Latin

>Whch is a more patrician language to learn?
>patrician

Please stop with this meme. A language is a language. It's all a bunch of phonemes that come together in various ways to produce arbitrary expressions. Some languages might be more practical than others depending on what you intend to use them for, but it otherwise doesn't matter.

Latin would be easier for an English speaker to learn since Modern English incorporates so much Latin vocabulary. Greek (especially Ancient Greek) is a whole other ballpark. This is reputedly one of the more difficult languages for translators to work with, assuming your intention is to go back and read all the Greek classics in their native writings. (which is both retarded and autistic, especially since there are large gaps in many Ancient Greek works)

You would be better off just researching different translations available for these works, comparing reviews of their accuracy, footnotes, etc. before settling on something. The footnotes will usually fill you in on any cultural differences or idiosyncrasies that might appear in a translation. Even if you could read Greek, these types of expressions would take a lot of experience for you to begin to understand.

>patrician
>meme
kys

He's asking what language is seen as more sophisticated. Your post seemed to miss the whole point of what he was asking. Nothing you said impacts on what he is asking.

Greeks.

Oh, boy, care to explain how on earth did you manage to bring that assessment out of two lines of greentext and a patrician meme?

Nice bait pleb

No, seriously, do explain. In what point did OP specify that he is looking for a more sophisticated language? Or, in what way is more patrician language more sophisticated? I won't bother you for both explanations, one will do...

Not that guy but you assumed he was working from an evaluative standpoint. He might have been but it was an assumption you that is not borne out in what he said. So you are doing exactly what you are accusing him of.

Latin has better classical lit.

Cicero alone is worth it.

He might have? He is explicitly stating that!
>he's asking what language is more sophisticated

And no I'm not

Today, everyone with a working brain already speaks English fluently by age 20, regardless of nationality.

[citation nonexistent]

Asking which is the more patrician language is not the same as asking what is the better language (though that might be what they mean). If I were to ask which language is more useful for travailing, Spanish or reconstructed proto-Indoeuropean the answer is obviously Spanish, but this is not the same as asking which language is more sophisticated.

If we take sophistication as the example and ask which language is more sophisticated, Latin or Esperanto the answer is obvious. We pick the one with a long rich tradition, that spawned many great works of literature, that was the lingua franca for government, trade, religion and culture of almost all of Europe for centuries.

You are choosing to make OPs statement an evaluative one and then pretending that you never chose anything and that is what OP actually said and then attacking someone else for doing the exact same thing. OP very well might have meant that but it is that you assume he meant it one way and then attack someone for making a different though equally plausible assumption that I take issue with.

>Latin or Esperanto

...

This is not even a question. Ancient Greek, and by a massive margin. The Roman corpus pales in comparison in literature, historiography, and especially in philosophy to the Greek corpus and even the entire Latin corpus into the early modern period would likely still have trouble matching the Greek corpus. Moreover, the comparative difficulty of Greek and the place Greece has in the origins of western civilization cement Greek's status as the most patrician European language for the foreseeable future.

Latin is a great thing to learn, chiefly for two reasons: First, to do well on the SAT. Second, to more easily learn Greek.

>This is not even a question. Ancient Greek, and by a massive margin

I agree. Ancient Greek sounds great.

youtube.com/watch?v=07Ys4tQPRis&

If i studied modern greek, how far off will i be from attic?

Certe mi amice lingva Graeca. But it's also way harder, at least from what I understand. It was extremely irregular, while Latin is very regular in all but a few fairly common words and their derivatives (naturally the idioms are difficult to get used to, but that's the true of all languages, especially ancient ones). Also if you want to read all the good stuff, you'll have to learn to very different versions of Greek: Attic and Homeric. There was no one "ancient Greek." That's not the case with Latin: while there were certain dialectical differences, Classical Latin literature comes at a time when the grammarians had already largely standardized the language. I think you could compare Latin to Spanish and Greek to English in terms of standardization. I do plan to tackle Greek at some point, though. Perhaps next year.

Very very far, and what you learn will be detrimental because your mind will think it's closer than it is, and constantly try to make sense of Attic by torturing modern Greek to help you

Attic Greek is best learned after learning Latin up to mastering the 101/textbook stage, when you understand the morphology and grammar well enough and you can adapt it easily to service your Greek learning (which will still be tedious and difficult)

Greek only sucks to learn because you basically have to sit down and do rote study and memorisation for 500-1000 pages before you can start cracking basic texts

you'll have to learn TWO different versions of Greek*. I should also mention that Homeric Greek was used by no surviving writer but Homer. It'd kind of be like learning the Northumbrian dialect of middle English just in order to read the Peal Poet when you don't yet speak a lick of English. Certainly an activity only for the enthusiast. But Attic Greek has a much larger corpus.

Unless you're saying you ALREADY studied modern Greek (or have it from your family or something), in which case don't worry about it too much

I am mostly saying in the above post that you shouldn't go study modern Greek as an easy intro to Attic, that'd be a fucking waste of time

>because you basically have to sit down and do rote study and memorisation for 500-1000 pages before you can start cracking basic texts

lmao no

Pretty much in my experience. The two textbooks I've used were a solid 500-1000 pages. The first one was solid morphology memorising from the get-go, occupied the entire first year, and we didn't even go all the way through the errata/appendices which are still important. That was GRK101/102. Tests, aside from literal rote memorisation of vocab and principle parts, were very rigid sentence/paragraph dissection according to (surprise) rote memorised grammar. The final passage of the course was a fairly simple but huge chunk of Democritus (I think), and everyone bombed the fuck out of it. This was a postgrad class at a decent university with a well-known very good Classics department, and everyone had Latin prior to taking the course.

GRK201+ the following year was starting with real texts, and even then it was baby steps. Some people found it easier than others, but the average and the vast majority had extreme problems with all the memorisation necessary to be able to sight read and pass exams. Actually about 80% of the course dropped by the midterm.

The other book was more staggered and structured like the easier Latin courses, like Cambridge, but it required 3-4 books in conjunction, had plenty of rote memorisation (often harder in parts), and actually took longer in my experience.

Latin. all medevial history and philosophy and religion is written in Latin. And it's all the foundation for enlightenment thinking.
Greek is pleb antiquities geeks rehashing the same shit.
Good luck learning it without a teacher though.

While it is true that you have to memorize a lot of grammar, this is true for any language, but as a matter of fact, you can be reading basic texts continuously while memorizing.

At my university, we used books which had a text section, and a grammar section specifically for that text, and you simply memorized a set amount of verbs and nouns, and their morphology, and then you read the text in question.

I think I actually learned more from doing that, simply because you get used to syntax in general and the subtleties of the language.

>Good luck learning it without a teacher though.
Are you talking about latin or greek? Latin is hella easy to teach yourself, there are tons of free resources on the internet for it, and it's hella easy to pirate what isn't free.

Ok, ty

>hella

Stop it.

why?

Greek looks and sounds ugly to me. Too many hoary sounds with 'h' base. Latin, on the other hand, is the most aesthetic language there is. I can't think of an ugly latin word, expect maybe the disgusting hachaechoc pronouns

The fact is, though, that the Attic Greeks would recommend Homer over all their own literature.

Except Plato. Plato would say, "Learn Attic first."

(not true, by the way)

Why did Rome produce nothing worth reading?

rome was when humanity disocvered jerkin off

Latin is more useful

Greek is obviously the more patrician

-harder
-fewer people study it
-much more classical lit left than Latin

I take "patrician" in chan speak to mean elitist and exclusive. Greek is definitely a less accessible language than Latin and so more patrician.

> I should also mention that Homeric Greek was used by no surviving writer but Homer.

Every writer of epic, including didactic, wrote in Homeric Greek, from Hesiod to Nonnos. Every poet, from Pindar to Theocritus, uses Homeric forms and vocabulary. Virtually every prose author quotes or alludes to Homer.

It's definitely worth reading a few books of Homer to get a little familiar with his language, even if you don't want to read all 30,000 lines.

My choice is latin. Is the base for A LOT of languages, portuguese, spanish, italian, french, so knowing latin, you are halfway through learning several languages

>so knowing latin, you are halfway through learning several languages
not really, you're just knowing latin, although it might be easier to recognize words that are descended from it. like, all of those languages have undergone thousands of years of development since diverging from latin, in the forms of sound changes, syntax changes, and other shit, learning latin will only give like, the most basic (if any) help to understanding them.

Greek is superior.

>and other shit
should probs have put something like "influence from other languages" or whatever.

also I don't really like when people say a language is the base for another language, it makes it sound as though languages are cold artificial things created by somebody rather than being constantly changing natural shit. Yeah, latin is what romance languages descended from, but I doubt the speakers over the ages were thinking about how they could change Latin to make their own sekrit club language or whatever.

>Using v to represent lowercase u
Eheu

Then how come I can understand some lines of text in italian, or hardly, maybe a few words of french, and possibly paragraphs of spanish, without ever studying any of those languages? Yeah, ok, maybe latin is not the "base" for all those, but it has brought a lot of similarities between them, which doesn't happen in languages not 'descended' from latin, like chinese or deutsch or russian.

Isn't romanian like the only romance language that didn't completely abandon expensive case systems? If anything, latin is more helpful in learning slavic and germanic languages that lavish in this shit

>Then how come I can understand some lines of text in italian, or hardly, maybe a few words of french, and possibly paragraphs of spanish, without ever studying any of those languages?

I can do that too, having only studied french and a bit of latin. mutual intelligibility is a thing, but studying latin has little to do with that. recognizing and understanding shit isn't knowing a language really.

>Yeah, ok, maybe latin is not the "base" for all those, but it has brought a lot of similarities between them, which doesn't happen in languages not 'descended' from latin, like chinese or deutsch or russian.

>Chinese
true, most aren't intelligible outside of their written forms

>deutsch
west germanic languages are actually pretty understandable to each other written too, less so spoken.

>russian
Slavic languages are apparently actually really similar to each other. Some of the languages might not even be considered languages were it not for politics desu.

The romans only spoke greek because they had to buy mathematicians and shit.
Latin is better tho.

Greek
- disgusting articles
- no ablative
- lower case bears no relation to capitals half the time
- three stupid tones that can fall wherever
- ugly aspirated consonants, diphthongs which can be read in like fifteen ways according to what time it is, all kind of consonant clusters
- a dialect for each rowdy city state
- displaced by Turks and Arabs
- used by little boys and lesbians
- provides us with words like "stratagem"

Latin
- no articles
- based ablative can do anything
- always all caps+aesthetic interpunct
- accent falls in the penultimate syllable unless it's short and there's another vowel behind
- no aspirates, diphthongs are sensical, very soft sounding, no weird consonant clusters
- one dialect for one great empire
- adopted willingly by all western Europe
- used by grown men and matriarchs
- provides us with words like "virtue"

Neither have a place in academia today unless you invest so much of your time in history with a purpose to transcribe texts. If this was a description of you then you would have already learnt both.

Either profit you as a patrician but you likely want to lure some naive slut in with your forgotten expressions and so the choice clearly is Latin.

you'd be surprised

at a decently high level most humanities scholars have latin if not greek

That circle of scholars likely only interacts with itself, OP wishes to boost his social status with it, if he enjoys hanging out with aging men who shitpost daily then he can stay here or go to a nursing home. He will never board the Slut train because they don't understand Latin and all that impresses women now is physical beauty.

Seriously, just learn French. It's a very nice language spoken all over the planet and will definitely open up new worlds for you. If you're an American pronunciation will definitely keep you challenged, but unlike Attic or Latin you can probably achieve conversational fluency in about 3 years of study. Plus you'll have a useful skill to show for your work.

this is actually good advice!

I'm not a native english speaker and I know some latin. So I have something to say.
From my experience with these two languages, I can say with knowledge of cause that most of the idiomatic expressions and the idiosyncrasies of a language are not easily learned. It is a time effort and you'd be better off reading good translations and annotated versions instead of focusing on learning a language.
Unless for some autistic or professional reason you need to delve deeper into the said work.

>There isn't much of a point in learning another living language
explain yourself

Not him but I assume directly from his comment that he means you already have one way of communicating so why learn another, invest your energy in something aged or old and maybe you can polish a gem or find more value in that then you ever could just by speaking to someone in a second way without saying anything new.

>He will never board the Slut train because they don't understand Latin and all that impresses women now is physical beauty.

i literally got laid a shitload during my masters degree by jokingly offering to tutor girls in greek and latin if they'd sit on my face

like more than a few girls that was my shitty opening line

>Hey guys, which should I learn, Latin or Greek
>Learn French

But you can do all of that with a living language too.

Romanian did lose is case system, just in a different way than other Romanic languages.

Case was also still present in Old French, albeit reduced to oblique/direct. While we're on that, the gender/number noun endings evolved distinctly in Western and non-Western Romance: in Spanish and French they're derived from the accusative forms, while in Italan they come from the nominatve ones.

>HGUR

italian,spanish, french(to an extent) and romanian are VERY easy to understand if you know latin

farsi (persian) is better than both and has a richer canon of poetry and political texts

>Iliad
>Odyssey
>New Testament
This is pretty much it for the relevant greek literature. Everything else is philosophic/scientific manuscripts that bear little literary value. Romans on the other hand had a bustling culture of memoirs and poetry written in strict meter and therefore probably untranslatable. Not to mention that the Bible that actually shaped Europe was the one written in latin

> fluently

Not even in England.

The tragedies and short poems aren't relevant?

>Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides aren't relevant
>Pindar isn't relevant

Just learn both.

Is this bait? There was about a thousand years of philosophy, history and literature in Koine Greek lad.

Greek, for numerous reasons.

closer to ionic and other dialects. eg. thalatta in Xenophon's Attic Anabasis is thalassa to most other Greek dialects and to modern Greek. maybe go herodotus and the ionic route, or just learn whichever Greek you want

>disgustive articles
The articles are beautiful, and quite rare in actual prose/poetry. Only examples studied in the classroom tend to have many articles.

>lower case bears no relation to capitals half the time
It does, all the time.

>three stupid tones that can fall wherever
What?

>ugly aspirated consonants, diphthongs which can be read in like fifteen ways according to what time it is, all kind of consonant clusters
I guess you're speaking on the "ng" sound as in "elengchos"?

>a dialect for each rowdy city state
All you have to know is Attic, then realize Ionian uses non-contract forms, Laconian turns the th into s, etc.

It would be like if you studied Italian to learn Latin.