What are some of the best languages to learn for someone interested in literature and historical linguistics/philology? This goes for both modern and ancient languages. Concerning ancient languages, a very important plus for me would be if the language still has a good body of untranslated texts. As a less important side note, I am also interested in religions (like neo-paganism) and occult things.
I already know English and French.
Thomas Brooks
>already know English and French. Oh you're good then
Austin Smith
German and Russian. Chinese couldn't hurt.
Jordan Lewis
Italian is a goldmine
Lucas Sullivan
Could you elaborate please?
Jace Green
>literature and historical linguistics/philology Well these are kind of at odds. Generally 3-4 euro languages are optimal for getting the most our of literature. With Japanese and Mandarin too, maybe. But for historical linguistics/philology you don't want similar languages or languages that most decent literature are written in.
Isaac Turner
He's going to say that Dante was the greatest writer of all time but forget to mention that Dante wasn't written in modern Italian.
Ryder Wood
>interested in literature and historical linguistics/philology French won't help you there. German. Lots of obscure--enlightenment--people that haven't been translated for some reason. But German is an awful language.
I'd say Latin and Spanish.
Nathan Wright
>Spanish Spanish sounds way worse and is far less intellectually important than German.
Jordan Morris
Top 3 phillangs are Latin, Greek, German, in that order. Sanskrit if you're interested, wanna have a big philology e-peen, and/or hate yourself
Asher Reed
I'd say Latin/Greek, German or Russian. But all of them are a bitch to learn. I am German and learned Latin in school and university, so I am lucky in that sense - wouldn't want to try learning German as somebody with only a little contact to the language.
Austin Nelson
Latin and Greek.
John Martin
It was written in form of Italian that is perfectly understandable to a modern speaker of Standard Italian.
Nathan Wright
Exactly, go for Basque or something
Nathaniel Foster
Arabic is the most logical progression. Lots of untranslated texts, lots of history, lots of ancient sheeet. Don't waste your time with another European language.
But German is nice too.
David Clark
That sounds interesting. Could you explain to me what kinds of texts are in Arabic, particularly the untranslated ones?
Are there any obscure languages which would fit that bill that do have decent literature?
Jordan Diaz
I've heard Finnish has some old literature that is supposedly great but untranslated because the poetry would be lost in the translation.
Xavier Allen
Old english, latin
Kayden Torres
Isn't Beowulf the only thing worth reading in Old English? Wouldn't Ancient Greek be very more valuable in basically every way?
Ryan Sullivan
I think that this languages are basics: Spanish, English, French, German, Russian, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, Zapotec, Mixtec, tarahumara, nahuatl
Brayden Ward
How are those last three relevant?
Lincoln Lopez
Greek. Hands down Ancient Greek is one of the best languages if you're interested in anything ancient with a huge amount of untranslated texts. That and Latin, which covers fucking all of European history from the rise of Rome to the fall of the Holy Roman Empire. There's a goldmine of untranslated text there.
If you're specifically looking for occult or obscure religious material, Arabic or German might be good places to start, though to be honest I'm not too up to date on occult material older than the 20th century.
Jonathan Ross
That sounds awesome, thanks. The one thing that keeps me from just pulling the trigger and learning Ancient Greek is that it is supposedly insanely hard. Plus, I can never fully convince myself whether to do Greek or Latin. Do you have any insights on this?
Michael Wilson
If you're unsure between the two, then I would say Latin would be the best choice. It has a lot more resources to learn from and is easier to learn, with not nearly as many dialects and verb forms as Greek, not to mention that for a massive period of history pretty much every Central European country wrote in Latin for most of their texts, meaning that there's just a lot more material available.
If you do want to learn Greek down the line, then having a background in Latin is also a big plus, as there's a lot of vocabulary that's shared between the languages.
Cameron White
Sanskrit. Hindus figured out way more than we do today with billion dollars particle accelerator. Not even memeing. The based scientists today go straight to the source instead of wasting time with dated newtonian 'science'.
Liam Myers
Do you have any examples? This sounds a bit too good to be true.
On the other hand though, Greek literature seems, from what people tell me, more interesting. There is supposedly more of it (when only counting antiquity), and it covers subjects like myths, religion, and history, whereas Latin, from what I have heard, is mostly on law and politics.
Andrew Carter
It's already been posted, but sanskrit is mandatory from a historical/linguistic standpoint. It's basically the language of grammarians. With it's alphabet neatly acommodated according to quality of sound (velar, palatal, retroflex, etc...) It also has terms that have been adopted by most everyone. Sandhi the most relevant as english is a language of pure sandhi.
It's hard as fuck though.
Jack Bennett
Not that user but René Guénon's work is a good place to start with Hindu ontology and metaphysics.
Sebastian Foster
It seems very interesting, but compared to the amount of scholars who study Greek or Latin, it is minuscule. What particularly then is important for a modern historical linguist, if most of the things I can see were written in Greek or Latin?
Samuel Perez
>few scholars study it
Nigga what? Tons of grammarians, native and foreign, study it (Panini, Bopp, Muller, Egenes...) As for your other question, sanskrit predates greek and latin, many of their words can be traced back to a sanskrit dhatu. So it's actually more important if you plan on studying them. Just as the eternal anglos in here will tell you latin is important to deepen your knowledge of a romance language. Sanskrit is the latin of latin
Benjamin Morgan
i read that he wrote it when the italian as a language was beginning and it was basically italian.
Austin Watson
Meh, Ancient Greek is the Latin of Latin. Sanskrit would be a fuller Ancient Greek, but some elements are missing, such as PIE pitch accent. Despite rich grammar, Sanskrit does not make full use of it--not only just compared to Greek, but to most inflectional languages. The subjunctive mood is not at all used, fewer participles are really used; the default mode of composing in Sanskrit is just stacking as many nouns as you can get away with before you have to break off, use maybe a verb or a particle and get to building another gargantuan noun of at least six elements. It's a linguistic joke of a classical language. The poo in loos know what to do with their heritage no more than they know what to do with a toilet. Which, incidentally, the Indus Valley civilisation had earlier than anyone else.
Logan Ward
Indians on suicide watch.
Brandon White
If you're interested in historical linguistics, then presumably you're interested in particular language families. So, study those language families, I guess. For example, for development of European Indo-European languages, it would be useful to also know some Slavic languages, also Greek, Armenian, Albanian and some Baltic language. It would also be useful to read some introductory linguistics text, to get the basic ideas of phonemes, morphemes, and points of variation between languages. That might motivate you to study particular languages with particular properties that are interesting to you.
Ryan Wright
I know a good deal about linguistics, especially concerning phonology and morphology. I find etymology very enjoyable as well. I know which features I like, like certain cases and dental fricatives, but this doesn't really give me a good enough reason to learn a specific language.
I mostly like the Indo-European family, so I suppose Ancient Greek or Sanskrit would make sense. The problem is that both are huge time investments with no modern speakers. I am not against them, but a modern language would be easier, but it is hard to discern which one.
Gabriel Jenkins
Not natively obviously but there are actually a decent number of modern Sanskrit speakers.