4 ms·

Seems like just an inevitable outcome of ever-increasing academic specialization. (Well, that and from the fact that classical languages aren't taught to many s

Seems like just an inevitable outcome of ever-increasing academic specialization. (Well, that and from the fact that classical languages aren't taught to many schoolkids anymore.) Maybe in the nineteenth century reading Thucydides would have posed no difficulty to the average classicist, but nowadays the scholar who specializes in Thracian numismatics or whatever probably doesn't have this facility and doesn't have much opportunity to develop or use it. I can't read Greek but I've always heard that it's quite a bit harder than Latin, a language that I found to be preposterously convoluted. (I hated it and didn't get any farther than Caesar.) These languages are hard. I remember reading somewhere that a distinguished English-speaking Hellenist who'd been a professor for decades reported that after all that time he was able to read ancient Greek about as fluently as he read French. That's crazy.

Ericson2314 5y ago
I wouldn't blame this on specialization, per se. This is more like asking why aren't critics good at sports/music/whatever. "Empathy" with the subject of study to the point of total mimicry is or isn't part of the job description on a different axis. The trend in modern social studies to emphasize "historical specificity", or an impossibility of fully embodying living some other context, might provide some cover to those that don't learn the language fluency, but this point didn't come up in the original reply or your comment. If we want people to learn ancient languages fluidly, I think the right model is not even Academia, but, say the Europeans subsidizing rural quasi-traditional farmers for cultural reasons. Or "historically informed practice" in old music. It's not scientific study of the past, but an art or cultural practice in its own right. A good question to ask is how well the Romans could speak 500 years prior Greek. (Older forms of their own language was already covered.) That was also an cultural practice of reverence.
tgv 5y ago
Idk. Mary Beard is not a present day schoolkid. The chair of the section in which I worked was about her age, and he could recite the opening of the Odyssee in Greek, and he was a psychologist. And he wasn't the only one. But IMO it isn't "academic specialization". That just hides the nasty fact that it's publications and successful grant applications that determine a career, the latter being so politicized, that you can get away with bold, unproven statements if you know the right people.
- watwut 5y ago
  If you read what she wrote, being able to recite something is not an issue at all. She said basically that she reads the same group of texts over and over, so she is super efficient at reading those. But when she has to read complex text she never seen before, it is different and harder. And that she remembers other classicists saying the same. Then some musings about passive vs active learning of language and such. Having something memorized is something entirely different then either of these.
inglor_cz 5y ago
I only brushed with Latin for about a month or so before I transferred classes, but I found it delightfully convoluted. Latin probably feels different to a speaker of a flexive Slavic language, who is used to words being declined and word sequence in a sentence being rather relaxed all the time, than to someone who is used that words do not change and a fixed word order in sentences.
- jhbadger 5y ago
  Exactly. Latin is case-based as are Slavic languages even today. It would interesting to see if Russian (or Finnish, which despite not being Indo-European in origin also has a lot of cases) Latin scholars can read Latin more fluently in general as the grammar would not be as alien as it is to native English speakers.
- School-Cotton 5y ago
  You make a good point, and this is why people claiming English is so much easier than Latin because it lacks noun cases is a pet peeve of mine — the word order conventions that we use instead of cases to convey information is grammar that has to be learned too! As far as I know there is no one-dimensional metric that would let you say any language is uniformly easier than another.
wazoox 5y ago
Weird. I find Latin relatively easy and extremely clear, and much less convoluted than English. I love the wonderful terseness of Horace, the extreme information density it carries in a few words, all that's implied in these often non-written verbs, or these wandering adjectives floating miles away from their nouns. I dig Latin. I'm really bad at Greek, but I like it too -- it sounds beautiful.
consp 5y ago
> I can't read Greek but I've always heard that it's quite a bit harder than Latin I actually found ancient Greek (most from Herodotos' time as that was my exam subject) actually much easier than Latin, but that might have more to do with my interest in everything around the language like the stories, culture and lifestyle. So maybe it's just a personal preference. If you ignore the different letterings sometimes used it's not even that bad. Fortunately all textbooks are in the Ionic writing scheme (and sometimes adapted to suit students more) so no sudden digamma's or other dialects.
- kgeist 5y ago
  Interesting, I found Greek more complex, because, in my opinion, there are far more irregularities than in Latin (especially in verbs), and that there are countless dialectal variations to learn if you want to be able to read any Greek text, not just the Attic dialect.
danjac 5y ago
And yet, modern academics are expected to have fluency in English even if it's a second language - academia has always required a lingua franca for obvious reasons, and English simply replaced Latin for that purpose (I think at one point in the early-to-mid 20th century a knowledge of German was required in US universities for some science and engineering subjects). So most academics are required so spend a non-trivial amount of time learning a foreign language to very high proficiency, to the point of being able to read, write and deliver specialist papers in it.
- xhevahir 5y ago
  They're not using these languages as linguae francae, though. They're treating fluency in Latin and Greek as a mark of a scholar's preparation in the field of classics. (Less charitably, you might say they're using it simply as a shibboleth.) Seems kind of pointless to me, since AFAIK it's a matter of convention and institutional inertia that so many disciplines are grouped together under that label. I mean, if I'm a researcher in the bioarchaeology of Cretan olive cultivation, what have I got in common with a student of Attic tragedy, other than the fact that we both took Greek at some point and belong to the same university department?
Mezzie 5y ago
In my experience, once you've studied a language for a while/to a certain level of competency, it's like riding a bike. I haven't studied French or Chinese for over a decade, but I can still (for example) read an article in Le Monde. On the other hand, my German and Arabic are basically non-existent while my Latin is somewhere in the middle. Reading comprehension is also the thing that degrades the least in my experience (as long as there's an alphabet; bets are off with languages with Chinese and Japanese Kanji). I can recognize the subjunctif in French, but if I had to use it/conjugate it, I'd just stare blankly at you.
- xhevahir 5y ago
  To be clear, I'm saying it's crazy that after all that time and effort this guy could read Greek only as well as French, which, from what I understood, he had learned in order to read the secondary literature in his field.

Ericson2314 5y ago

I wouldn't blame this on specialization, per se. This is more like asking why aren't critics good at sports/music/whatever. "Empathy" with the subject of study to the point of total mimicry is or isn't part of the job description on a different axis. The trend in modern social studies to emphasize "historical specificity", or an impossibility of fully embodying living some other context, might provide some cover to those that don't learn the language fluency, but this point didn't come up in the original reply or your comment. If we want people to learn ancient languages fluidly, I think the right model is not even Academia, but, say the Europeans subsidizing rural quasi-traditional farmers for cultural reasons. Or "historically informed practice" in old music. It's not scientific study of the past, but an art or cultural practice in its own right. A good question to ask is how well the Romans could speak 500 years prior Greek. (Older forms of their own language was already covered.) That was also an cultural practice of reverence.

tgv 5y ago

Idk. Mary Beard is not a present day schoolkid. The chair of the section in which I worked was about her age, and he could recite the opening of the Odyssee in Greek, and he was a psychologist. And he wasn't the only one. But IMO it isn't "academic specialization". That just hides the nasty fact that it's publications and successful grant applications that determine a career, the latter being so politicized, that you can get away with bold, unproven statements if you know the right people.

watwut 5y ago
If you read what she wrote, being able to recite something is not an issue at all. She said basically that she reads the same group of texts over and over, so she is super efficient at reading those. But when she has to read complex text she never seen before, it is different and harder. And that she remembers other classicists saying the same. Then some musings about passive vs active learning of language and such. Having something memorized is something entirely different then either of these.

inglor_cz 5y ago

I only brushed with Latin for about a month or so before I transferred classes, but I found it delightfully convoluted. Latin probably feels different to a speaker of a flexive Slavic language, who is used to words being declined and word sequence in a sentence being rather relaxed all the time, than to someone who is used that words do not change and a fixed word order in sentences.

jhbadger 5y ago
Exactly. Latin is case-based as are Slavic languages even today. It would interesting to see if Russian (or Finnish, which despite not being Indo-European in origin also has a lot of cases) Latin scholars can read Latin more fluently in general as the grammar would not be as alien as it is to native English speakers.
School-Cotton 5y ago
You make a good point, and this is why people claiming English is so much easier than Latin because it lacks noun cases is a pet peeve of mine — the word order conventions that we use instead of cases to convey information is grammar that has to be learned too! As far as I know there is no one-dimensional metric that would let you say any language is uniformly easier than another.

wazoox 5y ago

Weird. I find Latin relatively easy and extremely clear, and much less convoluted than English. I love the wonderful terseness of Horace, the extreme information density it carries in a few words, all that's implied in these often non-written verbs, or these wandering adjectives floating miles away from their nouns. I dig Latin. I'm really bad at Greek, but I like it too -- it sounds beautiful.

consp 5y ago

> I can't read Greek but I've always heard that it's quite a bit harder than Latin I actually found ancient Greek (most from Herodotos' time as that was my exam subject) actually much easier than Latin, but that might have more to do with my interest in everything around the language like the stories, culture and lifestyle. So maybe it's just a personal preference. If you ignore the different letterings sometimes used it's not even that bad. Fortunately all textbooks are in the Ionic writing scheme (and sometimes adapted to suit students more) so no sudden digamma's or other dialects.

kgeist 5y ago
Interesting, I found Greek more complex, because, in my opinion, there are far more irregularities than in Latin (especially in verbs), and that there are countless dialectal variations to learn if you want to be able to read any Greek text, not just the Attic dialect.

danjac 5y ago

And yet, modern academics are expected to have fluency in English even if it's a second language - academia has always required a lingua franca for obvious reasons, and English simply replaced Latin for that purpose (I think at one point in the early-to-mid 20th century a knowledge of German was required in US universities for some science and engineering subjects). So most academics are required so spend a non-trivial amount of time learning a foreign language to very high proficiency, to the point of being able to read, write and deliver specialist papers in it.

xhevahir 5y ago
They're not using these languages as linguae francae, though. They're treating fluency in Latin and Greek as a mark of a scholar's preparation in the field of classics. (Less charitably, you might say they're using it simply as a shibboleth.) Seems kind of pointless to me, since AFAIK it's a matter of convention and institutional inertia that so many disciplines are grouped together under that label. I mean, if I'm a researcher in the bioarchaeology of Cretan olive cultivation, what have I got in common with a student of Attic tragedy, other than the fact that we both took Greek at some point and belong to the same university department?

Mezzie 5y ago

In my experience, once you've studied a language for a while/to a certain level of competency, it's like riding a bike. I haven't studied French or Chinese for over a decade, but I can still (for example) read an article in Le Monde. On the other hand, my German and Arabic are basically non-existent while my Latin is somewhere in the middle. Reading comprehension is also the thing that degrades the least in my experience (as long as there's an alphabet; bets are off with languages with Chinese and Japanese Kanji). I can recognize the subjunctif in French, but if I had to use it/conjugate it, I'd just stare blankly at you.

xhevahir 5y ago
To be clear, I'm saying it's crazy that after all that time and effort this guy could read Greek only as well as French, which, from what I understood, he had learned in order to read the secondary literature in his field.