5 ms·

How is reading an interlinear translation of the Greek classics supposed to help you engage in a conversation with a real life Greek person in Greece?

chillacy 10y ago
My guess is Hamilton was teaching his pupils to be able to read classics, since traveling to speak with a Greek person in Greece would have been difficult back then anyways. To speak with people, you might look at the learning route advocated by Dr. Pimsleur, who also started a company which publishes language learning in audiobooks only, with the argument that most languages started out without a written form, and when they did develop writing it was inaccessible to a majority of speakers for most of history. Literacy is a recent phenomenon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Pimsleur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Pimsleur
- lgessler 10y ago
  Nearly half of languages of the world continue to have no writing system: https://www.ethnologue.com/enterprise-faq/how-many-languages-world-are-unwritten-0 https://www.ethnologue.com/enterprise-faq/how-many-languages...
  - oh_sigh 10y ago
    Sure, but how many people do those 3000+ languages actually cover? I'd imagine a lot of languages with 1-100 speakers don't have a writing system...
    - lgessler 10y ago
      The broader point here is that something most people in the developed world do not realize at first is that a writing system is not an important part of how many (I'd wager most) people use their language. In other words, the spoken language is all that matters or practically exists for most people in the world. For almost all of history most languages were unwritten. While it's true that today, owing to the efforts of indigenous leaders[1], missionaries[2], and linguists[3], many languages have gained writing systems, they often are of marginal, if any, relevance in the average speaker's daily life. E.g., Wu Chinese, at 80M speakers, lacks a robust writing system. Many Indo-Aryan languages (i.e. those related to Hindi) in Northern India lack a standard written form. Maay Maay, a language spoken in Somalia with 2M speakers, does not have a writing system. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_alphabet [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coorgi%E2%80%93Cox_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coorgi%E2%80%93Cox_alphabet
- adrianratnapala 10y ago
  Even today, for me today, being able to read Aristotle, Homer and Euripedes in their language would be slightly more useful than being able speak to Greek locals on some hypothetical holiday. But learning a language is a big deal, and I don't think that either one is really worth it for anyone who isn't a student. Though if I lived in Greece, that's a different matter.
- visarga 10y ago
  Pimsleur courses are amazing.
cafard 10y ago
More or less the way that an interlinear translation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles will help (say) a Greek monoglot hold conversations in Chicago.
gumby 10y ago
The same way reading Chaucer helps you speak with someone in Yorkshire: it doesn't. Flippancy aside: you learn languages to have conversations with others; in the case of dead languages it's to have one-sided conversations with long ago people, no different from reading a contemporary novel. Translation is never perfect (whatever that would even mean) so some stuff is clearly worth reading in the original, and when there's a significant corpus of stuff to read the effort to learn the language can be worth it. The article actually makes two points, neither of which I agree with. One is that interlinear translation is better than, say, paragraph by paragraph translation. The problem is linguistic structure, and the article even says he had to move words around to make interlinear translation work. That can actually "work" in languages with case like Classical Greek and Latin, but would result in a word salad with French and English. And even in a language with case, word order is not irrelevant. My second problem is the claimed emphasis on grammar. Of course you do need to know some grammar, but in the languages I learned in HS (French, Latin, Greek) the whole point was to be able to read classical texts (some of them salacious to keep the interest of HS kids), not rote learning of grammar and vocabulary for some abstract benefit.

chillacy 10y ago

My guess is Hamilton was teaching his pupils to be able to read classics, since traveling to speak with a Greek person in Greece would have been difficult back then anyways. To speak with people, you might look at the learning route advocated by Dr. Pimsleur, who also started a company which publishes language learning in audiobooks only, with the argument that most languages started out without a written form, and when they did develop writing it was inaccessible to a majority of speakers for most of history. Literacy is a recent phenomenon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Pimsleur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Pimsleur

lgessler 10y ago
Nearly half of languages of the world continue to have no writing system: https://www.ethnologue.com/enterprise-faq/how-many-languages-world-are-unwritten-0 https://www.ethnologue.com/enterprise-faq/how-many-languages...
- oh_sigh 10y ago
  Sure, but how many people do those 3000+ languages actually cover? I'd imagine a lot of languages with 1-100 speakers don't have a writing system...
  - lgessler 10y ago
    The broader point here is that something most people in the developed world do not realize at first is that a writing system is not an important part of how many (I'd wager most) people use their language. In other words, the spoken language is all that matters or practically exists for most people in the world. For almost all of history most languages were unwritten. While it's true that today, owing to the efforts of indigenous leaders[1], missionaries[2], and linguists[3], many languages have gained writing systems, they often are of marginal, if any, relevance in the average speaker's daily life. E.g., Wu Chinese, at 80M speakers, lacks a robust writing system. Many Indo-Aryan languages (i.e. those related to Hindi) in Northern India lack a standard written form. Maay Maay, a language spoken in Somalia with 2M speakers, does not have a writing system. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_alphabet [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coorgi%E2%80%93Cox_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coorgi%E2%80%93Cox_alphabet
adrianratnapala 10y ago
Even today, for me today, being able to read Aristotle, Homer and Euripedes in their language would be slightly more useful than being able speak to Greek locals on some hypothetical holiday. But learning a language is a big deal, and I don't think that either one is really worth it for anyone who isn't a student. Though if I lived in Greece, that's a different matter.
visarga 10y ago
Pimsleur courses are amazing.

cafard 10y ago

More or less the way that an interlinear translation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles will help (say) a Greek monoglot hold conversations in Chicago.

gumby 10y ago

The same way reading Chaucer helps you speak with someone in Yorkshire: it doesn't. Flippancy aside: you learn languages to have conversations with others; in the case of dead languages it's to have one-sided conversations with long ago people, no different from reading a contemporary novel. Translation is never perfect (whatever that would even mean) so some stuff is clearly worth reading in the original, and when there's a significant corpus of stuff to read the effort to learn the language can be worth it. The article actually makes two points, neither of which I agree with. One is that interlinear translation is better than, say, paragraph by paragraph translation. The problem is linguistic structure, and the article even says he had to move words around to make interlinear translation work. That can actually "work" in languages with case like Classical Greek and Latin, but would result in a word salad with French and English. And even in a language with case, word order is not irrelevant. My second problem is the claimed emphasis on grammar. Of course you do need to know some grammar, but in the languages I learned in HS (French, Latin, Greek) the whole point was to be able to read classical texts (some of them salacious to keep the interest of HS kids), not rote learning of grammar and vocabulary for some abstract benefit.