At least, that’s the lesson I take away from this.
Love this! pic.twitter.com/OhEyrZ6mws
— David Skelton (@DavidASkelton) September 20, 2017
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
At least, that’s the lesson I take away from this.
Love this! pic.twitter.com/OhEyrZ6mws
— David Skelton (@DavidASkelton) September 20, 2017
When I first taught myself Latin the very first sentences I had for translation were “ubi nautae sunt?” and “nautae in taberna sunt” – “where are the sailors?” and “there are sailors in the bar”. I knew I was going to get on with this language from the beginning.
Lucky you! Our textbook started with “Asia is a province” and “the woman is in the farmhouse”.
For a generation of Spaniards, the first English sentence learned was “My tailor is rich.”
They both fail, lacking as they do a certain A-pint-of-your-finest-ale-please-ness.
I am in favour of the modern language approach. Where is the bathroom? or Is there a laundromat in town? is a lot more useful than Life is long.
My takeaway is that I’d rather deal with the common problems of modern life than the apparently common problems of ancient life.
A happy medium could be found:
“Monday is long and unbearable. Each day the news is grim. I cannot wait until lunch; I am starving. Speaking of which, where is the bathroom? I have an unbearable, long, and hard ordeal ahead of me.”
@cartomancer #1:
As the great philosopher Molesworth once said, ‘What is the use of latin, sir?’
Surely that’s “The sailors are in the tavern”? If I’m wrong, I apologise, and can only offer the excuse calix meus inebrians.
Talking of the great Molesworth: the Latin verb conjugator.
Rich Woods, #8
The sentence can be rendered in several ways in English. Literally it’s just “sailors in tavern are”, and since Latin doesn’t have articles we must guess from context (of which there is none) whether it’s getting at some specific sailors, or just sailors in general. Likewise for whether it’s a specific drinking establishment we know or just any old watering hole (or inn, shop, hostelry or public meeting place – taberna could be all of those).
It could be “the sailors are in the tavern” or “some sailors are in a tavern” or “there are sailors in the tavern”. This last would more usually be written with the verb in the initial position for emphasis, but it’s a valid interpretation even with nautae as the stressed word – “sailors (who are the people you’re asking after) can be found at the bar (as opposed to other people, who can be found elsewhere).
Latin does have the tools to make the sentence more specific. We could add in demonstrative pronouns for instance – illae nautae in hac taberna sunt (those sailors are in this pub) or relative pronouns or possessive adjectives – aliquae nautae in taberna nostra sunt (some sailors are in our pub), et cetera ad nauseam.
I was, of course, trying to imply picking up men for sex in bars.
My first Latin ‘sentence’ was something like agricola arat, i.e. the farmer is ploughing.
Nothing like vita brevis ars longa.
In any case, if you find yourself in ancient Rome you should be able to get by with English.
Vita brevis intolerabileque dura.
All Gaul is quartered into three halves.
To be all boring and pragmatic for a minute (well, nobody seems to have taken up my suggestion that we trawl the bars for sailors, so I might as well be), the difference between ancient and modern language texts reflects a lot about how and why they are taught. It also reflects, albeit distantly, how ancient languages used to be taught in the Middle Ages and before.
We teach people modern languages mainly to enable them to talk to other people (a suspicious and unhealthy practice that can only cause great harm to society further down the road). We teach people ancient languages to enable them to read the documents left behind by ancient and medieval cultures. The focus of the former is primarily oral and as much focused on speaking as on listening. The focus of the latter is primarily written and much more focused on reading than on composition. As such people tend to move on to more complex language forms more quickly when learning ancient languages, because they are seeking reading comprehension rather than a ready command for personal use.
It is only comparatively recently that educational texts for language practice have been with us. Grammars have always been with us, but simplified texts specifically for beginners are only a couple of hundred years old. Traditionally you learned a modern language by speaking to native speakers, and they would help you out with the difficult bits. You learned an ancient language by reading original texts. Medieval grammar schools generally had you reading the Disticha Catonis early on, and onto Caesar’s Gallic Wars and the Aeneid by about 7 or 8. For Greek it would be Homer and the speeches of Demosthenes. There was no Caecilius est in horto for Medieval children.
ell, nobody seems to have taken up my suggestion that we trawl the bars for sailors
Not worth the effort here. We are army town. I thought you were speaking in general.
It appears that none of you have ever had the pleasure of studying German, which wouldn’t be so difficult if it weren’t for that gender thing. It starts off easily enough — the article for a man is masculine (der), a woman is feminine (die) and for a child it is neuter (das). Then all nouns that end in -e are feminine. After that you are SOL and on your own. It’s down to pure memorization. There are no other rules concerning the gender of a noun. For example, the sun is feminine and the moon is male, night is neuter and day is male. And then, wait for it, the articles can change depending on the case, of which there are currently four (there were five in Old High German, so be grateful for the little things). Which means that there can be four articles for any given noun depending on the part of speech. A man can be either der, den, dem or des.
Be grateful that our English speaking forebears, in their infinite wisdom, said fuck this and made every article THE. Then they impishly chose the th sound purely to confound their German speaking cousins. It’s no problem for us to say the, but have you ever heard a German try to say ‘this’ or ‘these’ or ‘thief’ or ‘south’?
German and I had a very difficult relationship followed by a rancorous breakup. I would appreciate it if you would not bring up our points of contention.
Well, very few phrasebooks cover such important phrases as “my hovercraft is full of eels” or “my nipples explode with delight”. It’s a national disgrace.
The summary for Post Cenam is Post cenam, Marcus Escam fellat and it’s quite the introductory-Latin-text from there on out , just sayin’. AO3 really does have a bit of (almost) everything.
(I’m sure there was another Eagle story structured after the Cambridge Latin course too but I can’t find it)
@Cartomancer
Ah, so that’s why you don’t like Wheelock’s. It starts with Pueri rosas puellis dant*. ;)
And contains the nerd-humour, which is probably taught in every beginning class semper ubi sub ubi.
@TheGyre.
Try Latin or Russian (6 cases and Cyrillic), then go look at German and be pleasantly surprised by its simplicity. ;)
*I probably made errors, Semper erro.
But apparently there kind of was for Greek-speakers in ancient Rome: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1107474574/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pd_nS_ttl?_encoding=UTF8&colid=35QEQF88WD9SB&coliid=ILJ92WQB2VAS3
Carto @ 15
“It is only comparatively recently that educational texts for language practice have been with us.”
Worrabaht the Colloquy of Ælfric?
Or is that comparatively recent to you :-)
Brian English, #21
Actually Latin has several advantages over German where grammatical gender is concerned. The first is the lack of articles – you don’t have to remember what gender a Latin noun is unless you want to modify it with an adjective, whereas a German noun will have that pesky article attached that needs to be done correctly. Secondly, Latin nouns tend to follow regular conventions far more than German ones. First and fifth declension nouns are almost always feminine, apart from traditionally male jobs like sailors, farmers and poets. Second and fourth declension are almost always masculine (with a few neuter ones that use the different endings). It’s only really the third declension that causes problems, and even there you have some useful guidelines (abstract nouns ending in -itas tend to be feminine, trees are usually feminine etc.).
Finnish, apparently, has sixteen different noun cases and articles as well. Truly it is the devil’s tongue.
I was making a joke. German is hard, but so is Latin and Russian. I need better joke markers. When someone comes in and says ‘you haven’t mentioned X, X is so hard!’ it’s obligatory to reply with ‘Y is harder, ner, ner’ Sort of Pythonesque ‘back in my days we worked 26 hours a day, and got up before we went to bed, but you didn’t hear us complaining.’ Must just be me then.
Same with Russian. But articles make things easier, not harder. Ille magnus Alexander to me reads The great Alexander, not That great Alexander or That (over there) great Alexander. Probably just me again.
Says the man who knows all this. To a student, why is a tree gendered? Why is charity gendered? It seem to me to be unintelligible. In the end, you just get on and accept it.
Now you’re getting the hang of it! Back in my day, we spoke a language with 72 cases, all of them nominative!
cartomancer @ 25
There are no articles in Finnish and no grammatical gender. We have a few more noun cases than most languages, but, OTOH, you don’t have to memorize a plethora of prepositions and try to remember in which context they can be used (instead, you have the same problem with the noun cases).
Now, verbs have about a thousand different forms, which is a bit demonic. Also, adjectives, pronouns and numerals mostly have the same cases as nouns.
An addendum to me @ 27: While verbs have many forms, there is no future tense.
richardelguru. #23-4
Aelfric’s Colloquy is an interesting text, but it’s not really the sort of practice text for translation that modern language students are given. It is, essentially, a dialogue for teaching students lists of vocabulary items. The grammar in it is fairly basic – essentially it is a series of working people being interviewed by the teacher and asked to list their jobs, the everyday items they use, the fish they catch, the livestock they keep and so on. The point of the text was to memorise sections by heart (in English and in Latin) for recitation in later lessons, and thereby learn the vocabulary items mentioned.
Such an exercise was important in Medieval schools because students did not have access to textbooks. Book production was so expensive that the only one in the school who would have any books was the teacher. Vocabulary lists could not be handed out to be learned. Nor could they be dictated for students to write down and keep – parchment was prohibitively expensive, so writing for school work tended to be done on wax tablets, and thus was only a temporary aid to memorisation. Hence a dialogue, learned like the lines of a play, could be useful instead. The one exception was the Bible, which generally was available to some extent, and particularly the Psalter. This was used as a first reading text in most religious school settings in preference to classical materials.
Which is not to say that Aelfric’s Colloquy wasn’t an innovative educational text. Aelfric follows in a strong tradition of educational innovation among English monastic scholars, going back to Dunstan and Alfred, attempting to revive the teaching of Latin following its near-eradication in the Viking wars.
Ice Swimmer, #27-8
Damn, it was verbs that Finnish did fiendishly, not nouns. I must have got it confused with some other language I’d heard terrifying things about. Maybe Hungarian or Old Welsh.
Brian, #26,
I never said the rules made sense, I just said there were rules! Well, helpful guidelines at least. German doesn’t appear to have even those. Which is odd, really, given the stereotypes we have about Germans.
@Carto, I think we’re arguing about different things. The original comment was that there were no rules concering (assignment of) gender.
How is that different from Latin? Sun is masculine. What rule of gender in Latin determines assignment of Gender to happiness?
Quite, but why are some feminine, and others masculine or neuter once we move away from living things? It seems to me to be the same with both languages, ‘The sea is a lady, no he’s a tough bloke’ All a bit arbitrary.
Just on your point (or what I take as your point) Carto. The only German grammar book I have says:
Apologies for not including the accents, but I think it’s legible. It appears you can divide German nouns into 5 groups, 1st masculine and neutral, 2nd and 3rd masculine, 4th feminine and 5th neutral. Which is similar to Latin.
Turkish has six cases but no grammatical gender and no definite article. As an agglutinative language it has an intricate system of suffixes that can pile up on each other, but it’s a remarkably regular language–once you’ve learned the morphological and morphophomological rules (including vowel harmony) you don’t need to learn a host of exceptions. Apparently it’s similar to the Finnish-Ugric to the point where some have proposed that they’re related, but that hypothesis hasn’t held up.
*the Finnish-Ugric languages
In German, the decision tree for adjective endings has 48 branches. Not that many endings, but that many decisions that must be made split second between saying “the” and “car.” As a threshold question, is the adjective:
-attributive or predicative (x2)
-variable or invariable (x2)
As for the modified noun:
-gender (x3)
-case (x4)
-number (x2)
Also in German, a human being’s gender can change in the course of a short conversation: “As a little girl, it lived in Berlin. As a married woman, she lived in Munich. Later, as the victim of a car accident, it was injured badly.” That usage seems to be dying out, but you had to pass it to test out of lower level German classes in college.
Drumpfheteerspeak: “10-4, good buddy.”
I’m currently studying Avestan, Old Persian and Pahlavi and it is not easy. Some words in those languages have no close English translation so to describe the word to English sometimes it takes a sentence to convey the meaning of one word. I definitely like modern language since it’s so concise and on point than some ancient languages.
Brian English,
I think it makes more sense when one realises that the primary meaning of “gender” in grammatical usage is not about the sexual genders of human beings and animals. In grammar a “gender” is simply a distinct form that a word takes – a class or quality it possesses. The word comes from the Latin genus (as in genus and species) – a class, family or type. Some grammatical classifications mark things other than masculine, feminine and neuter as genders – common versus proper nouns, plural nouns, animate versus inanimate nouns etc.
We call some of these genders “masculine” or “feminine” as a kind of shorthand. The different types of noun ending are used to denote sexual gender in some (human and animal) contexts, but that’s not all they do. The majority of the role that grammatical genders play is purely categorical – determining which adjectival endings go with which nouns for instance, or which article form a noun takes. We take the names “masculine” and “feminine” from one, very specific, thing genders do in very limited contexts.
It’s rather like the way we call a penknife a penknife. The name comes from one of its functions, but that function isn’t assumed to be inherent in all its other uses. Sure, it can be used for cutting a nib into a quill or sharpening pencils, but it can also be used for all kinds of other tasks. We don’t assume that just because you’re using a penknife to cut string that the string is somehow pen-like, or that using a penknife to carve wood makes the wood into a pen.
So Latin has the sun (sol) as masculine because it takes a first-and-second declension adjective in -us, not because it is thought to embody male qualities. Nobody sat down and decided which things seemed girly, then made those nouns feminine, any more than they sat down and decided which actions only affected an object indirectly and made those verbs intransitive. One of the rules internalised by speakers of all languages with grammatical genders is “these forms tell us something about sexual genders in some contexts, but not in others”. A German does not think of a table (tisch) as manly any more than a Roman thought of a table (mensa) as girly, even though they very much would think of Klaus as male and Cornelia as female.
Carto, thanks for you comment, it makes sense. But I was talking about a student learning one of these languages, not a native speaker. We start by being told there is 3 genders, and male are in masculine, female in feminine, and other things in neuter. But gender has nothing to do with sex we’re told. We end up with the strange situation that a boy is in its gender (gramatical type) because it takes a certain adjective group, but we name that noun group after the gender/sex* of the boy (or man). Seems somewhat weird. I presume the Romans used the same 3 names for genders, which leads to the same strangeness. This gender is mascline, but it has nothing to do with a masculinity, it just happens to have men and boys in it and a name that suggests maleness. It’s more or less unintelligble to a student, and you just accept it and get on with it.
Anyway, German nouns can be grouped into 5 types which seems on par with Latin, and Wheelocks is better than any others. Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative, Ablative, Vocative is the correct order of cases. :)
*Apologies for using gender and sex interchangebly, but this isn’t a comment on human sexuality.
cartomancer,
Not quite. Gender is understood as a classification of nouns into groups, often based on a real-world correlate. So animate vs. inanimate can be the basis of a gender system, but not common vs. proper or singular vs. plural.
That’s actually a rather active area of study these days, and there’s at least some evidence that grammatical gender can affect how speakers perceive objects. One of my favorite studies (unfortunately I don’t have the reference at hand) looked at the adjectives that bilingual German/Spanish speakers used for objects that have different genders in the two languages (e.g., der Mond/la luna). In short, they tended to assign adjectives that are more associated with men more in the language where the noun is masculine, and more “female” adjectives in the language where it was feminine.
When I studied Latin lo! these many years ago, it was in the form of epigrams: vestis virum reddit, lupus non mordet lupum, elephantus non capit murem. Short and pithy.
Try conjugating the Latin verb “sillico”, present tense.
It’s childish I know but greatly amused us as 11 year olds.
I have to agree that Latin school texts are boring as hell. I have a passion for languages and during my school years took up English, French, German and Latin (they didn’t offer Greek the year I enrolled in high school). It was such a stark difference, and while I coped quite well with Latin, most people in my class struggled or dropped out, even if they were quite capable of coping with the other languages. I think the texts may have played a part in it. That said, I don’t know if it’s something you can fix, as there’s simply no way to get as much exposure to dead languages, from colloquial to literary forms, as modern languages.
@17, I loved learning (and still love) German, and maybe the fact that I started learning it together with Latin made those cases easier. It also helps that my native language (Portuguese) also has gender, so that in particular was a non-issue. In any case, I don’t think cases are completely gone from English, they simply aren’t taught as that for the sake of simplicity. Take pronouns for example: “I” (nominative) is the subject; “me” (accusative or dative) is the direct or indirect object; “my” (genitive) is the possessive. Even normal -s plurals are in essence a declension of the root form. It also makes the distinction between “who” and “whom” much easier: the first is nominative (subject), the second is accusative (object). Though I don’t think “whom” will survive much longer.
IceSwimmer @ 28: (speaking about the Finnish language) While verbs have many forms, there is no future tense.
Suddenly a lot of Scandinavia and the World makes so much more sense than it used to.
@ 43 daemonios
I don’t know if it’s something you can fix, as there’s simply no way to get as much exposure to dead languages, from colloquial to literary forms, as modern languages.
I have never even seen these but they look like an interesting idea.
http://www.latinitatis.com/latinitas/nubecula/nubecula.htm
@ cartomancer
Have you considered translation as a sideline?
Ice Swimmer, Meg Thorton,
Strictly speaking, there’s no future tense in English either.
Cartomancer @ 30: Depends on your definition of ”fiendish”. Here is an example of the word-forms of an ordinary Finnish noun. There are only 2 253 of them!
Dang, borked the link @47. Maybe this’ll work?
My hovercraft is full of eels?