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artzmeister commented on A closer look at the Tabula Peutingeriana   blog.datawrapper.de/roman... · Posted by u/gmays
fngjdflmdflg · 2 years ago
>many ideals that are still present in today's governments

Rome existed for more than a thousand years, and for five hundred of those years there was only an emperor (who didn't refer to himself as a king). I will give you that Rome was good at building but that doesn't stop it from being a dark age. And while Greece was mostly left alone they did not "flourish" and their output significantly decreased. The Romans were anti intellectual and cared more about their traditions than understanding the world. That's why the Romans used Greek statue building techniques to make status of themselves and of the Emperor instead of the gods like Greece did. To Romans they were their own gods. They didn't care about the natural world or about philosophy. They actually became better at statue building than the Greeks (after hundreds of years) which would probably be listed by you as a "Great Roman Achievement" but it's just the result of Aping Greek culture. The Romans themselves were in a sense aware of this; they would use Greek in official documents and would at times dress up in Greek Togas/Chitons. Caesar's Et tu, Brute? was actually spoken in Greek.

artzmeister · 2 years ago
Is your point entirely based on statues an emperors? None of what you said proves anything and you make baseless claims about them not caring about the natural world or philosophy. Bother to read actual Roman and Greek sources of the time and you will find yourself contradicted soon (Plutarch's Parallel Lives might be of use, then Cicero, etc). Seems clear to me that this opinion is not your own.
artzmeister commented on A closer look at the Tabula Peutingeriana   blog.datawrapper.de/roman... · Posted by u/gmays
fngjdflmdflg · 2 years ago
>Like other things from their technology.

Like what? The Greeks advanced science and mathematics. The Romans sacked Greece and pillaged their artifacts. They didn't advance science or mathematics at all. Rome was a 1,000 year dark age.

artzmeister · 2 years ago
I would expect this answer from a reddit thread or a youtube comment, but not from HN. One would think such a silly and ignorant view of history would not be found here, but alas, it was.

Yours seems to be one of those opinions that can be summed up as "lol Greeks good Romans steal" when there is no shortage of technology and civil law improvements the Romans brought to light. To mention a few: a senate, aqueducts, urban planning, sanitation, civil engineering much better than that of the Greeks (see domes and arches), many ideals that are still present in today's governments, farms of quasi-industrial level production, and so forth.

That the Greeks made more developments in Maths is true - it was more of a cultural thing anyway. Your post also completely ignores the fact that Greece flourished under Roman rule and managed to keep many of its freedoms, with the protection of a giant empire. Romans also distributed Greek texts to all corners of the known world, wherein learned people could be found.

Your comment seriously sounds like that of a child, not at all something of the level of HN.

artzmeister commented on Anselm's Ontological Argument: A Guide for the Perplexed   philosophicaldisquisition... · Posted by u/tintinnabula
artzmeister · 2 years ago
Anselm's argument did not stand the test of time. Plato's and Aquinas' did, though :)
artzmeister commented on Advent of Code 2023 is nigh   adventofcode.com/2023/... · Posted by u/i13e
artzmeister · 2 years ago
common lispers unite
artzmeister commented on New Outlook is good, both for yourself and 766 third parties   godforsaken.website/@Shri... · Posted by u/commoner
zrezzed · 2 years ago
If you care about strongly about privacy... choose your email provider accordingly.

If Outlook is your company's email provider... the third parties are the concern of your IT department.

If you're not hit by one of those two conditions... why are you using Outlook? This feels like unwarranted outrage bait.

artzmeister · 2 years ago
Regardless of the reason, calling out such behaviour is always good, more so since many millions use outlook still.
artzmeister commented on Choose the browser that best suits your privacy needs   tuta.com/blog/best-privat... · Posted by u/grammers
artzmeister · 2 years ago
One additional bit of recommendation for Firefox: the Tridacyl extension only works on it.

It's a vim motions extension that works much better than the ones on Chrome/Brave. You can use it on every page except the Firefox settings, etc.

artzmeister commented on Ancient Echoes   etymonline.com/columns/po... · Posted by u/pcmaffey
marginalia_nu · 2 years ago
Literally every skill I mentioned does exactly that. It's very palpable, like the world gains additional colors.
artzmeister · 2 years ago
There is some element of truth to what they said, though. Not to take away from these other examples, but it is more than seeing new nuances, as in, it can become an entirely new paradigm of thinking. In English, things feel very limited and strict, and your expressiveness (so I find, at least) has an upper limit. With something like Latin, you can express more, with less, and in completely new ways that you would not think about at all in English.

There is more to this argument, but this is a good start, I think.

artzmeister commented on Ancient Echoes   etymonline.com/columns/po... · Posted by u/pcmaffey
LoganDark · 2 years ago
I think it's just that you are the type of person to learn Latin :)
artzmeister · 2 years ago
Hehe could be :)
artzmeister commented on Ancient Echoes   etymonline.com/columns/po... · Posted by u/pcmaffey
ajmurmann · 2 years ago
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.
artzmeister · 2 years ago
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.

artzmeister commented on Ancient Echoes   etymonline.com/columns/po... · Posted by u/pcmaffey
triyambakam · 2 years ago
Do you have any resources to recommend?
artzmeister · 2 years ago
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 :)

Happy learning!

u/artzmeister

KarmaCake day58October 16, 2023View Original