Learning Linguistics - classical Latin & Greek?

[Anonymous No.16197714]

>The uniqueness of Latin and Greek (apart from their immortal literature) is their ability to order and shape thought and word unlike any other language. They are the gatekeepers of the trivium arts. One cannot think logically or speak persuasively if one has not mastered language, and the surest road to mastery of subordinate and contingent relationships of language and fine shades of meaning in words are the classical languages. Modern languages may teach simple grammar such as direct and indirect objects or verb tenses, but because of the entropy of language (compare modern Greek to classical Greek), they lack simultaneously the complexity and order of the classical languages. This is one of the great benefits of studying a “dead” language; they don’t change! One should study cadavers before performing surgery on a living thing.
Site: https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2020/08/unique-advantages-latin-greek-austin-hoffman.html

Okay, I've been convinced, at least to learn linguistics to truly understand the limits of language. Are there any books that try to understand linguistics through classical languages? On a side note, are there any linguistic phenomena important for conveying meaning that are *not* covered naturally through classical Greek & Latin, i.e., would there be a 3rd or 4th language worth learning to fully appreciate the deftness and beauty of language while minimizing conceptual overlap?

pic unrelated

[Anonymous No.16197741]

Just learn it, you don't have to spam it every few days to convince yourself to do it.
It's not like you are not going to quit it.

[Anonymous No.16197803]

>>16197741
This is the first time I've made this post.

[Anonymous No.16198161]

>>16197741
My main interest in learning Latin and Greek is primarily understanding the written language, and it would be a plus to also be able to translate and understand classical texts from antiquity. If there's a shortcut or an additional caveat to understanding the flexibility of language at a deep linguistic level as described in the article I linked, then I'm all ears. I've been sitting with this meme in my head ever since Heidegger boldly claimed that classical Greek, followed by German, were the best languages for thinking about philosophy.

[Anonymous No.16199346]

bump

[Anonymous No.16199531]

>>16197714
study the trivium and quadrivium. see you in 10 years

[Anonymous No.16199825]

Any language with a case system and etymologically rich vocabulary will be superior for complex thought and exposition. Ancient Greek & Latin, and modern German are good examples of this.

So while this guy is exaggerating, he's not exactly wrong. It's why education until recently was heavily focused on learning these languages.

[Anonymous No.16199840]

>>16197714
>can’t enjoy rtj4 because of killer mike’s ridiculous political views
oh well

[Anonymous No.16199886]

>>16198161
>>16199825
lol imagine falling for Sapir-Whorf years after it's been discredited

[Anonymous No.16199890]

>>16199825
What are some other languages I should consider? Finnish? (I have Finnish family so might do that anyway) Russian? Japanese? Ge’ez? Arabic? Nahuatl? I want to understand the full structure, logic, and power of language.

>>16199840
It’s really not that bad, desu. I’ve only cringed at the opening verse of Early (dumb nigger smokes a blunt in front of a cop—happens all the time) and the weak Trump diss in their DJ Shadow feature. Cancer 4 Cure will always be my favorite though.

[Anonymous No.16199904]

>>16199886
Sapir-Whorf, at least the soft version, was never “discredited”. Most of the push back doesn’t have anything to do with scientific evidence but rather the potential “racist” consequences. As I’ve shown earlier, I’m willing to learn languages from every continent to grasp the full range of linguistic nuances if that’s what it’ll take, to have a trivium-like education for the modern era.

[Anonymous No.16199992]

For Latin I know there's the Lingva Latina books. Is there anything similar for Greek? Is it possible to attain fluency in Classic Greek, such that you could read and study classical works without resorting to English?

[Anonymous No.16200006]

>>16199992
What about something connected to learning linguistics?

[Anonymous No.16200007]

>>16199992
The general advice is to start with modern Greek and then work your way back since you'll get used to the alphabet, the vocab, and the general grammar.

[Anonymous No.16200061]

>>16199904
Sapir-Whorf may have an element of truth when applied to the one human language in general, but not its many dialects.

[Anonymous No.16200062]

>because of the entropy of language (compare modern Greek to classical Greek)
Languages don't develop in a straight line from a fusional Garden of Eden to an analytic Kali Yuga. Look up the typological cycle: an analytic language like English will eventually become agglutinative (and this process has already started -- cf. contractions like "don't"), and phonetic changes will cause word endings to combine, making the language fusional again.

[Anonymous No.16200199]

>>16200061
What do you mean? There is no one human language.

[Anonymous No.16200215]

>>16197714
I don't think languages are that off from each other. A natural language which has a base character in Being and everything derived from that is interesting. You'll learn more language complexity in computer languages and they're easier to learn

[Anonymous No.16200224]

Latin (Greek too but it's more of a commitment and thus more optional) is a great foundation for getting into linguistics because you have to learn it as a formalized dead system. This not only teaches you it "anatomically" in a way you would almost never get from studying a living language in a school today, like the OP quote suggests, it also makes you eager to go beyond the formal structure and learn the living history of the language that beats beneath it.

I can't really convey how fun it is to know Greek and Latin, and have to take a lot of things on faith and learn them by rote, like how certain conjugations contain redundant and this ambiguous forms overlapping with other conjugations, and then some Latin/Greek philologist tells you "oh those forms were initially different, the intervocalic sigma just dropped out, here look at this reconstruction of Homeric that retains the old forms."

Recently I read a some histories of early republican Roman inscriptions and they "feel" nothing like the Latin we know from the classical age. In one instant of reading them, I learned more about the Roman soul than I had in a thousand hours of reading Roman history, because I had the flash of insight that the Romans weren't "born Roman" but had to become the austerely "classical" Romans we know today over many centuries, hewing themselves out of Italic barbarian stock. Just by reading the old Italo-Latin MANIOS MED FHEFHAKHED instead of FECIT on the Praeneste inscription I could see so much, the affinities with Greek (aspirations, duplicated initial consonant to indicate the perfect, all the "rough" or "blunt" aggressive plosive consonants later elided in more elegant classical Latin), which then instantly made me visualize the migration routes of Proto-Indo-Europeans splitting into Proto-Greek and Proto-Italic groups and going down into their respective peninsulae and further splintering into Illyrians here, Sabians there, etc. You could give a hundred similar examples for Greek, hell in Plato's dialogues there are characters written as rednecks speaking a kind of backwoods Greek simply by changing the dialect.

Then more recently I read the Oaths of Strasbourg, one of the first documents where classicizing and formalized Medieval Latin is distinguished from living "Latinate" languages that were becoming French and Italian and so on, but at an early enough date that they still resembled a kind of backwoods simplified Latin, and alongside that is early medieval German, and again in one moment you can just see a thousand years of demographic, cultural, and linguistic flows and drifts interacting with one another to produce that document. You can just see a 7th century Italian reading bowdlerized post-Latinate proto-Italian versions of Virgil and thinking he's speaking the Latin of the Romans.

Great article:
https://www.degruyter.com/view/journals/joll/17/2/article-p191.xml

[Anonymous No.16200235]

>>16199825
>Any language with a case system and etymologically rich vocabulary will be superior
Very wrong. Look up semantic primes.

[Anonymous No.16200267]

>>16200062
Good post. So many retards fall for the "synthetic = good" meme

[Anonymous No.16200298]

>>16200224
I appreciate the post, was reading Loeb Plato dialogues and the language was drawing.

[Anonymous No.16200318]

>>16200199
>There is no one human language.
There is. That is why it is possible to describe natural languages with the same terms. Subjects, predicates, objects, nouns, pronouns verbs, adjectives, conjunctions, tense, names, reference, etc etc etc. It is one cognitive system - the medium of human thought - with different flavors. Sapir-Whorf applies to the human language faculty in general, not its various manifestations.

[Anonymous No.16200344]

>>16200224
>the Romans weren't "born Roman" but had to become the austerely "classical" Romans we know today over many centuries, hewing themselves out of Italic barbarian stock. Just by reading the old Italo-Latin MANIOS MED FHEFHAKHED instead of FECIT on the Praeneste inscription I could see so much, the affinities with Greek (aspirations, duplicated initial consonant to indicate the perfect, all the "rough" or "blunt" aggressive plosive consonants later elided in more elegant classical Latin),
interesting tbdesu

[Anonymous No.16200356]

>>16200318
How do I rigorously learn the "one" human language, in all its glory, precision, and possibilities?

[Anonymous No.16200379]

>>16200356
Not him but you have to analyze it back sorta like pie representations etc but based on more abstract things

[Anonymous No.16200392]

>>16200356
Study linguistics, basically. Syntax, semantics, etc.

[Anonymous No.16200443]

>>16200392
Linguistics doesn't really make you "practice" it like learning classical Latin or Greek, anon.

[Anonymous No.16200469]

>>16197714
That's pretty bad linguistics actually. Language rules and signs are arbitrary. They don't carry any meaning by themselves or outside of social convention. One of those social conventions say that such language is the language of culture or something like that.

Anyway if you like dead indoeuropean languages I would recomend sanscrit. You have plenty of stuff to read and you could grasp how related it is to greek or latin.

[Anonymous No.16200478]

>>16200443
Why would you want to further entrench the limitations that language imposes on thought?

[Anonymous No.16200502]

>>16197714
You could read Course in General Linguistics by Saussure. It's foundational and easy to understand.

[Anonymous No.16200503]

>>16200235
english seems to function on semantic primes, since our vocabulary is borrowed we don't understand the roots (unless its studied). in what way does this affect the way we think?

[Anonymous No.16200512]

>>16200478
Learning Latin or Greek forces you to think outside of your normal operating procedures for language.

[Anonymous No.16200610]

>>16197714
>Dear Sirs,

[Anonymous No.16200688]

>>16199992
Athenaze

[Anonymous No.16200701]

>>16200503
All languages can be boiled down to the same set of semantic primes

[Anonymous No.16200840]

>>16199886
>>16200062
>>16200267
>>16200478

[Anonymous No.16201267]

bump for saving the white race

[Anonymous No.16201727]

>>16199904
>racist

It's the opposite though

It says that language affects cognition, meaning if you speak a language with additional concepts you'll be able to conceptualise them.

The opposite would be racist or whatever, i.e. If your language doesn't have those concepts, it's because the native people were too cognitively limited to come up with them

[Anonymous No.16202368]

You guys are all misguided if you think the key to expanding your mind is to learn latin and greek. Cases and conjugations ain't shit, you have to go outside the Indo-European family if you really want the good stuff. I had a run-in with Nahuatl once and my brain still hasn't recovered.

[Anonymous No.16202461]

>>16202368
Yeah that small collected essays book of Whorf is a great read too

[Anonymous No.16202869]

Any thoughts on primarily using Lingua Latina/Athenaze/etc. vs primarily staring at grammar books like a retard?

[Anonymous No.16203093]

>>16199890
>Ge’ez
If you're not heavily into liturgical texts, I would recommend you rather learn akkadian since theres more to read and it's grammar(as far as I remember) is similar to what you're looking for

[Anonymous No.16203108]

>>16199890
Finnish is very good. Complex, flexible grammar and capability for nonsubjectual expression

[Anonymous No.16203180]

>>16197714
Writing Latin or any other language really is one of the best exercises for the mind there is. Having to pay extra attention to grammar frees up the imaginative part of your mind in an odd sort of way. There was some writer whose name I've forgotten that used to write everything in Latin first and then translate it into his native language. Really learning the classical languages is one of the best things a person can do for themselves.

[Anonymous No.16203190]

>>16197714
Πόσο σ' αγαπώ
πόσο σ' αγαπώ
σου το λέω και πονάω
πόσο σ' αγαπώ
Πόσο σ' αγαπώ
πόσο σ' αγαπώ
σε αγγίζω και σκορπάω
πόσο σ' αγαπώ
Μα εσύ μ' εκμεταλλεύτηκες
καθόλου δε με σκέφτηκες
τον λόγο σου δεν κράτησες
κουρέλι με κατάντησες εσύ
Μου 'χεις κάνει τη ζωή μου κόλαση
θα σου φύγω και θα φταις για όλα εσύ
μου χεις κάνει τη ζωή μου δύσκολη
κι όμως σ' αγαπάω ακόμα πιο πολύ
Μου 'χεις κάνει τη ζωή μου κόλαση
θα σου φύγω και θα φταις για όλα εσύ
μου χεις κάνει τη ζωή μου δύσκολη
κι όμως σ' αγαπάω ακόμα πιο πολύ
Πόσο σ' αγαπώ
πόσο σ' αγαπώ
μου χρωστάς
και σου χρωστάω
πόσο σ' αγαπώ
Μου 'χεις κάνει τη ζωή μου κόλαση
θα σου φύγω και θα φταις για όλα εσύ
μου χεις κάνει τη ζωή μου δύσκολη
κι όμως σ' αγαπάω ακόμα πιο πολύ

[Anonymous No.16203648]

>>16202869
>learn to read, speak, and think the language vs learn how to produce a shitty version of what you could get in a modern translation already

[Anonymous No.16203711]

Recommended Latin literature that doesn't require a background in the Greeks? A lot of classical writers seem to be heavily influenced by Greek lit and I haven't learned Ancient Greek.

[Anonymous No.16203841]

What is a way to get the natural grasp on latin?
So far all I can do (and have needed to for classes) is translate texts in a finite amount of time often with a dictionary.

I want to read Latin naturally even if I stumble a bit more.

>Just read and translate cicero non stop and increase my vocabulary?

[Anonymous No.16203874]

the brainchad is fluent in:
>English
>German
>Russian
>Mandarin
>Japanese
>Nahuatl
>Akkadian
>Hausa
>Finnish
>Sanskrit
>classical Latin
>classical Greek
Prove me wrong.

[Anonymous No.16203892]

is the ancient Greek verb system as scary as it looks? in retrospect Latin looks like a walk in the park in comparison

[Anonymous No.16203893]

>>16203841
Try reading some Livy.

[Anonymous No.16203948]

>>16203841
Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata. That, or find one of those hardcore Italian Living Latin groups.

>>16201727
I feel that it's not so much the MUH RACISM angle, but rather an understanding of how language itself works. If Sapir-Worf is right, then there are sort of hard-bounds on a language arising purely from the language itself (it is possible to construct a language where there is no way to make people think "red" or "hard"). This means that you can fit languages into nice little slots with clearly defined boundaries.

If the opposite is true, however, and there is no language that cannot express a given concept that some other language can (yes, Japanese has words for "love" and "emotions", yes, Bantu languages have words for "tomorrow" and "yesterday"). Language is just a big fuzzy mass and the borders are totally arbitrary and the "rules" don't really matter because everything is just relative to other things anyways and this offends a sort of Platonic idea of languages as being "things". Really, then, there are no "languages", there's just "languaging", with people languaging in different manners (sort of like how there are no "species", there's just many ways of "lifeing"). In short, what this guy says: >>16200224.

[Anonymous No.16204080]

>>16203948
>If the opposite is true, however, and there is no language that cannot express a given concept that some other language can (yes, Japanese has words for "love" and "emotions", yes, Bantu languages have words for "tomorrow" and "yesterday"). Language is just a big fuzzy mass and the borders are totally arbitrary and the "rules" don't really matter because everything is just relative to other things anyways and this offends a sort of Platonic idea of languages as being "things". Really, then, there are no "languages", there's just "languaging", with people languaging in different manners (sort of like how there are no "species", there's just many ways of "lifeing"). In short, what this guy says: >>16200224.
There's no way the truth isn't at least somewhere in the middle, where different languages have different barriers to expressing certain concepts over others, and that these differences can be measured in real-time. For example, look at the differences in the rate pf achievement between Finno-Ugric countries and the rest of Europe in their education systems, and it's similar to the differences in Mandarin and the rest of the world. Finnish, Estonian, and Mandarin have straightforward, "logical" names for their numbers, without any idiosyncrasies, making it easier for children to learn and manipulate numbers. Estonia is also a relatively poor country too, which makes its own achievements fascinating, too, and it's hard to not imagine that language has some role to play. Also, 1984 is basically the consequences of Sapir-Whorf but applied to the political dimension... so if Sapir-Whorf is wholly false, then there's no need to worry about 1984... which is also bullshit because things like political correctness and the lack of "buzzwords" to describe certain topics and concepts makes them much harder to pinpoint and work with.

[Anonymous No.16204603]

Boomp

[Anonymous No.16205701]

bump

[Anonymous No.16205771]

>>16204080
China, Estonia, Japan, and Finland do well because their populations have high IQs and their social systems are conducive to cultivating elites and putting them where they are best used. It has nothing to do with their language. If language was a significant impediment to actual quantitative things, then America wouldn't be a super power, and would never have gotten to space; France would have never gotten to be a world power (it doesn't even have words for certain numbers, and instead relies on constructs like "thirty-two minus two times four", to say nothing of its atrocious orthography). Japan does great despite having three (four if we count Romanji) writing systems.

The enormous distance between languages, however, is obviously why we think of them as being separate things. German and English share the same root, but the divergence occurred so far apart and over so much time that it's impossible to, easily, see how they diverge unless you collected documents from various points in their history and compare them.

On your point about 1984, this I think has more to do with media control and narrative setting than the actual language. As the Chinese demonstrate, you literally cannot engage in censoring a specific word or phrase, people will just retool it. Jogger, redguard, YOOF, we all know what these terms mean. Eventually you have to censor asdkfla;sfdjlskjdfalsdf because it's an attempt to get past a series of attempts at censoring "nigger". Yes, having a specific term for a concept makes it easier to work with, and can set the stage for how we think of it, but all languages can be used to express the same concepts. "Serendipity" isn't something Germans can't understand, for example, even if they lack a word for it.

[Anonymous No.16206339]

>>16205771
>China, Estonia, Japan, and Finland do well because their populations have high IQs
Their IQs are not much higher than the rest of Europe, if at all.
>their social systems are conducive to cultivating elites and putting them where they are best used.
Both Finland and Estonia actively eschew "splitting up" kids by capability and practice a more egalitarian approach to education. If anything, this is the complete opposite. Also, Estonia is much poorer (and also less homogeneous, 30% Russian nationals) than many lower-scoring nations as well.
>If language was a significant impediment to actual quantitative things
Nobody said it was a "significant impediment" in that it prevented anybody from achieving mathematical fluency. Rather, the difficulties in learning idiosyncratic number systems during early education causes many countries to fall behind relative to other countries whose language has a more rational system.
>As the Chinese demonstrate, you literally cannot engage in censoring a specific word or phrase, people will just retool it. Jogger, redguard, YOOF, we all know what these terms mean.
... if you have access to a neologism-forming community. The ability to censor and destroy words as they are created can permanently cripple a society's ability to create conceptual building blocks and realize even more complex ideas. Not everybody is as lucky.
>Yes, having a specific term for a concept makes it easier to work with, and can set the stage for how we think of it
Okay, so now we're on the same page. And if there are languages that are significantly more flexible, evocative, and precise in their capacity to express ideas, then anybody using those languages would be able to *do* more with the same amount of effort. It's not about limitation of higher thought, but rather efficiency and the ability to reach higher peaks with less effort. I'm sure that you could find statistically significant differences if one were able to find useful metric.

[Anonymous No.16206394]

>>16206339
>I'm sure that you could find statistically significant differences if one were able to find useful metric.
We have some. Check pic-related.

[Anonymous No.16207371]

bumperino

[Anonymous No.16208233]

>>16197714
Most of linguistics is focused on spoken language. Historical linguistics and orthography (written language) are subsets of the field, or perhaps more accurately they are two of the fields that are loosely grouped together under the umbrella of "linguistics." You will be missing out on almost all of linguistics if you focus on these subsets.

And for whether or not there are things to be learned from language which cannot be learned from Latin and Greek... yes, those will barely get you to 20% of the concepts you could learn.

If you want to know Latin and Greek just for historical reasons, learn Latin and Greek, and possibly Sanskrit if you're up for it. No need to toss in the word "linguistics."

>t. BA in Linguistics

[Anonymous No.16208314]

>>16208233
Contrary to popular belief, people really did actually speak Latin and Greek, and that's why people wrote in them. We know how these people talked, people speak these languages today, and if you want to learn them learning them as spoken languages is crucial. And there was no need to list a fucking baccalaureate credential, it was obvious from your post that you're a pseud undergrad.

[Anonymous No.16208440]

>>16203874
>no Middle Egyptian
Pseud.

[Anonymous No.16208598]

>>16206394
The Anglo wins again