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I'd prefer to learn the language to read it in the original form, but it's vice versa, people learn the language from translations of Homer. I wonder how much

I'd prefer to learn the language to read it in the original form, but it's vice versa, people learn the language from translations of Homer. I wonder how much comparative analysis has gained or will from AI. Given a suitable model to start with, a huge probability tree of ontologies could be handled to reconstruct common ancestors in proto-languages. There were people here reporting interest in machine translation of some 30000 Sumerian clay-tablets, the other day. The pairing with semantic inference would be interesting, too, or the inverse, alike to deep dream generating adversarial reinforcement in pictures, extracting the principal components of a language to infer stages of it's development, like a sequenced Word Net. There might be some surprises in the ambiguity of metaphors.Especially in long living or quickly developing languages folk etymologies must be common, especially given religion, so a naive machine approach might even help next to manual translation (human in the loop ai).

ubernostrum 9y ago
I'd prefer to learn the language to read it in the original form, but it's vice versa, people learn the language from translations of Homer. Ancient Greek was not one language. Like any language, it had multiple dialects and evolved significantly over time. The big one is Ionic Greek, which was the source of the Greek of three time periods scholars care about: Homeric Greek, the language of Homer, named for him; Attic Greek, the language of the "golden age" of Athens; and Koiné Greek, the language of early Christian texts. An analogy I've heard a few times is to compare Homeric Greek to Chaucer's English; Attic to Shakespeare's English; and Koiné to modern vernacular. The usual approach is to teach Attic, since it has a large, well-understood corpus and offers the easiest path to either of the other two (in much the same way that it'd be easier to get to Chaucer if you started by learning Shakespearean English). That's how it was taught when I did Greek in college, for example; we started with simple contrived texts in Attic Greek, then moved into reading selections from Athenian figures like Plato and Aristophanes and Euripides. The very back of the book had short passages from Homer for truly ambitious students, but we didn't get into them.
- StavrosK 9y ago
  I think that analogy is pretty apt, given that Koine is readily understandable by modern Greeks. Priests in churches today read the original passages from the third century BC in sermons.
- tragomaskhalos 9y ago
  That's an interesting take. In England, for O level (hence a few years younger than college age) we did both Plato and Homer as set books. I think the reasoning was that yes the language differences are challenging, but it's important to encompass both to really appreciate the language and culture.
tragomaskhalos 9y ago
I'm (intermittently) trying to read the Iliad using the Loeb side-by-side text, i.e. try to figure out the Greek and use the English on the facing page as a (frequent) crib. It's very hard work, even though the English is a fairly literal translation, but at the same time very rewarding: it's true that you can only really appreciate poetry in the original.

ubernostrum 9y ago

I'd prefer to learn the language to read it in the original form, but it's vice versa, people learn the language from translations of Homer. Ancient Greek was not one language. Like any language, it had multiple dialects and evolved significantly over time. The big one is Ionic Greek, which was the source of the Greek of three time periods scholars care about: Homeric Greek, the language of Homer, named for him; Attic Greek, the language of the "golden age" of Athens; and Koiné Greek, the language of early Christian texts. An analogy I've heard a few times is to compare Homeric Greek to Chaucer's English; Attic to Shakespeare's English; and Koiné to modern vernacular. The usual approach is to teach Attic, since it has a large, well-understood corpus and offers the easiest path to either of the other two (in much the same way that it'd be easier to get to Chaucer if you started by learning Shakespearean English). That's how it was taught when I did Greek in college, for example; we started with simple contrived texts in Attic Greek, then moved into reading selections from Athenian figures like Plato and Aristophanes and Euripides. The very back of the book had short passages from Homer for truly ambitious students, but we didn't get into them.

StavrosK 9y ago
I think that analogy is pretty apt, given that Koine is readily understandable by modern Greeks. Priests in churches today read the original passages from the third century BC in sermons.
tragomaskhalos 9y ago
That's an interesting take. In England, for O level (hence a few years younger than college age) we did both Plato and Homer as set books. I think the reasoning was that yes the language differences are challenging, but it's important to encompass both to really appreciate the language and culture.

tragomaskhalos 9y ago

I'm (intermittently) trying to read the Iliad using the Loeb side-by-side text, i.e. try to figure out the Greek and use the English on the facing page as a (frequent) crib. It's very hard work, even though the English is a fairly literal translation, but at the same time very rewarding: it's true that you can only really appreciate poetry in the original.