I’ll admit I took Latin as my language requirement at University since it was the only language without a language lab. Here I am 15 years later watching all your videos and getting into it again. Thank you!
Two of my favorite academics, with two of the most engaging channels of highly dependable, relevant explorations of comparative language. Thanks, Gentlemen.
I do Ancient Greek at Uni, and I do remember very distinctly last semester when it got HARD. 😂 What keeps me sane, is just kind of going with the flow and accepting that this damn river is never going to be the same in two different places.
Thanks to yall both I was inspired to learn my peoples language that has been extinct for almost 60 years. Trying to get a text translated in it currently
Ich hätte mir nie im Leben vorstellen können dass ihr euch zwei wirklich trefft finde ich unglaublich macht weiter so ich wünsche euch beiden nur von Herzen das Beste
This was just too good! I greatly admire Luke from polymathy, and Jackson Crawford with the Old Norse . A few others as well including Aleph with Beth doing the Ancient Hebrew.
@@polyMATHY_Luke There’s another channel for learning Koine Greek called Alpha with Angela. And Jackson Crawford did a collab video with Simon Roper who specializes in Old English.
I grew up with some German and Croatian on either side of the family. Basic kids stuff, enough for tourism easily. Of course, this meant I did very well in German before college. Latin is really what gave me my love of languages, though, and I had to take Latin I and II twice before I had what I considered any proficiency to go further. I found ON easier, but I'd already embarked on Icelandic. I love Catullus, for easy poetic Latin. Excellent collaboration, as always!
Must also add that I consider Latin the most perfect language I've encountered. The syntax is a bit rough at first, but I found it really helps with understanding more obscure tenses and historical phrasing sometimes.
I've taken both Latin and Old Norse language and literature courses and funnily enough, two of the lecturers recommended us to watch you guys in your own respective channels to ease the learning. it is awesome to see you both in videos together! Grammar books offer a concise presentation of grammar and as such can often be difficult to understand. It seems like no matter how many times you read the exposition, you simply cannot make sense of it. Channels like these two (three) put these expositions in a different light and thus straightens the learning curve for us students. I can speak for many of my peers, we are indeed grateful for your effort, both of you. I truly hope you deem the youtube activism as productive and fruitful, because it is worth much more than a book for us. We got plenty of books, but we only got two of you. (Also wrote this on Crawford's video)
Some people say that learning classical languages like Latin has become much harder for Anglophones since English teachers abandoned formal grammar in the 1970s. Several years of parsing, particular analysis and general analysis of English words and sentences in primary school gave children a head start before tackling Latin in high school. Without that background, they are better off learning another modern language first, to get over the taboo on grammatical terminology.
Having Finnish as my native language I think has helped me a lot with learning Latin grammar, as there's a lot of correlation between the two in that area, even if it's not always one-to-one.
Inflection of nouns is great. Having learned Russian, I sometimes wonder how someone learning English can ever figure out the role of a word in a long sentence. The problem I have with Latin (having had 2 years in high school at the same time I started Russian) is that there are _too_ _many_ different declensions compared to Russian. Then there are those verb tenses. From my very limited survey of languages, it seems that verbs are always the stumbling block. Perhaps because they and their tenses and aspects and moods, etc., are more abstract than, say, a brick. Edit: Maybe I just didn't stick w/ Latin long enough to get used to the declensions, but I think the patterns in Russian are easier even though there are 5 (6-ish) cases like Latin.
How to Learn English: exactly like you join an Anabaptist church. Immersion only! Hardly any declension or conjugation-we have nothing left except strong verbs and cases for pronouns. Is English basically garbage in my opinion? Yes. But the user base has reached critical mass.
As a non-native speaker: it’s usually easy to figure out what role a word plays, but what is really hard is that a verb can look exactly the same as a noun and an adjective, combined with a refusal to write compound words as single words. It’s not the inflections that I miss, it’s that different word classes look different from each other (and the refusal to accept compounds, even though they are *clearly* there in spoken English).
@@peterfireflylund It’s funny you mention about the refusal to accept spoken compound words in writing because I had a discussion with my roommate yesterday where this was brought up. I was talking about how I write the exact way I talk, and that includes writing words as a compound if they are combined in speech or separating compound words if they would be separated. A high school English teacher might not appreciate it, but I feel like it’s way more effective at communicating.
@@BobbyHill26 it’s really jarring to someone like me who both has some linguistic training and also knows other Germanic languages that the English teachers -x who should know better! - insist on such a comically wrong orthography. (And what’s up with “what”? Who got the order of the first two letters wrong?) Most of the time, though, I love the English language.
I want to learn to speak Latin, and I knew that a lot of English words come from Latin with certain standard transformations (posterity = posteritas), so I went through my Cassells dictionary, word by word, and noted all words that are almost the same in English as Latin. I found that right "out of the gate" so to speak I had a vocabulary of about 1487 words. I also noted, as I found them, any example phrases that I thought might be handy. As an added benefit, I found a few English words that I did not know, like vituperator, spelled exactly the same in Latin and English.
You do have to be somewhat careful though because sometimes a Latin word is not necessarily translated best by its English equivalent. So take, translatus. Pretty obvious that the word is equivalent to translate. It really means "to carry across". In English when we translate something from X to Y, we're "carrying across" X to Y, but we use this term almost exclusively to refer to languages, while in Latin it has a much broader meaning (like carrying a case of wine over to your friend's house). Latus is the past participle of the verb ferre, so while translated would seem the most obvious translation of translatus (meta af), transferred might be a better word for more general purposes, even though the connection is not immediately obvious unless you remember that ferre has suppletive forms with tuli in the perfect and latus in the past participle, and even though transferred is an Anglicized version (there is no transferatus in Latin). And likewise when going from English to Latin in your brain you should consider whether or not Latin would use the Latinized word in that context.
Both the large number of cognates and the notion that Latin tends not to have hidden surprises is rather encouraging. Especially so, given my experiences with Ancient Greek and Mandarin...
I regularly attend a Latin mass so I have memorized several prayers and responses in Latin. The other day I recited the "Our Father" in Latin to a Cuban and he said that he could follow it, but didn't really understand it. I study Spanish regularly and I think the differences between Latin and Spanish are about as great as they are between Modern English and Old English to making the language nearly unintelligible.
Luke you are an inspiration. I had no idea you were so accomplished outside of the language realm. Can't wait for more videos in this series, Old Norse and Latin are the two ancient languages I want to learn most.
What pre-Latin languages existed before total Romanization in Italy other than ETRUSCAN and GREEK? Was their OSCAN or UMBRIAN? Are they all vanished modes of speech no longer learnable? Were they related to Latin or different entirely like Etruscan? Are there any Oscan or Umbrian texts or inscriptions being found in Italy, and if so, are they decipherable?
I watched this video because of my excitement for my next semester where I start learning Attic-Greek, and I can't agree enough that Latin is really ''Reglulegt'' as we say in Iceland or ''According to (it's) rules'' and It never stabs you in the back, It can also be really really enjoyable and its a recommendation for everyone who is planning on learning an Ancient or ''Dead'' Language. It sure has thrown me into this new realm of expertise which I'm excited to learn more about!
Some words in Spanish seem much more similar to germanic languages. For example Fuego (Fire) has an F not a P, as Pyro. Guerra (War) instead of Bellum. I imagine that some words came from the Visigoths.
Latin so far seems to be not just learnable, but somewhat easy, actually. It feels just Russian with funny word roots and slightly altered inflections. General logic is the same, except we don't drop parts of sentences that often. And if we do, we drop different parts. For example, out of "ego sum" we would more likely drop "sum", not "ego": Mihi nōmen Basileus, ego discipulus, discō Latīnam.
One difficulty I experienced as I started learning and reading Old Norse compared to Latin is how confusing the endings are. It's a problem when trying to find the verb and subject etc, when you're not confident yet. In Latin the syntax is all-over the place but at least the verb endings are (mostly) verb endings, -t and -nt especially, it's easier to find which words go with what, and then cognates do quite a lot of heavy lifting. In Old Norse, except the quite recognizable -t-/-d-/-ð- of weak verbs, most endings can be on anything (and often they can mean anything) : -a, -u, -ir, -r, -um ... can all be put on nouns or on verbs and most words just look the same from the outside, you have to know the vocabulary.
This is quite peripheral to the subject matter of this video, but I just realized that Crawford narrated and translated a particular rendition of the poetic edda that I've listened to a lot and have thoroughly enjoyed.
One thing I learned from Latin is that you have to know your writer if you want to easily understand him. If you spent a month reading Seneca it would be natural to read it as you adapt to his way of speaking and writing. Tacitus might seem terrible, but after a while you expect hint to speak on a given pattern that you already know. For the same reason, to understand Demosthenes, you we'd a lot of practice, and what might seem odd and convoluted to a casual reader becomes natural to someone who spent time with his writings. BTW if Prof. Crawford thinks Latin is messy, give him a test of ancient Greek! 🤣🤣🤣
Yes, the syntax and the word endings make the Latin language framework totally incomprehensible to ANY neo-latin speaker while any speaker can easily get access to almost any other contemporary language.
spoken Persian is pretty much the same syntax wise. I break the supposed rules all the time as a native speaker. So picking up latin wasn't that much hard, in fact it was strange to me that English has such harsh rules about word order.
@@arma5166 well when you realize that word order is the only thing that can even partially make up for the loss of grammatical case… (in terms of specifying the function of a word) it makes sense then. [edit: adding an example] Ich gab den Hund dem Könige. German has cases so to be absolutely clear about the situation and not ambiguous, ‘den’ and ‘Hund’ should stay together and so should ‘dem’ and ‘Könige’. The words can be in any order. English: I gave the king the dog. If you don’t want to be forced to add words, this is the only word order possible.
Very often, while translating from inflective languages to non inflective ones, I realised that there was a sharp loss of "meaning". This of course can happen with any idiomatic expression too but it would be interesting to see a comparison between old languages Vs modern conterparts like Latin => Italian, Old Norse => scandinavian languages and Old German => Modern German. Let's see if I can start writing some examples.
If English was like Latin, “the shoe is blue” would become “shoeam blueam is” and “the shoes are blue” would become “shoearum bluearum are.” (IIRC, that is). All the modifiers drive one crazy because they don’t just apply to the subject, but to the adjective as well; and that’s on top of the verb conjugations as well. English in some ways is incredibly simple with limited verb conjugations and subject-object relationships always determined by the order with the verb in between. But then we have so many things that don’t follow the rules and homonyms that are confusing, loan words from French and Latin, that a simplified language can also be difficult in other ways. I like to think that English, coming from the backwater of Northern Europe, is like the “white trash” language of the equivalent of a Medieval trailer park. Any Latin speaking person would see the simplified conjugations and lack of modifiers as primitive.
@@arma5166 Those word order rules are important in English precisely because the conjugations are limited and it’s often necessary to understand what’s being done to what. In many other languages, the conjugations tell one who is doing what, but that doesn’t exist but to a limited degree in English. The word “go” is the same regardless of whether it’s I, you, they, or we that is going. It only modifies for he/she to “goes.” Of course the subject/object order isn’t always necessary: “go I to the store” would probably work just as well as “I go to the store.” But because there are so many cases where it wouldn’t work, I guess it was decided to keep it simple and maintain the subject-verb-object order. 🤷🏻♀️
Learning Latin has been surprisingly intuitive for me as I am a native speaker of Spanish and Polish. Latin is kind of like Spanish vocabulairy with Polish grammar. The cases mostly line up, the free word order works more or less the same and so on.
my favorite Latin author is Petronius, and I find his syntax in the satyricon oddly approachable, both in the prose and poetic parts, though the poetry is obviously harder
I always wanted to learn Japanese and Latin, honestly Latin is easier than Japanese for me, but they're both pretty hard. German was very easy for me, so I want to learn ON at some point as well. I had an interest in Chinese/Cantonese and Russian but I have to put a cap on things if I ever want to achieve half my goals lol
To me, Japanese was way easier to learn than Latin is, at least grammar wise. If you can understand Latin cases, you can understand Japanese particles and agglutination, they feel like the same concept. But particles are easier to remember than case endings for me.
I took two years of mandatory Latin in high school and two more years as an elective. As a native Croatian speaker, I didn't have too much trouble with grammatical cases. The way they work isn't different from Croatian. Verbs are a bit more difficult as Croatian doesn't have that many verbal forms. I tried to study a bit of Ancient Greek on my own, but I found it to be MUCH more difficult. The grammar and syntax are just way more different.
always watch your videos to keep the thought in my head that i really do want to learn latin, i spent four years in high school with a fantastic teacher who really inspired me. one day i'll be able to understand it, but my god executive dysfunction is an aggressive nightmare when trying to learn languages lol, though semi-conveniently, by comparison, the actual retaining, applying, and synthesis of language is actually easier... anyways, thank you for making videos like this
I’m Irish and after reading about hiberno-Latin and watching your videos I’m determined to learn it. Moreover I was never any good at Irish, English on the other hand I’ve always excelled at.
how you describe fairly free word order and no articles kind of reminds me of slavic languages. Edit: specifically for Polish, my native language, the dropping of "I/You" also
Is there any evidence of exchange between Germanic languages and Latin related to the Visigoth settlement in Spain and Portugal? For example, I've heard that surnames like Rodriguez means "Son of Rodrigo". Could that be related to the Germanic/Norse custom of patrinomic surnames? I know it sounds tenuous, but was curious.
As a Spaniard, it is quite exotic to see two cowboys talking about Latin and Old Norse, languages that we relate to such intrinsic European and ancient peoples! Strangely enough, even if I tried hard, I cannot read Greek and Roman Classics in English. It is too odd to me, like if my brain is telling me that something is off, like seeing Die Hard in Arabic! Is that a sort of sinestesia 😋? Does it have a name? I can read them in Romance languages 😳. I wonder if it is because I focus a lot on culture, history, and geography when I study a language... Listen to you in this video it’s a pleasure in any case! I studied only one year of Latin at High School and I was pretty good guessing the meaning of non cognate words, as if they were hidden in some corner of my brain. We translated classical texts, maybe I just have heard those stories before, or maybe because by getting most of the cognates first, it’s easier to get those that are not, but usually the right or a quite similar meaning came to my mind. By the way, I think I saw some feathers and axes lurking just behind that rock beside you guys… watch out! 😜
How much of the old Roman Empire spoke the same type of Latin, even in its prime. Could it be similar to English at the time of Chaucer for example? I can imagine the Iberian Latin being different than Latin in Gaul which is different to that in Rome proper due to influences by the natives.
This has been much studied, so I recommend JN Adams’ books. In effect the differences were quite small until the dissolution of the Western Roman state. This is consistent even in the English speaking world, where American accents were not distinguished from British ones until the 1850s. See also this: ua-cam.com/video/HgRxuPzdInI/v-deo.html
As an Spanish speaker, I would say that it would be hard to read correctly a phrase, but it would be mostly easy to understand what separate words mean.
Have you ever heard of Coptic? it is a language that is Linked to the language that the Ancient Egyptians spoke. Coptic is basically a modern day version of the Ancient Egyptian language it is dead, but is mainly spoken in church hyms.
thnx for the interesting vid! i've made that spanish understanding latin experiment long time ago on my spanish colleagues (chemists). they all failed ;-) in one ancient (1939) czech comedy movie from high school envirinment, there are even jokes on unintelligibility of latin word order in poetry. latin was mandatory on grammar schools (klasické i reálné gymnázium) and it was a nightmare for students.
Native Portuguese-speaker with a good knowledge of French and Spanish and a reasonable knowledge of Italian here. Italian seems 100% foreign to me. Word order, morphology and, to some extent, even the fucking vocabulary... Grammar-wise, I'd say Latin resembles German a lot more than any Western Romance language, odd though it may seem.
Been learning, on A Major Online Language Platform, a bit of Czech, which is fairly highly inflected. This makes the word order really pretty flexible, but not, as I've discovered by way of frequently getting it wrong, *completely* flexible. Still don't have a feel for what's allowed and what isn't. (Anecdotally, I've found school Latin very, very helpful in learning Czech and also German. English speakers often struggle with the whole idea of case, despite English retaining pronominal case. School Latin gives you a way in to those mysteries. I haven't properly learned, say, Finnish or Hungarian, and I do wonder if it would work on those...)
I might argue that the modern Romance languages are a combination (for lack of a better word) of Latin vocabulary and late Germanic syntax (i.e., subject, verb, object).
No mention of Saxo Grammaticus For me that would be essential to a crossover between an expert in old Norse and an expert in classical Latin Still liked the video though
I've learnt to read Latin to a scratchy intermediate level, but the part I have found most difficult is committing to memory all the grammatical inflections/tables etc. It's very, very patchy. It's certainly hampering my development from imperfect intermediate to even advanced intermediate, let alone true advanced.
He’s not just esteemed, he’s Old Norse specialist Dr. Jackson Crawford
Funny, he doesn't look that old ...
@@clintharper8906 hahahahaha
I love Old Noerds
Cowboy hat, leather jacket from the army, extensive knowledge of latin. This man is a legend.
While Latin may never betray you, if my understanding of history is correct, its original speakers would have done so readily!
I’ll admit I took Latin as my language requirement at University since it was the only language without a language lab. Here I am 15 years later watching all your videos and getting into it again. Thank you!
Two of my favorite academics, with two of the most engaging channels of highly dependable, relevant explorations of comparative language. Thanks, Gentlemen.
Grateful for the support
I could listen to these two talking, like, Omg, ad infinitum! 😄
Always a top quality collaboration, excited for this one!
I never knew Luke was a captain in the US army :)
I do Ancient Greek at Uni, and I do remember very distinctly last semester when it got HARD. 😂 What keeps me sane, is just kind of going with the flow and accepting that this damn river is never going to be the same in two different places.
herakleitos reference?
@@elijah_oofoof8891 Yep! 😂
Simply two gigachads, what the legends...
I really need to start learning Latin. It seems like a challenge but totally worth it as well
Star here ua-cam.com/play/PLU1WuLg45SiyrXahjvFahDuA060P487pV.html
The collab we've all been waiting for
Greatest crossover event in history the Viking vs the gladiator.
These Collabs are the best way to start my day
Thanks to yall both I was inspired to learn my peoples language that has been extinct for almost 60 years. Trying to get a text translated in it currently
Wow! May I know what that language is?
@@muhdzafri7551 Miwok dialects
@@vysheslavuzumati1269 That's beautiful, the Utian languages are fascinating. Best of luck learning & connecting with your heritage!
Not a related language, but Daybreak Warrior has amazing videos on Navajo. Hope that gives you inspiration!
Ich hätte mir nie im Leben vorstellen können dass ihr euch zwei wirklich trefft finde ich unglaublich macht weiter so ich wünsche euch beiden nur von Herzen das Beste
This was just too good! I greatly admire Luke from polymathy, and Jackson Crawford with the Old Norse . A few others as well including Aleph with Beth doing the Ancient Hebrew.
Yes, I also admire AwB ua-cam.com/video/00U7FKV33pM/v-deo.html
ua-cam.com/video/dme8fvY2dNw/v-deo.html
@@polyMATHY_Luke There’s another channel for learning Koine Greek called Alpha with Angela. And Jackson Crawford did a collab video with Simon Roper who specializes in Old English.
I grew up with some German and Croatian on either side of the family. Basic kids stuff, enough for tourism easily. Of course, this meant I did very well in German before college.
Latin is really what gave me my love of languages, though, and I had to take Latin I and II twice before I had what I considered any proficiency to go further.
I found ON easier, but I'd already embarked on Icelandic.
I love Catullus, for easy poetic Latin.
Excellent collaboration, as always!
Must also add that I consider Latin the most perfect language I've encountered. The syntax is a bit rough at first, but I found it really helps with understanding more obscure tenses and historical phrasing sometimes.
Catullus is filthy?! Ti vrapca!
I've taken both Latin and Old Norse language and literature courses and funnily enough, two of the lecturers recommended us to watch you guys in your own respective channels to ease the learning. it is awesome to see you both in videos together!
Grammar books offer a concise presentation of grammar and as such can often be difficult to understand. It seems like no matter how many times you read the exposition, you simply cannot make sense of it. Channels like these two (three) put these expositions in a different light and thus straightens the learning curve for us students. I can speak for many of my peers, we are indeed grateful for your effort, both of you. I truly hope you deem the youtube activism as productive and fruitful, because it is worth much more than a book for us. We got plenty of books, but we only got two of you. (Also wrote this on Crawford's video)
Thanks very much! Glad to hear it
Some people say that learning classical languages like Latin has become much harder for Anglophones since English teachers abandoned formal grammar in the 1970s. Several years of parsing, particular analysis and general analysis of English words and sentences in primary school gave children a head start before tackling Latin in high school. Without that background, they are better off learning another modern language first, to get over the taboo on grammatical terminology.
I have found this to be generally true.
One day I will. Make videos like you guys I am into linguistics since I am 12 and I started to learn Italian ^^
This collaboration is pure gold!
Having Finnish as my native language I think has helped me a lot with learning Latin grammar, as there's a lot of correlation between the two in that area, even if it's not always one-to-one.
Have you ever tried to learn hungarian? 😅
@@Dai_Abdurrahman nah
I was thinking the same when Luke said "rock see", "kiven näen" or "näin kiven".
The world can never have enough Luke x Dr. Crawford!
its a trilogy! Hope for more of this epic crossover!
Decology.
Stay subscribed.
What a reversal, seeing Jackson as the black hat villain and Luke as the hero.
I absolutely love this collab series. You two work great together
Inflection of nouns is great. Having learned Russian, I sometimes wonder how someone learning English can ever figure out the role of a word in a long sentence. The problem I have with Latin (having had 2 years in high school at the same time I started Russian) is that there are _too_ _many_ different declensions compared to Russian. Then there are those verb tenses. From my very limited survey of languages, it seems that verbs are always the stumbling block. Perhaps because they and their tenses and aspects and moods, etc., are more abstract than, say, a brick.
Edit: Maybe I just didn't stick w/ Latin long enough to get used to the declensions, but I think the patterns in Russian are easier even though there are 5 (6-ish) cases like Latin.
How to Learn English: exactly like you join an Anabaptist church. Immersion only!
Hardly any declension or conjugation-we have nothing left except strong verbs and cases for pronouns.
Is English basically garbage in my opinion? Yes. But the user base has reached critical mass.
As a non-native speaker: it’s usually easy to figure out what role a word plays, but what is really hard is that a verb can look exactly the same as a noun and an adjective, combined with a refusal to write compound words as single words. It’s not the inflections that I miss, it’s that different word classes look different from each other (and the refusal to accept compounds, even though they are *clearly* there in spoken English).
@@peterfireflylund It’s funny you mention about the refusal to accept spoken compound words in writing because I had a discussion with my roommate yesterday where this was brought up. I was talking about how I write the exact way I talk, and that includes writing words as a compound if they are combined in speech or separating compound words if they would be separated. A high school English teacher might not appreciate it, but I feel like it’s way more effective at communicating.
@@BobbyHill26 it’s really jarring to someone like me who both has some linguistic training and also knows other Germanic languages that the English teachers -x who should know better! - insist on such a comically wrong orthography.
(And what’s up with “what”? Who got the order of the first two letters wrong?)
Most of the time, though, I love the English language.
@@peterfireflylund It must be maddening how English speakers love to verb nouns.
I want to learn to speak Latin, and I knew that a lot of English words come from Latin with certain standard transformations (posterity = posteritas), so I went through my Cassells dictionary, word by word, and noted all words that are almost the same in English as Latin. I found that right "out of the gate" so to speak I had a vocabulary of about 1487 words. I also noted, as I found them, any example phrases that I thought might be handy. As an added benefit, I found a few English words that I did not know, like vituperator, spelled exactly the same in Latin and English.
Don’t forget deponents in -or. Humor, rumor, tumor, etc.
You do have to be somewhat careful though because sometimes a Latin word is not necessarily translated best by its English equivalent. So take, translatus. Pretty obvious that the word is equivalent to translate. It really means "to carry across". In English when we translate something from X to Y, we're "carrying across" X to Y, but we use this term almost exclusively to refer to languages, while in Latin it has a much broader meaning (like carrying a case of wine over to your friend's house). Latus is the past participle of the verb ferre, so while translated would seem the most obvious translation of translatus (meta af), transferred might be a better word for more general purposes, even though the connection is not immediately obvious unless you remember that ferre has suppletive forms with tuli in the perfect and latus in the past participle, and even though transferred is an Anglicized version (there is no transferatus in Latin).
And likewise when going from English to Latin in your brain you should consider whether or not Latin would use the Latinized word in that context.
Take example over our French Language, a Gallo Romance
I like it when Luke mumbles "Hypotactic, good word."
Yeah, I had to look it up: the Latin word subōrdinātus is the Roman calque from Ancient Greek.
The Ultimate Crossover Episode carries on.
Luke, Jackson, and Simon 😁🥰 My guys.
You may also like Dr Crawford’s friend Dr Luke Gordon over at his channel Word Safari
Both the large number of cognates and the notion that Latin tends not to have hidden surprises is rather encouraging. Especially so, given my experiences with Ancient Greek and Mandarin...
I regularly attend a Latin mass so I have memorized several prayers and responses in Latin. The other day I recited the "Our Father" in Latin to a Cuban and he said that he could follow it, but didn't really understand it. I study Spanish regularly and I think the differences between Latin and Spanish are about as great as they are between Modern English and Old English to making the language nearly unintelligible.
Spanish absorbed Gothic and Arabic over 1000 years. Italian is so much closer.
You two are so fun to watch together! Cheers!
Thank you for incredibly interesting conversation. I listen to this not only to learn, but also to pretend I’m smart.
Luke you are an inspiration. I had no idea you were so accomplished outside of the language realm. Can't wait for more videos in this series, Old Norse and Latin are the two ancient languages I want to learn most.
Thanks. The latest one was published today
What pre-Latin languages existed before total Romanization in Italy other than ETRUSCAN and GREEK? Was their OSCAN or UMBRIAN? Are they all vanished modes of speech no longer learnable? Were they related to Latin or different entirely like Etruscan? Are there any Oscan or Umbrian texts or inscriptions being found in Italy, and if so, are they decipherable?
I watched this video because of my excitement for my next semester where I start learning Attic-Greek, and I can't agree enough that Latin is really ''Reglulegt'' as we say in Iceland or ''According to (it's) rules'' and It never stabs you in the back, It can also be really really enjoyable and its a recommendation for everyone who is planning on learning an Ancient or ''Dead'' Language.
It sure has thrown me into this new realm of expertise which I'm excited to learn more about!
Much obliged for the comment. Good luck on your journey
Como siempre!! Gracias por haberme inspirado a aprender. Magnífica conversación .
Gracias Daniela
Some words in Spanish seem much more similar to germanic languages. For example Fuego (Fire) has an F not a P, as Pyro. Guerra (War) instead of Bellum. I imagine that some words came from the Visigoths.
Fuego comes from Latin focus. Guerra is germanic
You are wrong, fuego come from latin focus, and pyro is greek not latin.
8 seconds after it was posted propably the best i've ever done
Latin so far seems to be not just learnable, but somewhat easy, actually. It feels just Russian with funny word roots and slightly altered inflections. General logic is the same, except we don't drop parts of sentences that often. And if we do, we drop different parts. For example, out of "ego sum" we would more likely drop "sum", not "ego": Mihi nōmen Basileus, ego discipulus, discō Latīnam.
One difficulty I experienced as I started learning and reading Old Norse compared to Latin is how confusing the endings are. It's a problem when trying to find the verb and subject etc, when you're not confident yet. In Latin the syntax is all-over the place but at least the verb endings are (mostly) verb endings, -t and -nt especially, it's easier to find which words go with what, and then cognates do quite a lot of heavy lifting. In Old Norse, except the quite recognizable -t-/-d-/-ð- of weak verbs, most endings can be on anything (and often they can mean anything) : -a, -u, -ir, -r, -um ... can all be put on nouns or on verbs and most words just look the same from the outside, you have to know the vocabulary.
This is quite peripheral to the subject matter of this video, but I just realized that Crawford narrated and translated a particular rendition of the poetic edda that I've listened to a lot and have thoroughly enjoyed.
One thing I learned from Latin is that you have to know your writer if you want to easily understand him.
If you spent a month reading Seneca it would be natural to read it as you adapt to his way of speaking and writing.
Tacitus might seem terrible, but after a while you expect hint to speak on a given pattern that you already know.
For the same reason, to understand Demosthenes, you we'd a lot of practice, and what might seem odd and convoluted to a casual reader becomes natural to someone who spent time with his writings.
BTW if Prof. Crawford thinks Latin is messy, give him a test of ancient Greek! 🤣🤣🤣
When I saw the thumbnail I legetimatally shouted : Avengers, Assemble!
Latin grammar was surprisingly familiar after studying Japanese. Word order didn’t bother me.
The two titans finally collided!!!
Yes, the syntax and the word endings make the Latin language framework totally incomprehensible to ANY neo-latin speaker while any speaker can easily get access to almost any other contemporary language.
spoken Persian is pretty much the same syntax wise. I break the supposed rules all the time as a native speaker. So picking up latin wasn't that much hard, in fact it was strange to me that English has such harsh rules about word order.
@@arma5166 well when you realize that word order is the only thing that can even partially make up for the loss of grammatical case… (in terms of specifying the function of a word) it makes sense then.
[edit: adding an example]
Ich gab den Hund dem Könige.
German has cases so to be absolutely clear about the situation and not ambiguous, ‘den’ and ‘Hund’ should stay together and so should ‘dem’ and ‘Könige’. The words can be in any order.
English:
I gave the king the dog.
If you don’t want to be forced to add words, this is the only word order possible.
Very often, while translating from inflective languages to non inflective ones, I realised that there was a sharp loss of "meaning". This of course can happen with any idiomatic expression too but it would be interesting to see a comparison between old languages Vs modern conterparts like Latin => Italian, Old Norse => scandinavian languages and Old German => Modern German. Let's see if I can start writing some examples.
If English was like Latin, “the shoe is blue” would become “shoeam blueam is” and “the shoes are blue” would become “shoearum bluearum are.” (IIRC, that is). All the modifiers drive one crazy because they don’t just apply to the subject, but to the adjective as well; and that’s on top of the verb conjugations as well.
English in some ways is incredibly simple with limited verb conjugations and subject-object relationships always determined by the order with the verb in between. But then we have so many things that don’t follow the rules and homonyms that are confusing, loan words from French and Latin, that a simplified language can also be difficult in other ways.
I like to think that English, coming from the backwater of Northern Europe, is like the “white trash” language of the equivalent of a Medieval trailer park. Any Latin speaking person would see the simplified conjugations and lack of modifiers as primitive.
@@arma5166
Those word order rules are important in English precisely because the conjugations are limited and it’s often necessary to understand what’s being done to what. In many other languages, the conjugations tell one who is doing what, but that doesn’t exist but to a limited degree in English. The word “go” is the same regardless of whether it’s I, you, they, or we that is going. It only modifies for he/she to “goes.” Of course the subject/object order isn’t always necessary: “go I to the store” would probably work just as well as “I go to the store.” But because there are so many cases where it wouldn’t work, I guess it was decided to keep it simple and maintain the subject-verb-object order. 🤷🏻♀️
Learning Latin has been surprisingly intuitive for me as I am a native speaker of Spanish and Polish. Latin is kind of like Spanish vocabulairy with Polish grammar. The cases mostly line up, the free word order works more or less the same and so on.
my favorite Latin author is Petronius, and I find his syntax in the satyricon oddly approachable, both in the prose and poetic parts, though the poetry is obviously harder
Litterae thesaurum est et artificium nunquam moritur
Just two language nerds with big hats talking aboot Latin
just the asmr i need
What a fascinating discussion! 😃 🤠
I always wanted to learn Japanese and Latin, honestly Latin is easier than Japanese for me, but they're both pretty hard. German was very easy for me, so I want to learn ON at some point as well. I had an interest in Chinese/Cantonese and Russian but I have to put a cap on things if I ever want to achieve half my goals lol
To me, Japanese was way easier to learn than Latin is,
at least grammar wise.
If you can understand Latin cases, you can understand Japanese particles and agglutination, they feel like the same concept.
But particles are easier to remember than case endings for me.
I took two years of mandatory Latin in high school and two more years as an elective. As a native Croatian speaker, I didn't have too much trouble with grammatical cases. The way they work isn't different from Croatian. Verbs are a bit more difficult as Croatian doesn't have that many verbal forms.
I tried to study a bit of Ancient Greek on my own, but I found it to be MUCH more difficult. The grammar and syntax are just way more different.
in Portugal until like 30/40 years ago we leaned latin in school.
always watch your videos to keep the thought in my head that i really do want to learn latin, i spent four years in high school with a fantastic teacher who really inspired me. one day i'll be able to understand it, but my god executive dysfunction is an aggressive nightmare when trying to learn languages lol, though semi-conveniently, by comparison, the actual retaining, applying, and synthesis of language is actually easier... anyways, thank you for making videos like this
I’m Irish and after reading about hiberno-Latin and watching your videos I’m determined to learn it. Moreover I was never any good at Irish, English on the other hand I’ve always excelled at.
The word order flexibility is used for emphasis, attitude, etc.... At least in the Slavic languages.
A wonderful crossover
14:40 The same with Classical Chinese, there is so much Classical Chinese written in the 20th century and many people just completely pass over it.
amazing content. thank you both of you.
A brutal crossover, amazing!
My two favourite UA-cam guys.
Noice one mate
Exciting collab
WHAT! This team up is epic!
how you describe fairly free word order and no articles kind of reminds me of slavic languages.
Edit: specifically for Polish, my native language, the dropping of "I/You" also
Is there any evidence of exchange between Germanic languages and Latin related to the Visigoth settlement in Spain and Portugal? For example, I've heard that surnames like Rodriguez means "Son of Rodrigo". Could that be related to the Germanic/Norse custom of patrinomic surnames? I know it sounds tenuous, but was curious.
As a Spaniard, it is quite exotic to see two cowboys talking about Latin and Old Norse, languages that we relate to such intrinsic European and ancient peoples! Strangely enough, even if I tried hard, I cannot read Greek and Roman Classics in English. It is too odd to me, like if my brain is telling me that something is off, like seeing Die Hard in Arabic! Is that a sort of sinestesia 😋? Does it have a name? I can read them in Romance languages 😳. I wonder if it is because I focus a lot on culture, history, and geography when I study a language... Listen to you in this video it’s a pleasure in any case!
I studied only one year of Latin at High School and I was pretty good guessing the meaning of non cognate words, as if they were hidden in some corner of my brain. We translated classical texts, maybe I just have heard those stories before, or maybe because by getting most of the cognates first, it’s easier to get those that are not, but usually the right or a quite similar meaning came to my mind.
By the way, I think I saw some feathers and axes lurking just behind that rock beside you guys… watch out! 😜
im a bit late. but really amazing. great dicsussion with jackson :)
How much of the old Roman Empire spoke the same type of Latin, even in its prime. Could it be similar to English at the time of Chaucer for example? I can imagine the Iberian Latin being different than Latin in Gaul which is different to that in Rome proper due to influences by the natives.
This has been much studied, so I recommend JN Adams’ books. In effect the differences were quite small until the dissolution of the Western Roman state. This is consistent even in the English speaking world, where American accents were not distinguished from British ones until the 1850s. See also this: ua-cam.com/video/HgRxuPzdInI/v-deo.html
Brokeback Mountain sequel looks great!
sorry (not sorry)
🤣🤣
Thanks for another great video!
Favourite chapter was Elk hands down
As an Spanish speaker, I would say that it would be hard to read correctly a phrase, but it would be mostly easy to understand what separate words mean.
From the background I thought this was Crawford's channel :D
When I read the Vulgate I feel like such a star but anytime I read something classical, I struggle so much.
best duo ever
Where were you two? I can't stop looking at the background -- it's fantastic. Reminds me of parts of southern CA.
Colorado
What😲 how you two get together 😲 i didn't expect this
Have you ever heard of Coptic? it is a language that is Linked to the language that the Ancient Egyptians spoke. Coptic is basically a modern day version of the Ancient Egyptian language it is dead, but is mainly spoken in church hyms.
thnx for the interesting vid! i've made that spanish understanding latin experiment long time ago on my spanish colleagues (chemists). they all failed ;-) in one ancient (1939) czech comedy movie from high school envirinment, there are even jokes on unintelligibility of latin word order in poetry. latin was mandatory on grammar schools (klasické i reálné gymnázium) and it was a nightmare for students.
Had a moment of confusion when the channel name popped up. I thought I was on Dr. Crawford's channel. 😆
Thank you for this video!!!! Prof X and Magneto
There is also Julius Caesar and Tacitus.
Native Portuguese-speaker with a good knowledge of French and Spanish and a reasonable knowledge of Italian here. Italian seems 100% foreign to me. Word order, morphology and, to some extent, even the fucking vocabulary... Grammar-wise, I'd say Latin resembles German a lot more than any Western Romance language, odd though it may seem.
I want to learn Latin so I can sound like an ancient vampire supervillain that's been alive for 2,000 years.
Start today! I started last year and I am already at a high intermediate level.
Been learning, on A Major Online Language Platform, a bit of Czech, which is fairly highly inflected. This makes the word order really pretty flexible, but not, as I've discovered by way of frequently getting it wrong, *completely* flexible. Still don't have a feel for what's allowed and what isn't.
(Anecdotally, I've found school Latin very, very helpful in learning Czech and also German. English speakers often struggle with the whole idea of case, despite English retaining pronominal case. School Latin gives you a way in to those mysteries. I haven't properly learned, say, Finnish or Hungarian, and I do wonder if it would work on those...)
Perbellissime!
You should make a comparison video between old Norse and latin
Saya tidak bisa bahasa Inggris... Tp saya suka pemandangan di video ini.. Salam kenal dari Indonesia.
Ask John Milton. He pretty much already had it when he entered grammar school. BTW, will Latin unlock Finnegans Wake?
I might argue that the modern Romance languages are a combination (for lack of a better word) of Latin vocabulary and late Germanic syntax (i.e., subject, verb, object).
Ottima, docta chiacchierata, La ringrazio tantissimo Magister Luke.
When I saw the thumbnail, I burst out laughing, because it made me think of Brokeback Mountain. 😄😄
No mention of Saxo Grammaticus
For me that would be essential to a crossover between an expert in old Norse and an expert in classical Latin
Still liked the video though
Stimmt
I've learnt to read Latin to a scratchy intermediate level, but the part I have found most difficult is committing to memory all the grammatical inflections/tables etc. It's very, very patchy. It's certainly hampering my development from imperfect intermediate to even advanced intermediate, let alone true advanced.
The avengers of linguistics