Western languages 4 canon?

You must have known...

why italian>german?

Germanophobe

english
russian
french
italian
german
spanish

>Old Norse

>De Rerum Natura

Doesn't even compare to Horace or Catullus or even Statius as far as poetry goes. Lucrretius has his moments but for every bit of

"Suave, mari magno turbantibus aequora ventis
e terra magnum alterius spectare laborem;
non quia vexari quemquamst iucunda voluptas,
sed quibus ipse malis careas quia cernere suavest.
suave etiam belli certamina magna tueri
per campos instructa tua sine parte pericli;
sed nihil dulcius est, bene quam munita tenere
edita doctrina sapientum templa serena,
despicere unde queas alios passimque videre
errare atque viam palantis quaerere vitae,
certare ingenio, contendere nobilitate,
noctes atque dies niti praestante labore
ad summas emergere opes rerumque potiri."

there are like a hundred bits of

"Nec tamen haec simplex nobis natura putanda est.
tenvis enim quaedam moribundos deserit aura
mixta vapore, vapor porro trahit aëra secum;
nec calor est quisquam, cui non sit mixtus et aër;
rara quod eius enim constat natura, necessest
aëris inter eum primordia multa moveri."

Which is all very interesting stuff but it's not great poetry. There's a reason you don't see many poets writing about physics and most of what Lucretius wrote about was physics.

He's very much worth reading but putting him next to Ovid and Vergil seems goofy to me.

Take your spic speak behind the wall where it belongs compadre

liberal trying to parody a conservative detected

better luck next time

I didn't fail if you replied

I'm a conservative, and I object to your inaccurate and obviously biased parody. Real conservatives value culture!

I'll translate loosely and lazily for the illiterati:

"It is a sweet thing, when the winds stir up the plains of the great sea, to watch the great travail of another from land; not because it is a pleasant thing for someone to be in trouble, but because it is sweet to behold the evils from which you are free. It is also sweet to behold the great battles of war drawn in array when you have no part in the danger; but nothing is so agreeable, than to hold a well-walled, tranquil temple constructed after the teaching of the wise, from which you can look down on others and see them straying all over, wandering and seeking the way of life, competing in abilities, contending in nobility, strinvg night and day with surpassing labor to come to great wealth and to control things."

And the second bit:

"Nevertheless this nature [of the soul] must not be thought of as simple [i.e. composed simply of heat]. For a thin breeze leaves those who are dying, mixed with vapor, and the vapor brings the air with it; nor is there any heat, into which air is not mixed; its nature is of a loose texture, so many atoms of air must move within it."

>English: King Lear, Paradise Lost, Ulysses

Amerifats BTO and on sudoku watch.

America is English, we are just mentally ill and in denial

Or if you want to see a really crazy passage, interesting but plodding poetry, when he tries to describe subatomic particles:

Tum porro quoniam est extremum quodque cacumen
corporis illius, quod nostri cernere sensus
iam nequeunt, id ni mirum sine partibus extat
et minima constat natura nec fuit umquam
per se secretum neque post hac esse valebit,
alterius quoniamst ipsum pars primaque et una,
inde aliae atque aliae similes ex ordine partes
agmine condenso naturam corporis explent;
quae quoniam per se nequeunt constare, necessest
haerere unde queant nulla ratione revelli. "

"And furthermore since there is a final Summit of every atom, which our senses already cannot perceive, it certainly must exist without parts and be of the smallest nature, nor has it ever been apart nor ever will be able to be, since it is itself the first and only part of another; thence other similar parts in order in a dense formation fill the nature of the atom; since they cannot exist on their own, it is necessary that they adhere whence they cannot be torn away."

It goes on for a long ways after in the same way.

Lucretian woman, get away from me
I'm going to heaven, the gods I will see
Don't go telling me gods aren't real
I don't want feel that atomist feel
No woman
Said get away
Epicurean baby, darlin' let me be!

Man that was the most surprising thing about Lucretius for me was how much contempt he had for erotic love. He says you should sleep with prostitutes and avoid getting entangled in any Relationshit. Love is just another passion that perturbs the atoms of the soul and leads to pain.

Also his idea (or probably Epicurus' I guess) that the proof that the gods are real is that people all over the world see them in sleep/fevers/insanity (which, if you believe Suetonius, Lucretius knew something about, being attacked by episodes of psychosis throughout his life that were set off by a love potion).

All things emit films which cause vision when they strike the eyeball. The Epicureans thought the films of the gods somehow make it from the intermundia (the spaces between universes) into our eyeballs where they bounce around our brains to come up at certain times. So the gods are real but we don't need to worry about them and they don't worry about us. You should perform the customary sacrifices but have no fear of them.

true dat

But the most remarkable thing about Lucretius is how his very exposition of Epicureanism subverts that philosophy. A materialistic, hedonistic philosophy like Epicureanism has no real means of dealing with suffering (like in Solzhenitsyn's In The First Circle, when the Epicurean bureaucrat Volodin is being inducted into the GULAG and "at that moment Innokentii Volodin would have foregone all the pleasures of his life for a little truth and justice"). You have this massive contradiction.

"nequaquam nobis divinitus esse paratam
naturam rerum: tanta stat praedita culpa."

"By no means was this Nature prepared by the gods: it is endowed with such fault."

But

"illud in his rebus video firmare potesse,
usque adeo naturarum vestigia linqui
parvola, quae nequeat ratio depellere nobis,
ut nihil inpediat dignam dis degere vitam"

"I see that I can prove this: that so many small tracks of the natures of things have been left [i.e. that we can follow like dogs after the truth of reality], which reason cannot drive from us, that nothing prevents us from living a life worthy of the gods."

As if removing ourselves from pain and seeking pleasure, even in the most enlightened fashion, could give us lives worthy of the gods in this vale of tears! When Lucretius himself describes man as a "vas pertusum" - "a punctured vessel" - that cannot hold onto any of the pleasures he receives!

And I could cite other quotes on either side within the poem. Lucretius must have been aware of the contradiction but he didn't do anything to resolve it.

He did, however, choose to end his poem with a hair-raising account of the Plague of Athens, the family members of the dead fighting violently for space on the funeral pyres. These are the last lines of the poem:

"Inde bonam partem in lectum maerore dabantur;
nec poterat quisquam reperiri, quem neque morbus
nec mors nec luctus temptaret tempore tali."

"And so the better part of the people were bedridden with anguish, and no one could be found unafflicted by sickness or death or grief."

And he did choose to end his life by his own hand.

It's funny how people like to make list of 10+ languages yet can't read anything but English translations. What about learning one, to begin with?

OP here,
I'm focusing on Latin, first. I just hope I get to the rest. I might not, but it's a nice goal.

You can't learn a language in a matter of months. You should consider being fluent in three, four ones by the time you're 35 as a great achievement.

Si vous apprenez le Latin correctement vous pourrez acquérir une langue romane dans quelques semaines.

some people can

Sure, people with cosmopolite background like Nabokov, who already spoke fluently three languages by the age of five, or who had French humanities-like curriculum in school and learned Greek and Latin perfectly. Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire knew Greek and Latin when they were in middle school, and both engaged in Latin verses contest in high school. Assuming you're older than three years old, not being in a European Jesuit private school or the son of some diplomat—Belgian's daughter one Amélie Nothomb also spoke Japanese, French, German and English fluently as a child—you won't learn ten languages. Sorry.

1. English
That's it. With English, you can read any piece of literature with all its intricacies. And all of the best literature was originally written in English. So why even bother?

monoculturalist bigot Anglophile elitist detected

bump 4 interest

I included it because it's also a famous work of philosophy

Why King Lear over Hamlet or Macbeth?

Well, those three are usually considered his best plays, so you could swap out any one of them for another.

I would put German in top tier and Italian in middle tier, if not only because German literature gets completely fucked by translation
The difference between reading a German text in the original language and translated are much more important

but that's Nazi, tho

The only reason that cat looks inquisitive is because it has a question mark over its head. Otherwise it's just making a normal cat face.

I love how he tried posting the names in german, but couldn't write Die Verwandlung.

whats ur problem asshole

I wasn't very consistent in general with whether to use the original title or English translation, I just used whatever came to mind since I threw the list together in like a couple minutes

Esperanto

Just learn French, Italian and Latin. Germanic languages don't matter, at all

>italian
>relevant

French let seems to be the best among others, but it is not useful nowadays speaking it. I personally would go for Spanish.

Old Norse is literally Swahili tier, snow niggers be damned.

The Financial Times ranked French #2 on the list of most useful second language when it comes to business, and as far as my experience is relevant I use it—almost—everyday.

depends where you live

Most people who speak french are arabs from 3rd world countries, france included

Boston. France and French speaking countries are huge markets, and it's still among the official languages of many institutions.

You mean African. An estimated population of 800,000,000 will speak French in 2050 according to some studies, with the vast majority being in Africa. Its growth would be higher than Russian, Spanish or Chinese ones.

noone needs your ugly language and France is a shithole

/r9k/ you aren't literate, please leave

In all seriousness Spanish will probably be more useful than France, South America (and the Philippines) will economically bloom much more strongly than former French colonies in the upcoming few decades

>French speaking countries are huge markets
hahaha
french speaking countries except france and a part of canada it's a bunch of african shitholes

>/r9k/ you aren't literate, please leave
just pissed on your mother's face, she seems to have liked it

South America has already been an emerging power along with Russia, China, India, Mexico and Indonesia for a decade. It's starting to fade. China's repeated crisis, Argentina's debt, Brazil Petrobras scandal—Brazil is excluded of the Spanish sphere, by the way—or Russia vivid decline are proofs it's already over. These countries also had an emerging middle class, which doesn't favour their fertility rate. I don't say Spanish is useless but its growth won't be as high as expected. Why do you think it would be otherwise?

you cant learn russian unless you were born there

an average iq among people living in shitfrica is too low

>you cant learn russian unless you were born there
you're utterly wrong, maybe you're just an unlearnable person

omg this is racist tho

i already know it, there is no way in hell you can match my knowledge of it unless you live there for 10 years as a kid, sorry

russian is nowhere near among the hardest languages to learn

for a western speaker it's probably chinese and japanese

but that's racist tho

omg facts can't be racist tho

your Russian is primitive obsolete shit

hate speech isn't freespeech

proof of hate speech? how do you even determine it?

yeah i havent exactly been up to date on how much theyve raped the language since then, like combining kak-byd-to into kabud or some youtube comments level of degeneracy

if it targets underprivileged groups tho

you dont get to decide who is underprivileged you cis shitlord

ya cuz it's nonwhites and nonmen tho

bump

>Elder god tier
Irish

>Meh tier
everythnig else

p u r e i d e o l o g y

fuck racism

german
ancient greek
french

in that order. anything else is accessory.

no latin for Aeneid ????

learn shit, 'cause that most westerners speak

>Old Norse
Not worth, put in Russian there instead.

men substantially less privileged than females, see realsexism.com for the deets

bump

thanks, more people need to see this.

>>Top Tier
>-English

>Mid-Tier
>-Spanish
>-German

Top kek

Portuguese

Help me out lit I know english and spanish and I want to learn a third language but I'm having trouble deciding what. What do you recommend as my third? Although I guess I could really brush up my spanish since I wasn't educated in it.

Old Franconian

Why sempai?

My god, you have shit taste.
The three portuguese works you posted are far superior to the spanish ones.
And they are not even the top tier.

The problem with any analysis by Veeky Forums is that most of you guys can't see beyond a few books in a desired language.
Then you randomly pick three books and thinks: "Oh these ones are nice, it is the equivalent of all the literature".

If you want to check the body of work of a language, you must dwell first on poetry, it has many more jewels than prose.

I saw that you put Baudelaire on french lit but did not put a fuckin poet in spanish or portuguese. WTF?

Don't pick from a wiki page, please.

ok sorry jeez

Uh Camoes is a poet, dude

Trade out Fuenteovejuna for las Soledades if it really bothers you that much

tho fuenteovejuna is already in verse so.. idk what you're even bitching about

French obviously

English is dope, you barbarian

Bump.

Greek should be above Latin.

What about Dante? It's not modern Italian though.