández de Toledo, the Spanish royal court physician and naturalist who traveled to Mexico specifically for this purpose, and ascademic Botanical gardens first show up in Europe not long after Conquistador accounts talking about them were published (their accounts are filled with many instances of praising Aztec and other Mesoamerican civilization's societies, laws, order, art, archtecture, etc, often lamenting that their religious was so barbaric in comparison)

Another random example is that the modern birth control pill was synthesized from a plant used by the Aztec and other Mesoamericans as an aborficant, among other things. If you want me to go on or post sources/citations, let me know

2/2 for now.

>>16787031
Great poetry. I'm always fascinated by how ancient civilizations approached the brevity of life.

>>16787142
>>16787031
>>16786406
>>16786439
Also the Aztec were just one of dozens of other major Mesoamerican civilizations, shit like monumental archtecture, class systems, rulership, etc goes back like 3000 years prior to Europeans showing up, see pic

So what I mentioned is just notable examples of intellectualism and science from a tiny slice of the region's history, though i'm doubtful that most others had as developed a intellectual infanstructre or medicine/botany

Oh shit I forgot to also mention that they were arguably (admittedly depends on how you define "public", and may not have been applicable to cities beyond Tenochtitlan but probably was to some extent) the first state in history to have mandatory public education, with even commoners and girls attending schools on a madatory basis per most sources, though what you got taught depended on your social glass and gender

>>16787166
Yeah, it's cool stuff. If you want recommendations for further reading and such let me know

again, I only know english so I'm sadly only going off a tiny % of the actual available amount of sources, though

>>16786364
I just browsed through a couple Spanish-language colonial-era texts and I very much doubt that such a misunderstanding would happen to you. Even if a word has a different meaning the context will almost always make clear either the old meaning of the word or that the current meaning doesn't make sense. Assuming you're not yet fluent in Spanish, a maybe useful comparison is that 16th century Spanish is to current Spanish what 19th century English is to current English. Small differences in grammar/vocab/syntax etc. but the biggest difference is just the vibe and style of writing used at the time imo.

>>16787195
>>16787142
>>16787031
>>16786406
>>16786439

>>16787195
>Yeah, it's cool stuff. If you want recommendations for further reading and such let me know
Yes please! Even better if they can be found on libgen

Advice on finding pleasure doing what you like and not what other people expect from you?

>>16784432
I learned Latin, and am in the process of learning Attic Greek. Really the process is the same, except harder because you don't have access to native speakers and there isn't as much media at your disposal. Also there isn't really any easy stuff to read in these languages. The easiest classical Latin author is Caesar but he is still hard. The ancients didn't write graded readers of the kind you have access to with modern languages, so you have to sort of throw yourself in the deep end when it c omes to reading literature. As for strategies, I think active use of the language is extremely important. Nothing boosts your intuitive understanding and grasp of a language than actively using it, which in the case of dead languages, means lots of prose composition.

>>16786087
impressive, maybe I will try that book too

literally nobody today speaks an ancient language

>>16788055
there are autists who get together to speak in latin.