12 ms·

Uh, no? The two broad categories are high Latin and low Latin. Put another way, classical Latin and vulgar Latin. Low Latin was the vernacular and already used

Uh, no? The two broad categories are high Latin and low Latin. Put another way, classical Latin and vulgar Latin. Low Latin was the vernacular and already used by most by 270 AD, including poets, who greatly influenced the formation and unification of the new Latin language. The "Latin" that is generally studied at university these days comes from a mediaeval Latin that is a simplification of this old, vernacular form. Actually, during the period of classical Latin, the vulgar form already existed and broke off into at least a dozen dialects, some of which include old forms of French, Spanish, Portuguese, and, of course Latin, of which there were many versions. It was a fight between the two, but nobody really used classical Latin in everyday speech. These days, there are I want to say probably a dozen dialects in Italy. But Italian is a simplification of Roman Latin with minor influences by other Romance languages and even less influences by other world languages such as Arabic. My basic conclusion to what you say is, there is no way you can understand classical Latin if you speak modern Italian.

thaumasiotes 10y ago
There is also no way to understand classical Chinese if you speak any modern Chinese language. > The "Latin" that is generally studied at university these days comes from a mediaeval Latin that is a simplification of this old, vernacular form. This is certainly not the case in the US. That sounds more like studying church Latin, which will be mocked if you're studying Latin outside an explicit religious context. Where are you?
- huahaiy 10y ago
  Not really. Ancient Chinese poems as far back as 3000 years ago are still required materials for recitation by Chinese school children. Any educated modern Chinese can read and understand ancient Chinese text.
  - thaumasiotes 10y ago
    > Ancient Chinese poems as far back as 3000 years ago are still required materials for recitation by Chinese school children. This is true. > Any educated modern Chinese can read and understand ancient Chinese text. This is false. Try them on something they haven't seen before. Furthermore, just as modern Chinese who have studied ancient Chinese can read it, modern Italians who have studied Latin can read that, too. In fact, modern Italians who have studied ancient Chinese can even read that! That doesn't mean their knowledge of Italian is helpful; it isn't.
    - huahaiy 10y ago
      I was merely questioning the claim that modern Chinese cannot read ancient Chinese. I made no claim whatsoever on Italian as I have no knowledge on that matter. However, I have first hand knowledge that modern educated Chinese can read ancient Chinese text, which by definition means reading text they have not seen before. The Chinese writing system changed very little since Han dynasty. Even with the mainland Chinese's simplified Chinese system, most mainland Chinese can still read traditional Chinese without special training. Because the simplification was mostly codifying the existent shortcuts in ordinary people's hand-writings.
      - GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
        Sinologist Victor Mair reports: " On Thursday we had our Spring mid-term examination. I always test the students on a seen portion and an unseen passage. Because we go over the text in class together so very carefully, they usually do well on the seen passage, but often the unseen passage — for which I try to pick a text that is at about the same level of difficulty as the stage we're at in class at the time — completely throws the students for a loop. This time it happened that the students (2 from China, 2 with a Japanese background, 2 from the United States, 1 from Hong Kong, 1 from Vietnam, and 1 from Ghana) were stymied by the unseen passage that I gave them. They could understand all of the characters singly, and I even gave them additional vocabulary notes and explanations. But they just couldn't make sense of the passage as a whole nor even of its constituent sentences. Among the 9 students, only 2 could roughly figure out what was happening in the unseen passage. Of course, this is terribly frustrating for the students, but it is also good practice to push them to their limits to see what they can do unaided (like letting a child try to ride a bike without training wheels after a period of using them). In cases like what happened on Thursday, I tell the students that I will be lenient, so I'll add on 20 or 30 points to their grade because I fully realize how hard the test is. If they can get any part of it, I'm proud of them." ( http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=24459 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=24459 ) and also a detailed answer from an otherwise-anonymous stackoverflow user: http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/15452/can-chinese-people-read-the-literature-of-2-500-years-ago-as-easily-as-yesterday http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/15452/can-chines...
  - Retric 10y ago
    Linguistic drift if fast, try reading the canterbury tales from an original document. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English#/media/File%3AChaucer-canterburytales-miller.jpg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English#/media/File%3... Sure, is looks somewhat similar but this is only Middle English from around 650 years ago it rapidly gets much worse.
    - kafkaesque 10y ago
      This is a weird thread. I hate to be so contrarian, and I'm beginning to question people's knowledge in this thread, but I was taught Middle English and they hammered home how it was very close to modern English. Yes, a lot of students were first shocked and disagreed, but if you stuck with it, you would see a lot of similarities. One thing that I think threw off a lot of students was the spelling versus the pronunciation. If you analyze Middle English on a purely visual or "literal" level, it looks almost nothing like English. Once you start learning the pronunciation and liaisons and connecting words, and with a few minor pronunciation differences, you really do begin to hear its strong correlations to modern English.
      - thaumasiotes 10y ago
        In an objective sense, Middle English is very close to modern English. Modern German is also very close to modern English. That means learning either language will be much easier for an English speaker than e.g. learning Japanese would be. But it doesn't mean that knowledge of modern English is sufficient to understand Middle English.
      - Retric 10y ago
        I think you missed my point, starting from scratch you might get say 50%+ percent of Middle English and it's fairly easy to learn the rest. But, this is only 650 years ago, 3,000 years is several cycles like this. We teach students modern versions of really old stories like gilgamesh and enkidu, but not in their original format.
  - plaguuuuuu 10y ago
    I'm not an expert on this by any means, but.. Chinese is a totally different case due to the writing system. If you can read Mandarin, you can also read Cantonese text to a certain extent, even though the languages are mutually unintelligible in conversation. Ancient Chinese - first of all seal script would make it a bit harder vs modern script but AFAIK everyone uses modern typography. Then the characters used in the old texts are often pretty different to modern ones, requiring a certain amount of study to interpret. But most importantly the language itself would be entirely unintelligible to a modern Mandarin speaker. There are hundreds of dialects with varying levels of intelligibility with Mandarin within China, and the ancient Chinese languages were very, very different to Mandarin (some dialects are supposed to have certain similarities with it). So even if it were written phonetically and not logographically, it would be impossible to understand. More like studying Latin than Middle English.
    - huahaiy 10y ago
      It is indeed different, not just for modern Chinese speakers, but also for ancient Chinese speakers, because the classic Chinese writing is not a record of spoken language, it is a literary form of its own. However, an educated Chinese person is expected to be able to read classic Chinese. Not many years ago, they are even expected to be able to write in classic Chinese. For example, some top communist revolutionary leaders, such as Mao, could write beautiful classic Chinese proses, which was part of their allure to the intellectual class that supported them.
  - eloisant 10y ago
    That's because they learn old Chinese at school, just like any educated French a few decades ago were able to read latin.
- kafkaesque 10y ago
  > This is certainly not the case in the US. That sounds more like studying church Latin, which will be mocked if you're studying Latin outside an explicit religious context. Where are you? I studied Latin in Canada. Foundation Latin classes are based on the "Latin of Cicero," the writer who is considered to have mastered the language during its Golden Age by most scholars. We are not taught Classical Latin til more advanced courses, as the declensions and conjugations change and so do many word meanings, and instead of learning Classical Latin the language, we learn to close-read Classical Latin literature.
  - GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
    How is Cicero not "Classical Latin"?
    - kafkaesque 10y ago
      I'm assuming a few people here have not studied Latin, which is fine of course, but their understanding is based on a simplification of a summary of nice and orderly definitions on what periods adhere to what types of Latin dialects. This is not how the real world worked and neither how Latin is taught at my particular institution. Unfortunately, I do not have time to explain everything, and I am also not a Latin scholar. I studied Latin over 6 years ago so my Latin history knowledge is also a little fuzzy. But you are right, Cicero is Classical Latin. However, we were taught a mix of Latin that is kind of like what this Wiki says: "The Latin of the panegyrics is that of a Golden Age Latin base, derived from an education heavy on Cicero, mixed with a large number of Silver Age usages and a small number of Late and Vulgar terms." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panegyrici_Latini#Language_and_style https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panegyrici_Latini#Language_and... "Silver Age" is what I probably should have said instead of strictly Late and Vulgar, which are both technically different terms, but which were also taught in my Latin courses.
      - GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
        A close family member was a Classics professor so while I have never personally studied Latin, I've been around it all my life, and my understanding is that your experiences are not close to typical.
empath75 10y ago
> My basic conclusion to what you say is, there is no way you can understand classical Latin if you speak modern Italian. As someone who knows a little latin, spanish and french, I think with a little bit of thought, you can get a decent gloss of quite a bit of classical latin. I'd say it's probably easier to guess at latin than trying to understand italian if you only know spanish. For example -- the first line of Caesar's commentaries: "Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres" "All of Gaul is divided in three parts" Spanish (using google translate, because i'm lazy, but you get the idea): 'Toda la Galia está dividida en tres partes' French: Tout de la Gaule est divisée en trois parties Italian: Tutto della Gallia è divisa in tre parti
- kafkaesque 10y ago
  Trust me, I understand what you mean, but it is not the same. I don't mean to brag, but I speak fluent Spanish, and I studied Italian, French, and Latin for four years. I never studied Portuguese, but I can read probably 50% of it and grasp about 70% of its meaning. Romanian looks a lot more like Latin, so I used to be able to spot some words in it, as well. My Latin is rusty these days, though. The difference between Classical Latin is that word meaning is very different, even though it looks similar. You can't go from a modern Romance language and back, but you can go from Classical/Vernacular Latin forward. Even Latin speakers would sometimes get confused which words were accusative and nominative cases in complex sentence structures. The easiest ones are genitive, ablative, and dative, but try reading literature that is long, and it starts getting complicated to parse who is doing the action to what. Not to mention the noun declensions, which are completely nonexistent in all modern Romance languages.
  - empath75 10y ago
    oh sure.. but the cognates are close enough that you can get a rough idea of what's being talked about in a lot of cases...
    - kafkaesque 10y ago
      You're right. There are a lot of cognates. But in first year Latin we are taught and given exams on false cognates, so I guess I always treated each cognate carefully because our prof was always trying to trick us! In translation class, we were taught about false friends, so this added to my paranoia probably.
smallnamespace 10y ago
Then isn't the analogy between Latin/Romance pretty comparable with Classical Chinese/Modern Chinese? Modern written Mandarin was standardized based on Northern vernacular Chinese dialects in early last century, which had diverged very far from the Classical Chinese of the Qing and Han dynasties (when the vernacular of the time was recorded and standardized). Without specifically being taught, Classical Chinese is mostly incomprehensible to a native Mandarin speaker -- the vocabulary has changed a lot and the grammar has shifted. To make things more difficult, because the sound system in Mandarin underwent simplification, many words that used to be differentiated are now homophones. Written Classical Chinese is also not readable without specific teaching -- even when characters are the same, the meaning has often diverged significantly. False cognates abound. To further the analogy, the regional Chinese 'dialects' like Cantonese, Fuzhounese, Taiwanese, Shanghainese, etc. are for the most part mutually incomprehensible, having developed their own sound systems, vocabulary, and grammar. A linguist would consider them separate languages, just like the different Romance languages. Source: am a native Cantonese and Mandarin speaker
gpderetta 10y ago
> These days, there are I want to say probably a dozen dialects in Italy. you are probably off by one order of magnitude.

thaumasiotes 10y ago

There is also no way to understand classical Chinese if you speak any modern Chinese language. > The "Latin" that is generally studied at university these days comes from a mediaeval Latin that is a simplification of this old, vernacular form. This is certainly not the case in the US. That sounds more like studying church Latin, which will be mocked if you're studying Latin outside an explicit religious context. Where are you?

huahaiy 10y ago
Not really. Ancient Chinese poems as far back as 3000 years ago are still required materials for recitation by Chinese school children. Any educated modern Chinese can read and understand ancient Chinese text.
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  > Ancient Chinese poems as far back as 3000 years ago are still required materials for recitation by Chinese school children. This is true. > Any educated modern Chinese can read and understand ancient Chinese text. This is false. Try them on something they haven't seen before. Furthermore, just as modern Chinese who have studied ancient Chinese can read it, modern Italians who have studied Latin can read that, too. In fact, modern Italians who have studied ancient Chinese can even read that! That doesn't mean their knowledge of Italian is helpful; it isn't.
  - huahaiy 10y ago
    I was merely questioning the claim that modern Chinese cannot read ancient Chinese. I made no claim whatsoever on Italian as I have no knowledge on that matter. However, I have first hand knowledge that modern educated Chinese can read ancient Chinese text, which by definition means reading text they have not seen before. The Chinese writing system changed very little since Han dynasty. Even with the mainland Chinese's simplified Chinese system, most mainland Chinese can still read traditional Chinese without special training. Because the simplification was mostly codifying the existent shortcuts in ordinary people's hand-writings.
    - GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
      Sinologist Victor Mair reports: " On Thursday we had our Spring mid-term examination. I always test the students on a seen portion and an unseen passage. Because we go over the text in class together so very carefully, they usually do well on the seen passage, but often the unseen passage — for which I try to pick a text that is at about the same level of difficulty as the stage we're at in class at the time — completely throws the students for a loop. This time it happened that the students (2 from China, 2 with a Japanese background, 2 from the United States, 1 from Hong Kong, 1 from Vietnam, and 1 from Ghana) were stymied by the unseen passage that I gave them. They could understand all of the characters singly, and I even gave them additional vocabulary notes and explanations. But they just couldn't make sense of the passage as a whole nor even of its constituent sentences. Among the 9 students, only 2 could roughly figure out what was happening in the unseen passage. Of course, this is terribly frustrating for the students, but it is also good practice to push them to their limits to see what they can do unaided (like letting a child try to ride a bike without training wheels after a period of using them). In cases like what happened on Thursday, I tell the students that I will be lenient, so I'll add on 20 or 30 points to their grade because I fully realize how hard the test is. If they can get any part of it, I'm proud of them." ( http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=24459 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=24459 ) and also a detailed answer from an otherwise-anonymous stackoverflow user: http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/15452/can-chinese-people-read-the-literature-of-2-500-years-ago-as-easily-as-yesterday http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/15452/can-chines...
- Retric 10y ago
  Linguistic drift if fast, try reading the canterbury tales from an original document. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English#/media/File%3AChaucer-canterburytales-miller.jpg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English#/media/File%3... Sure, is looks somewhat similar but this is only Middle English from around 650 years ago it rapidly gets much worse.
  - kafkaesque 10y ago
    This is a weird thread. I hate to be so contrarian, and I'm beginning to question people's knowledge in this thread, but I was taught Middle English and they hammered home how it was very close to modern English. Yes, a lot of students were first shocked and disagreed, but if you stuck with it, you would see a lot of similarities. One thing that I think threw off a lot of students was the spelling versus the pronunciation. If you analyze Middle English on a purely visual or "literal" level, it looks almost nothing like English. Once you start learning the pronunciation and liaisons and connecting words, and with a few minor pronunciation differences, you really do begin to hear its strong correlations to modern English.
    - thaumasiotes 10y ago
      In an objective sense, Middle English is very close to modern English. Modern German is also very close to modern English. That means learning either language will be much easier for an English speaker than e.g. learning Japanese would be. But it doesn't mean that knowledge of modern English is sufficient to understand Middle English.
    - Retric 10y ago
      I think you missed my point, starting from scratch you might get say 50%+ percent of Middle English and it's fairly easy to learn the rest. But, this is only 650 years ago, 3,000 years is several cycles like this. We teach students modern versions of really old stories like gilgamesh and enkidu, but not in their original format.
- plaguuuuuu 10y ago
  I'm not an expert on this by any means, but.. Chinese is a totally different case due to the writing system. If you can read Mandarin, you can also read Cantonese text to a certain extent, even though the languages are mutually unintelligible in conversation. Ancient Chinese - first of all seal script would make it a bit harder vs modern script but AFAIK everyone uses modern typography. Then the characters used in the old texts are often pretty different to modern ones, requiring a certain amount of study to interpret. But most importantly the language itself would be entirely unintelligible to a modern Mandarin speaker. There are hundreds of dialects with varying levels of intelligibility with Mandarin within China, and the ancient Chinese languages were very, very different to Mandarin (some dialects are supposed to have certain similarities with it). So even if it were written phonetically and not logographically, it would be impossible to understand. More like studying Latin than Middle English.
  - huahaiy 10y ago
    It is indeed different, not just for modern Chinese speakers, but also for ancient Chinese speakers, because the classic Chinese writing is not a record of spoken language, it is a literary form of its own. However, an educated Chinese person is expected to be able to read classic Chinese. Not many years ago, they are even expected to be able to write in classic Chinese. For example, some top communist revolutionary leaders, such as Mao, could write beautiful classic Chinese proses, which was part of their allure to the intellectual class that supported them.
- eloisant 10y ago
  That's because they learn old Chinese at school, just like any educated French a few decades ago were able to read latin.
kafkaesque 10y ago
> This is certainly not the case in the US. That sounds more like studying church Latin, which will be mocked if you're studying Latin outside an explicit religious context. Where are you? I studied Latin in Canada. Foundation Latin classes are based on the "Latin of Cicero," the writer who is considered to have mastered the language during its Golden Age by most scholars. We are not taught Classical Latin til more advanced courses, as the declensions and conjugations change and so do many word meanings, and instead of learning Classical Latin the language, we learn to close-read Classical Latin literature.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
  How is Cicero not "Classical Latin"?
  - kafkaesque 10y ago
    I'm assuming a few people here have not studied Latin, which is fine of course, but their understanding is based on a simplification of a summary of nice and orderly definitions on what periods adhere to what types of Latin dialects. This is not how the real world worked and neither how Latin is taught at my particular institution. Unfortunately, I do not have time to explain everything, and I am also not a Latin scholar. I studied Latin over 6 years ago so my Latin history knowledge is also a little fuzzy. But you are right, Cicero is Classical Latin. However, we were taught a mix of Latin that is kind of like what this Wiki says: "The Latin of the panegyrics is that of a Golden Age Latin base, derived from an education heavy on Cicero, mixed with a large number of Silver Age usages and a small number of Late and Vulgar terms." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panegyrici_Latini#Language_and_style https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panegyrici_Latini#Language_and... "Silver Age" is what I probably should have said instead of strictly Late and Vulgar, which are both technically different terms, but which were also taught in my Latin courses.
    - GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
      A close family member was a Classics professor so while I have never personally studied Latin, I've been around it all my life, and my understanding is that your experiences are not close to typical.

empath75 10y ago

> My basic conclusion to what you say is, there is no way you can understand classical Latin if you speak modern Italian. As someone who knows a little latin, spanish and french, I think with a little bit of thought, you can get a decent gloss of quite a bit of classical latin. I'd say it's probably easier to guess at latin than trying to understand italian if you only know spanish. For example -- the first line of Caesar's commentaries: "Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres" "All of Gaul is divided in three parts" Spanish (using google translate, because i'm lazy, but you get the idea): 'Toda la Galia está dividida en tres partes' French: Tout de la Gaule est divisée en trois parties Italian: Tutto della Gallia è divisa in tre parti

kafkaesque 10y ago
Trust me, I understand what you mean, but it is not the same. I don't mean to brag, but I speak fluent Spanish, and I studied Italian, French, and Latin for four years. I never studied Portuguese, but I can read probably 50% of it and grasp about 70% of its meaning. Romanian looks a lot more like Latin, so I used to be able to spot some words in it, as well. My Latin is rusty these days, though. The difference between Classical Latin is that word meaning is very different, even though it looks similar. You can't go from a modern Romance language and back, but you can go from Classical/Vernacular Latin forward. Even Latin speakers would sometimes get confused which words were accusative and nominative cases in complex sentence structures. The easiest ones are genitive, ablative, and dative, but try reading literature that is long, and it starts getting complicated to parse who is doing the action to what. Not to mention the noun declensions, which are completely nonexistent in all modern Romance languages.
- empath75 10y ago
  oh sure.. but the cognates are close enough that you can get a rough idea of what's being talked about in a lot of cases...
  - kafkaesque 10y ago
    You're right. There are a lot of cognates. But in first year Latin we are taught and given exams on false cognates, so I guess I always treated each cognate carefully because our prof was always trying to trick us! In translation class, we were taught about false friends, so this added to my paranoia probably.

smallnamespace 10y ago

Then isn't the analogy between Latin/Romance pretty comparable with Classical Chinese/Modern Chinese? Modern written Mandarin was standardized based on Northern vernacular Chinese dialects in early last century, which had diverged very far from the Classical Chinese of the Qing and Han dynasties (when the vernacular of the time was recorded and standardized). Without specifically being taught, Classical Chinese is mostly incomprehensible to a native Mandarin speaker -- the vocabulary has changed a lot and the grammar has shifted. To make things more difficult, because the sound system in Mandarin underwent simplification, many words that used to be differentiated are now homophones. Written Classical Chinese is also not readable without specific teaching -- even when characters are the same, the meaning has often diverged significantly. False cognates abound. To further the analogy, the regional Chinese 'dialects' like Cantonese, Fuzhounese, Taiwanese, Shanghainese, etc. are for the most part mutually incomprehensible, having developed their own sound systems, vocabulary, and grammar. A linguist would consider them separate languages, just like the different Romance languages. Source: am a native Cantonese and Mandarin speaker

gpderetta 10y ago

> These days, there are I want to say probably a dozen dialects in Italy. you are probably off by one order of magnitude.