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.
Same with me. Dad is Mexican and I took Spanish because I thought he could just help me every time I got stuck. At 15 years old it did not occur to me what a wasted opportunity it was that he never taught me.
I ended up learning Japanese later in life through tons of immersion and living in the country, and knowing what I know now I wish I could have explained how important bilingualism is to 15 year old me...or even my dad. It is the single most eye-opening thing I've ever done. Something about it just makes you so much more cognoscente about everything you say and do even in your native language. It's like I "came online" or something.
When I was born, my mother specifically requested that she teach me to speak Spanish. She refused to do so; when her own children were born, she had been forbidden from teaching them Spanish.
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.
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.
Right, but thinking is just one aspect of our experience of the world.
Skills, in a broader sense expand how and what you experience. Language does this to how we experience communication and expression. Reading in general does this too, but in different ways.
Like how you can't hear a word you know without understanding its meaning, expanded beyond language.
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.
does a snob not turn up their nose? and a snoop is someone who sticks their nose in other people's business. a snake literally sees with its nose... a snare entraps anything that dares to stick its nose in it, and a snack is definitely something you'd smell with your nose (and flavor is mostly scent-based)
A snob is someone who makes shoes, otherwise known as a cobbler.
You can't make the argument that words starting with sn- must have something to do with noses by reference to developments in the sense of a word that occurred many decades after the word was already current -- or by reference to developments in other parts of the language! By your standard, every word in every language "has to do with the nose".
I never said they must have to do with noses. My argument would be more like sn- words are more likely than a random word-start to eventually take on a connotation to do with noses.
In this sense, the development of word-senses after word-origination and with respect to developments in other parts of the language would be a fine argument.
I think, sometimes, people are so focused on etymology that they lose sense of why words evolve in meanings over time.
Tracing, for example, the genetics of various finches in the Galapagos, one might find a tree of ancestry and say that "this finch species came from this other, which in turn are derived from this common ancestor" (etymology for birds) -- and that this is why their beak is shaped in such and such a way (because of their ancestral tree).
To do so, however, would be to lose sight of the larger picture -- there are a variety of ecological niches in the galapagos suitable to different beak shapes, and these shapes (like crab body form) have evolved again and again.
The local ecology and niche structure determines a possibility space of beak shapes -- the specifics of which species was capable of competing within those niches as competition waxed and waned in each determines which species were most likely to evolve in which directions (or split and radiate into multiple beak shapes).
We have no problem understanding this for birds -- why is it so hard to conceive of something similar for words?
I'm probably showing my ignorance here, but if etymology and ancestry are paired concepts, what is the name of the word that means "why this word took on this sense", or "why this word stayed in the lexicon and evolved while this other word died out in usage"? The corollary to "evolutionary pressures" on words (and their semantics)?
> My argument would be more like sn- words are more likely than a random word-start to eventually take on a connotation to do with noses.
> In this sense, the development of word-senses after word-origination and with respect to developments in other parts of the language would be a fine argument.
That is true, but your arguments above don't speak to this point. Those are just random flights of fancy dedicated to defending a false idea. For example, snake is older than the phenomenon in question, always started with sn-, and hasn't changed relevantly in meaning.
By contrast, snack is generally believed to be an example of the sn-/nose correspondence. It's not because the concept was ever, or is now, related to noses, smells, or flavor. Rather, the connection is supposed to be that the mouth was viewed as part of the nose. (This makes a bit more sense as applied to animals than to humans.)
A basic prerequisite to arguing that snob developed the sense it did because of the supporting parallel existence of the expressions "turn up your nose" or "look down your nose" would be to show that those expressions predated the development in snob. That part of the argument works fine; "turning up your nose" is a very old concept. You'd also hope that the developments in snob didn't make sense on their own terms, because in that case there would be nothing left to explain by reference to noses, and in the case of snob that hope would be disappointed.
> I'm probably showing my ignorance here, but if etymology and ancestry are paired concepts, what is the name of the word that means "why this word took on this sense", or "why this word stayed in the lexicon and evolved while this other word died out in usage"?
My sense is that there is not a general word for your first question, but it is viewed as an important phenomenon and there are words for particular types of sense development, whereas there is not a general word for your second question, there is also no related specific terminology, and the usual feeling is that the answer to questions of that form is essentially always "chance", or in evolutionary terms "drift".
In fact, more 'study' has gone into your question than I think would have been wise. You might have heard about the theory of the "bear taboo", how the Indo-Europeans replaced the word for bear with euphemistic references to the features of bears.
You can find people arguing for this theory with a straight face today, but in my view there are two major problems:
(1) The word for bear was replaced in Germanic, Slavic, and Sanskrit. It was not replaced in Latin, Greek, or Persian; speakers of Spanish, French, and Farsi today are still going around referring to bears by their ancient proto-Indo-European root.
(2) In medieval France, the native word for fox was replaced by the Germanic word renard. In this case, we know there wasn't a taboo, and we know the source of the new word; we still have the body of literature - the Reynard the Fox stories - that supplied the modern French noun.
Do we know why common usage shifted? No; that's just a thing that sometimes happens. In English, the native word hound was replaced by dog, and we have no idea where the new word came from. But most native words for common objects did not change.
But this means that the only evidence we have for the bear taboo - the shift in usage - doesn't actually support the theory.
> Tracing, for example, the genetics of various finches in the Galapagos, one might find a tree of ancestry and say that "this finch species came from this other, which in turn are derived from this common ancestor" (etymology for birds) -- and that this is why their beak is shaped in such and such a way (because of their ancestral tree).
> To do so, however, would be to lose sight of the larger picture -- there are a variety of ecological niches in the galapagos suitable to different beak shapes, and these shapes (like crab body form) have evolved again and again.
One of Darwin's more important but less famous results from studying in the Americas was that tropical American plants more closely resembled temperate American plants than they did tropical old-world plants. This speaks directly to your point here, and labels it minor in comparison to the effect of common descent.
That is not to say that the effect isn't there (we know it is), or that the relative importance is equal between biology and language development (we don't know, but we can be pretty confident that they're not literally the same).
But languages, like biology, are characterized by quite a lot of stability, and this tends to limit the potential significance of any systematic force for change.
You seem pretty dedicated to misreading me in the least charitable way. I've noticed that linguists seem to have a particular bugbear about amateurs daring to tread in their territory.
My original 'argument' was really just a list of ways in which those words that someone else had listed as definitely unrelated might be considered related to noses, to which you replied "You can't make the argument that words starting with sn- must have something to do with noses by reference to developments in the sense of a word that occurred many decades after the word was already current". note the lack of me ever saying any argument at all (and certainly nothing about 'must') when just listing words and the ways that they 'could' be considered related to noses.
You then replied to my positing that there might be mechanisms besides sn- always meaning and having meant nose-related by misreading me again "your arguments above don't speak to this point. Those are just random flights of fancy dedicated to defending a false idea. For example, snake is older than the phenomenon in question, always started with sn-, and hasn't changed relevantly in meaning." Note, in the above clarification, I did not state that snake eventually came to hold that meaning, nor do I care at all about or mention 'the phenomenon in question' as relating to other words having to hold that meaning at the same time. Your counter-argument seems, again, completely orthogonal to what I'm saying.
The idea that 'turned up your nose at' or 'look down your nose at' also would have to be phrases in use for it to be a metaphor understood also seems, to be charitable, orthogonal to the point, as certainly at some point these phrases came into existence due to a correspondence with reality without them having existed prior -- and the idea that one line of evidence is 'sufficient to explain' and therefor the other lines are invalid is... not really how explanations work, in evolutionary contexts?
However, I've still upvoted you -- I appreciate your taking the time to engage on this subject, and it is clear that it is something you both care about and have expertise in.
In the future, perhaps consider when you write down combative phrases as to whether you're really arguing with the text at hand, or if you're arguing with a bunch of other imaginary foes who you've dealt with in the past, and use the principle of charity.
If instead of assuming arguments I didn't make, you tackled them in a more hypothetical manner (if this is what you're saying, this would be problematic because, etc), you might find your blood pressure and conversations in general improve.
Either way, thank you for the enlightening discussion. I wish you the best, and a happy holiday season!
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.)
Old Norse is a Nordic langauge, which makes it a North Germanic language, which, in turn, makes it a Germanic language.
Nordic languages (a family of languages) are descended from Proto-Nordic (a language).
Germanic languages (a family of languages) are descended from Proto-Germanic (a language).
Germanic languages are Indo-European languages, which have Proto-Indo-European as a root language.
You are not wrong in saying that Proto-Germanic and Old-Norse are IE languages. But it's also like saying that nickles and coins are currency, it doesn't mean that nickels are not coins.
.jpg){kind=link}
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.