Will ancient languages ever be revived? Or at least reconstructed to the point of being able to take classes?

A language is dead when it has no native speakers.

Berber still exist

>civ 5
Don't put much stock on that, the leaders' talk is pretty meh, even if they did try to get native speakers to record the lines.

let's just force Italians to stop speaking Italian and do traditional Latin until they subconsciously start thinking like Romans again

Is Latin really dead though? Hasn't the Catholic church used Latin for thousands of years?

What troubles me is that Cicero says Sardinians all spoke one tounge (not Latin) so they all spoke Phoenician?

Wow

They're not native speakers though, the pope for example is not a native speaking Latin.

anyone know how good Latin the top people in the church got? The pope and the bishops in the Vatican for example, do they speak fluent Latin? Do they use Latin when they speak to eachother in the vatican gardens? Or do they just use Latin when they recite texts?

It's been said already but unless there is a large scale effort it won't happen.

Sounds like complete bullshit

Ancient Greek: youtube.com/watch?v=Q5FHZx0oOqs

Modern:youtube.com/watch?v=gtmBaIKw5P4

>Sounds like complete bullshit

It's not.

>the language hasn't changed in 1800 years

It has stop trying to bullshit people

It hasn't changed much. The only things that have changed from Koine to current Demotic Greek is the grammar, and the fact that it has a lot of loanwords from other languages.

It doesn't take long for a modern Greek speaker to understand the Bible in Greek for example.

Not that guy but it hasn't changed much if you compare it to other languages atleast.

I mean go back 500 years and English becomes difficult for most native English speakers

While Koine Greek(spoken more than 2000 years ago) is no problem for a modern Greek to understand but Homeric Greek gets really difficult(not impossible)

Probably because greek needed to be revived after 600 years of ottoman control

They did not speak Greek at home atleast during the occupation?

Eh, Koine should be quite difficult to a modern Greek speaker if he has no knowledge of the old grammar. He'd probably understand all the words by themselves, but knowing who is the subject of what, and so on requires some reading.

The grammar is actually quite advanced compared to modern Greek.

Also, Homeric Greek is a whole other can of words because he uses extremely archaic variants of words(Such as Anax instead of Basileus), and he drops the definite article(ho, he, to) completely.

can of worms*

Its impossible foe the language to have changed so little in over 1800 years. So they would have to of revive it from an older version.

Well i'm not Greek but I once thought about learning it so I looked up a lot of shit and talked to some people and they all told me they(Greeks) could read the New Testament without much problem and Attic Greek, they could understand words here and there, so sometimes they could kinda get a sentence but if someone were to read to them in Attic greek, they wouldn't understand a thing.

>so little

What do you mean by "so little" though? There's nothing called "normal change" for a language over time, and different languages change based on what is going on in that specific part of the world.

So little that a modern day speaker could still read shit from 1800 years ago. It just doesn't happen naturally

And I'll also add that you are implying that no major events happened in greece for the past 1800s

Well, I studied Ancient Greek at university, and there was a Greek guy in my class, and apart from his pronunciation being dead on, he needed a lot of grammar practice to learn the language just like everyone else.

How do you know what ancient greek sounded like

>So little that a modern day speaker could still read shit from 1800 years ago.

Well you're not paying attention, because I've told you that it's highly unlikely that a modern Greek speaker would understand Koine or Classical Greek, because of grammar.

Like I said, they might understand half of the specific words, but they would have no idea which case it is in, or which gender the word is, and have problems with the conjugation of verbs.

We don't know. We just make educated guesses based mostly on what the Ancients wrote about their own pronunciation.

This is a good video explaining Modern/Ancient Greek if anyone is interested.

youtube.com/watch?v=6Xy7WahsS7I

Then why are you and others claiming the opposite

And
>half
Doubtful probably a few words and the rest of guesses

>Then why are you and others claiming the opposite

I'm not. The only thing I'm claiming is that the difference between modern and ancient Greek lies mostly in grammar and some pronunciation.

We really should take south korean's example and make up an artificial and worldwide language.

Comparative phonology.
The Greeks described, in words, what their letters sounded like.
The Romans described, in words, what the Greeks' letters sounded like.

It's too late for that. It would become a sort of SJW all-inclusive shit Esperanto type language.

English is set to become a world language anyway.

Should also mention, part of the reason we know how Classical Latin sounded like was because the Greeks wrote down what it sound like.(E.g when Greeks wrote about Cicero, they wrote Kikeron for example).

Indeed.

Certain people on this board seem to think the Greeks and Romans were incapable of linguistic knowledge.

There are multiple cases of Greek and Roman writers writing grammar books and explicitly describing how to pronounce letters:

> to pronounce 'v' place your...

my parents speak syriac or aramaic or whatever the fuck its called

Which actually goes to show how educated they were, which is hard to imagine since it's two millennia ago.

>trying to learn ancient greek
>realize when I'm saying p t and k I'm actually saying ph th and kh
>literally impossible for me to say p t and k

Another name for 'consonants' is 'mutes'; consonants cannot be pronounced without an accompanying vowel.

I guarantee that if you pronounce 'poo', 'too', or 'kool', you'll be pronouncing correctly.

The aspirates are more like the 'ph' in 'loophole', 'th' in 'boathouse', 'kh' in 'lakehouse'.

I mostly don't bother with distinguishing the aspirates from the unaspirates; pronounce everything as an unaspirate.

Why is it hard to imagine though? Free citizens in Rome could get an education in the form of the artes liberales. Most of them took the basic level, the trivium (grammar, logic and rhetoric). This of course results in most of the free citizens of Rome actually had a good if not great knowledge of their own language.

Not necessarily Phoenician, actually Proto-Sardinian/Nuragic was more probable, considering that there are still a lot of words from it in the modern, neo-latin Sardinian.

>I guarantee that if you pronounce 'poo', 'too', or 'kool', you'll be pronouncing correctly.
Most native English speakers always aspirate p, t, and k unless they are preceded by an s.

When I try to pronounce an unaspirated voiceless consonant without an s it just sounds voiced.

It depends, some are really good with Latin and some aren't. John Paul II spoke really good Latin, Benedict XVI also speaks Latin very well.

youtube.com/watch?v=g-NJNSBNsyk

It is certainly possible, but it requires A: major determination both in the populace at large and the state to promote the language and B: the language has to be documented enough to be reconstructed close to its original form.
Best example is Hebrew but Sanskrit also has a lot of support in India and has revived somewhat.
As I understand it there was a big debate after Greek independence over what form the standard language should be like, there was an intentional push for decades to push an archaic version of greek intentionally similar to ancient greek, but from 1976 onwards it gave way to the evolved vernacular.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katharevousa
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demotic_Greek
In general Italian is the lingua franca of the Vatican establishment