There is benefit to all in learning Latin. I cannot explain it, it's one of those things you just have to experience.
Not to mention that it will become a gateway drug... Attic Greek, Sanskrit, Syriac, Aramaic... I don't know them just yet, but Latin makes me want to learn it all!
I think Latin, like so many things, gets taught in school to people who are too young to appreciate it. Latin in school was mostly a nuisance to me. The only students who got really into it were those that took it as an additional elective later. I now wished I had made more of an effort in the Latin class. That said, even now I study languages in my spare time but choose once that are currently in use.
Sure, but if I may digress a bit, don’t fool yourself into thinking that if you had paid more attention to the lessons you would actually have learned more. You might, but maybe not as much as you think. As a teacher myself, I believe that people put too much weight and unfair expectations on the formal process of learning, especially in the classical structure we have in most schools/universities.
It goes something like “I need to learn X; let me take a course on that, surely this will do it.” But then two things happen: the feeling that, by taking the course, you are doing what needs to be done in order to learn, you get lazy and sit back and expect it to happen passively. It won’t. Second, your teacher might not actually be very good, which is fine (most of us have no idea what constitutes “good teaching” in any repeatable way) and might give you lessons and assignments that may be more of a waste of time than anything else.
My point is: if you want to learn something, just go and do it. Odds are you are probably doing better than if you were in a course. If you are doing a course, then consider it as “time slot allocated to X” and try to be as independent and proactive as you can; it is much better than relying on a teacher.
I agree. When in school, I had very little interest for learning English and Spanish, or languages in general. Now, with newfound maturity and curiosity, I'd like to learn lots of them and about them.
There is also the issue of approach: learning the grammar of a foreign tongue before the rest is tedious and will bring kids very little. If, however, you learn my immersion and naturally, then you are sure to be hooked. That's how I learned English anyway, on my own.
Learning almost anything sufficiently new will do that to you. Dabble in calligraphy and letters will never quite look the same again. Get into dance or poetry and you'll appreciate entirely new nuances to music.
For sure! The book that gets the most amount of praise and the one I personally used and can highly recommend is `Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata Pars I: Familia Romana` or LLPSI, for short.
It is a "natural method" book, which means it teaches you the language using the language itself. This may seem hard and counter-intuitive, but it starts off really easily, with sentences that just about anyone could understand, and there are images to help you visualize things. The advantage of this method is that it teaches you an intuitive understanding of the language, as if you were learning by immersion. That is how humans generally learn languages: we don't think of grammar when we read or speak, we just do it.
That isn't to say you won't learn grammar, but rather, it means that grammar will be a complement, not your main focus. For grammar-related queries, Allen & Greenough's dictionary is a really good one. You can find it hosted online by the Dickinson College.
As a dictionary, there are the Latinitium ones, which are really good, and serve Latin to English as well as the contrary. For support and to see what other Latinistas are up to, there is the Latin & Ancient Greek discord server (sorry, I don't have the link on me right now), and from there you can join the LLPSI one.
What I did was to read a bit every day of either LLPSI I & II or some more advanced books when I was able to for about a year and a half. Now, I can read a lot by Cicero and some other authors. It's well worth it :)
Etymonline.com is one of my favorite websites. I had no idea it had a blog though - thanks for posting. I love the description of English as “Built from half-Frenchified Roman marble and local wattle-and-daub.”
James Nicoll said, "English doesn’t borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over and goes through their pockets for loose grammar." For example, geyser (Icelandic), ski (Norwegian), mesa (Spanish), physics (Greek), pyjama (Persian), algebra (Arabic, along with the algorithms--and of course 'algorithm' comes from Arabic too), kayak (Greenland Inuit by way of Danish), canoe (Arawak by way of Spanish), banana (Wolof), coolie (probably from Tamil), hula (Hawai'ian), origami (Japanese), chimpanzee (probably from a Bantu language), alphabet(Canaanite by way of Greek), and...well, you get the idea. Also countless placenames, like Seattle (Salish).
Most of those words exist also in a number of European languages. Not a good example for the mixed nature of English that makes it stand out; pointing to its combination of inherited Germanic lexicon and French loans would be better.
Indeed, beware any popular treatments of the history of English, which might give you pithy quotations like the one you cite above, but have so often been sloppily written by non-experts.
BTW: The image on the page is "Der Abend" ("The evening") from Caspar David Friedrich's "Tageszeitenzyklus" ("Time of Day Cycle") from 1821/22. The reproduction on the page seems to be somewhat overexposed. Wikipedia has it a lot darker: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caspar_David_Friedri... -- I personally have not yet seen the original painting, but in view of other Caspar David Friedrichs and considering its title, the darker version seems more accurate to me.
There's not much to elaborate, tons of practical use cases for search, sort and storage rely on alphabetization. If you move through an analog world of organized data, you'll find and develop many practical approaches to interacting with data based on knowing the key and the alphabetic ordering. Whether it's a phone book, a map, a dictionary, or filing systems, alphabets were always used as an indexing mechanism.
I dreame of a setmoot wishtongue that riddes English of the mute endes and comes again to the grounde and wefte that Roman-speak still ownes.
He writes, he is a writer. I sleepe, I be a sleeper. For truth, there is Anglish, but the end speakes akin to a Scotch pirater. My setmoot wishtongue has a lilt like Swedish chef.
Old Norse is Germanic so I'm not sure whether you're suggesting those words entered the English vocabulary later, with the Vikings, of which I'm sure there are examples. On a side note, I liked seeing "swike", which would have been nice for Swedish speakers if it was still in use in English today.
> Old Norse is Germanic so I'm not sure whether you're suggesting those words entered the English vocabulary later, with the Vikings, of which I'm sure there are examples.
There are many. Often the native word coexists with the borrowed Norse cognate, as in yard / garden or shirt / skirt.
give is, I believe, subject to some debate. Without Norse influence, it would be pronounced yiv. People argue over whether it should be thought of as a borrowing from Norse or as a reversion of the pronunciation of the English word in a Norse-heavy environment. (etymonline has the second of those theories; wiktionary has the first.)
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Not to mention that it will become a gateway drug... Attic Greek, Sanskrit, Syriac, Aramaic... I don't know them just yet, but Latin makes me want to learn it all!
Nice article.
It goes something like “I need to learn X; let me take a course on that, surely this will do it.” But then two things happen: the feeling that, by taking the course, you are doing what needs to be done in order to learn, you get lazy and sit back and expect it to happen passively. It won’t. Second, your teacher might not actually be very good, which is fine (most of us have no idea what constitutes “good teaching” in any repeatable way) and might give you lessons and assignments that may be more of a waste of time than anything else.
My point is: if you want to learn something, just go and do it. Odds are you are probably doing better than if you were in a course. If you are doing a course, then consider it as “time slot allocated to X” and try to be as independent and proactive as you can; it is much better than relying on a teacher.
There is also the issue of approach: learning the grammar of a foreign tongue before the rest is tedious and will bring kids very little. If, however, you learn my immersion and naturally, then you are sure to be hooked. That's how I learned English anyway, on my own.
It is a "natural method" book, which means it teaches you the language using the language itself. This may seem hard and counter-intuitive, but it starts off really easily, with sentences that just about anyone could understand, and there are images to help you visualize things. The advantage of this method is that it teaches you an intuitive understanding of the language, as if you were learning by immersion. That is how humans generally learn languages: we don't think of grammar when we read or speak, we just do it.
That isn't to say you won't learn grammar, but rather, it means that grammar will be a complement, not your main focus. For grammar-related queries, Allen & Greenough's dictionary is a really good one. You can find it hosted online by the Dickinson College.
As a dictionary, there are the Latinitium ones, which are really good, and serve Latin to English as well as the contrary. For support and to see what other Latinistas are up to, there is the Latin & Ancient Greek discord server (sorry, I don't have the link on me right now), and from there you can join the LLPSI one.
What I did was to read a bit every day of either LLPSI I & II or some more advanced books when I was able to for about a year and a half. Now, I can read a lot by Cicero and some other authors. It's well worth it :)
Happy learning!
Indeed, beware any popular treatments of the history of English, which might give you pithy quotations like the one you cite above, but have so often been sloppily written by non-experts.
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Snake, snare, and snack also come to mind.
He writes, he is a writer. I sleepe, I be a sleeper. For truth, there is Anglish, but the end speakes akin to a Scotch pirater. My setmoot wishtongue has a lilt like Swedish chef.
Read Chaucer aloude and he singes.
There are many. Often the native word coexists with the borrowed Norse cognate, as in yard / garden or shirt / skirt.
give is, I believe, subject to some debate. Without Norse influence, it would be pronounced yiv. People argue over whether it should be thought of as a borrowing from Norse or as a reversion of the pronunciation of the English word in a Norse-heavy environment. (etymonline has the second of those theories; wiktionary has the first.)
No, Old Norse is Old Norse.
"Germanic" (i guess you mean Proto-Germanic) and Old Norse are both indo-european languages.
They come from Indo-European roots and are older than Old Norse or Old English. Cognates are also found in Slavic and Roman languages: