Now have Caesar's Gallic Wars on Kindle. Yea not new to everybody. But BBC documentary on

[UTUSN]

The University of YouTube - O.M.Z.

Brutality. Genocide. "Glory"

[sprinkleeninow]

1. Oh. Your. Zog. 😁 Wherz Caesar fiddlin' now? Oops. Pardonez.Tha' wuz Nero.

Hello, but then nitey-nite, Sailor.

[UTUSN]

4. Jules was *such* an a-hole

[sprinkleeninow]

6. And he is now in the great gehenna dustbin.

[wnylib]

2. What a horrible thought to view

them on Kindle. I took 2 years of Latin in high school and we had to read Caesar's Gallic Wars journal. Once was enough.

[sprinkleeninow]

3. I also took Latin in H-S. I don't recall them. 'Twas long, long ago.

[wnylib]

8. I remember that we read them, but

could not recall a single part of them now. In fact, I have forgotten a lot of Latin in general after studying 2 modern languages since then.

[UTUSN]

5. Only anglais here!

[sprinkleeninow]

7. Franglais spoken chere. 'Chere' is for 'here' a la Nawlins speak.

Justin Wilson and his 'onyons'.

[bronxiteforever]

9. 4 years of Latin. Was horrible until we got to

Catullus’s poetry. Quite the rush for a teenage boy.

[wnylib]

10. I was eager to switch to a modern language

after 2 years of Latin. All those genderized nouns, pronouns, and adjective agreements, the noun declensions, and verb conjugations drove me nuts. I got A's but wanted a language I could speak.

So I opted for German, the language of my immigrant grandparents. Alas, German also has the genderized nouns and pronouns, noun declensions, and verb conjugations, but much worse. In Latin, the noun endings give a clue to the gender. In German, you have to memorize which is der, die, or das. And then some declensions of a noun in German have the same article as the subject form in a different gender. I had naively thought that a modern language would be easier than an ancient dead one. I became convinced that my great-grandparents brought their families to the US to escape the German language. I got A's in German, too, but maybe because Latin had prepared me for the grammatical nightmare of German.

German was not offered at the college I attended. I majored in Spanish. Only two genders and no declensions, except for pronouns. Verb conjugations were old hat for me by then.

Our Spanish class went to NYC the week of the Columbus Day parade and visited Spanish and Puerto Rican restaurants and theaters. I was old enough to drink legally so I spent some evenings in the hotel lounge where I met tourists from Spain, Germany, and Denmark. A German group invited me to join their table when I greeted them in German. Some of them knew a little English, so between their English and my German, plus sketches on napkins and some pantomimes, we communicated. I was surprised by how much German I remembered after a few beers.

Some of my classmates returned from an outing with our Colombian exchange student and the professor, so they joined me while I switched between German, Spanish, and English for introductions. When the introductions were finished, the professor said I had just earned an A for juggling names and languages. I said that all it takes is a few beers to relax speaking inhibitions about making mistakes.

[bronxiteforever]

11. German! You are a better scholar than I.

Great story!

[wnylib]

13. Not really a German scholar. Just two years

of high school German. Enough for simple conversations only. I probably couldn't even do that now, either, since it has been so long since I studied or used it.

[mopinko]

12. my son took german so he could read kant and nietzke in the original language.

he didnt even HAVE to take a language. he had 2 years of japanese in high school.
and he got quite fluent after he dropped out, while sitting on my couch.

when he finally got up and went to college, he got almost straight a's.
he flunked psyche 101, so he took it again for an a, and got a b in 2nd semester german.
it's a language that sorta suits him. he's very didactic.

graduated magna cum laude. 1st in his class.

[wnylib]

15. Impressive that he took Japanese.

Last edited Sun Jun 27, 2021, 12:08 PM - Edit history (1)

The languages that I studied were all European ones in the same language family, Indo-European. There are similarities between them in how expressions are used. There are also many cognates between English and Spanish due to the Norman French rule in England and to the Latin influence from the church. Since English is a Germanic language, many words are identical or very nearly identical to English words.

I think it would be more difficult to learn a language from a completely different language family.

I never got far enough in German studies to read German philosophers, but read some Spanish philosophers and poets in my Spanish major. Also read Don Quixote and El Cid in the original Spanish, and journal entries by Spanish priests who described the Spanish conquests and their first sight of Tenochtitlan (Aztec capital).

Studying German in high school helped with reading Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English for an English Lit class.

But I think that learning a language outside of one's own language family is a greater challenge. When the pandemic subsides enough to make it possible, I'd like to take some lessons in the Seneca language offered on Seneca territory near me. I don't know, though, if the language study is open to non tribal members.

[mopinko]

16. well, he went to a math and science high school.

they also offered chinese. i think this is common.
he shined it up gaming with people in japan. that kind of gaming was the big new thing then.

[Ocelot II]

14. Everything is easier after Latin.

Last edited Sun Jun 27, 2021, 05:03 PM - Edit history (1)

I took it in high school at the insistence of my dad, who told me in no uncertain terms that I would not be a truly educated person unless I learned Latin. Actually, I kind of enjoyed it, and can still remember at least some of the declension and conjugation forms. After that I took German, which seemed relatively easy after Latin, although keeping track of gendered nouns and their pronouns was a challenge (I remembered the dative prepositions - aus, ausser, bei, mit, nach, seit, von, zu - by singing them to The Blue Danube). Now, much later, I'm learning Norwegian, which is much easier than German because it's closer to English. Some linguists think English is a North Germanic, that is, Scandinavian, language rather than a West Germanic language. Nouns are gendered but verbs are hardly conjugated at all. Latin is far away but I'm still glad I learned it.

[mopinko]

17. i took spanish in high school.

2 yrs. even tho i slept through it, i passed. live in a mexicano hood.
i can stumble through simple conversation.

the genders always made sense to me. figured out later - all soft fuzzy things are female and all hard strong things are male.

[Ocelot II]

18. In the Potawatomi language, nouns aren't gendered, but

are divided into things that are alive and things that are not alive, and are to be declined accordingly. Water and rocks are considered alive.

German and Norwegian nouns, except those relating to humans, aren't defined by soft and fuzzy/not soft and fuzzy (there are also neuter nouns), so that doesn't help. German tables are masculine; Norwegian ones are neuter. German cars are neuter; Norwegian ones are masculine. German clouds and streets are feminine but both are masculine in Norwegian. There is no apparent logic to noun classification in either language. I think I'll learn Potawatomi.

[wnylib]

21. LOL. In Spanish, table (la mesa) is feminine.

Not what I'd call soft and fuzzy, neither the household furniture, nor the geologic mesa.

[Ocelot II]

22. A German cat, who is probably soft and fuzzy, is feminine -

die Katze - but a Norwegian cat, en katt, is masculine. Maybe they are less soft and fuzzy than the German ones; the native breed, the Norwegian Forest Cat, is quite large and probably traveled with the Vikings, where soft fuzziness might not be a useful quality.

[wnylib]

23. Norwegian Forest cats are definitely furry,

so are probably soft and fuzzy, or at least their undercoat is. Their coats are similar to Maine Coon coats in thickness and length.

In Spanish, the masculine form is used for male cats and the feminine for females. Both are soft and fuzzy.

[Ocelot II]

28. They are very fuzzy and adorable. I want one.

[wnylib]

29. I have never seen one except in photos, but to me

they look both cute and hardy.

You must have a pretty good linguistics background, with your knowledge of language structures.

[Ocelot II]

30. I've read a lot, can't say I have any expertise, but

I do find languages fascinating. There are several books by the linguist John McWhorter that offer some really interesting insights into the development of languages. https://www.amazon.com/JohnMcWhorter/e/B00IZ5SXOC%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share His book about swear words is a riot.

[wnylib]

20. ¿De veras?

El gato, la gata. Both soft and fuzzy.

El poema - masculine
La poesia - feminine
Same subject matter.

[mopinko]

26. as a general rule.

always exceptions, but usually you can see why.

[wnylib]

27. But when it comes to languages, it is not a general rule

because everything has a gender in Spanish and several other languages. In Spanish, tables, books, trees, and all other things are masculine or feminine. Police is a feminine word, but army is masculine while war is feminine. Stone is feminine - hardly soft and fuzzy. Etc.

[wnylib]

19. "Everything is easier after Latin."

De veras. Oder, naturlich.

Interesting about English being a North Germanic language rather than a West Germanic one. There certainly is a strong influence on English from Norwegian and Danish. Dutch (Frisian), too. It is possible to say a complete sentence in Frisian that is identical to English.

The linguistic view on the history and evolution of English has probably shifted from when I learned about it. I learned that the noun declensions and verb conjugations became more simplified or dropped due to differences in regional speech between areas influenced by Romano Celtic, Anglo Saxon, Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, and later, Norman French. The order of words became more important for meaning than ending designations.

Spanish is also simpler than Latin. There are still gendered nouns in Spanish (but only two) and agreement of noun and adjective. Cases in Spanish are like English - subject, object, indirect object and possessive, but without declension except for pronouns. Possessive is designated by the use of a possessive pronoun or the word "de" (of) in front of who or what something belongs to. .Verbs in Spanish are fully conjugated so that pronouns are often not needed in speaking or writing, except to clarify when there is more than one person being referenced. The multiple influence of languages in Spain helped to simplify the grammar a little (Celtiberian, Latin, Gothic, and Arabic).

[Ocelot II]

24. One theory is that when the Vikings invaded England in the ninth century,

they had to communicate with the locals who spoke Anglo-Saxon. Both Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon were descended from proto-Germanic but by the time of the Viking invasion the languages had diverged enough that they were not mutually intelligible, or only slightly so. As a result of the need to communicate, both languages became more streamlined. The simplified versions went back to mainland Scandinavia, though the Norwegians who settled Iceland retained Old Norse almost completely, with the result that Icelandic hasn't changed much in the last thousand years. Norwegian changed the least until fairly recently, while Danish was influenced by German and Frisian and Swedish had some French influence from the Bernadotte kings that ruled the country. Following the Norman Conquest English got a fair amount of French influence as well. Ultimately it became one of the most analytic languages (one that defines relationships between words in sentences by prepositions and word order), while old languages like Latin and Icelandic remained synthetic (the sense of a sentence determined by inflections of the words), and most other European languages are somewhere in between.

[wnylib]

25. Thanks. Language families

and the evolution of specific languages are fascinating to me. You have apparently learned about languages as well as learning specific languages.