5 ms·

To English speakers, Greek is the traditional exemplar of incomprehensibility. See also http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/graph2.png http://languagelog.ldc.

To English speakers, Greek is the traditional exemplar of incomprehensibility. See also http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/graph2.png http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/graph2.png

daeken 15y ago
My girlfriend has been teaching me Greek for a little while, and I agree wholeheartedly. There are still sounds I simply can't make; it definitely serves as a great source of entertainment for her, though.
- 100k 15y ago
  It used to be worse. Ancient Greek had tonal accents, instead of just stresses as now. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:About_Ancient_Greek#Tonal_Accents http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:About_Ancient_Greek... I learned this reading "Empires of the Word", a book recommended in the HN 2011 best books thread. http://www.amazon.com/Empires-Word-Language-History-World/dp/0066210860 http://www.amazon.com/Empires-Word-Language-History-World/dp...
  - celoyd 15y ago
    I took a semester or two of Ancient Greek, and it wasn’t a walk in the park, but it also wasn’t a headache. It’s the Indo-Europeanness: it’s full of cognate vocabulary and even idioms,[0] and while it has some new grammar, its basic structure is reasonably familiar. It doesn’t do anything freaky (to an Anglophone) like, say, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergative–absolutive_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergative–absolutive_language or what Wikipedia says about the Salishan languages: They are characterised by agglutinativity and astonishing consonant clusters — for instance the Nuxálk word xłp̓x̣ʷłtłpłłskʷc̓ (IPA: [xɬpʼχʷɬtʰɬpʰɬːskʷʰt͡sʼ]) meaning ‘he had had [in his possession] a bunchberry plant’ has thirteen obstruent consonants in a row with no vowels. A-Greek is nothing like this. And its tones are different from the ones in, e.g., Mandarin in that they’re almost never the only way of distinguishing words. It’s rare that ábà means one thing and àbá means an unrelated thing. Plus, a word’s tones are reasonably predictable from the way it’s spelled (about like stress in English or Spanish), so you just learn the tones as part of the word and then you don’t really have to think about them much. It’s trickier than not having tones, but not by much. 0. For a trivial example, if you translate I have in mind to overperform in a naïve word-by-word way to A-Greek, it would end up perfectly idiomatic: both to have in mind and the pervasive figurative use of over and under (hyper and hypo) are the same.
stan_rogers 15y ago
"Graecum est; non legitur." It's not just English; until Chrysoloras et al and the cheap Greek printing of Aldus Manutius, that was pretty much true across Europe. It has probably remained the idiom in English because of Shakespeare (he had a habit of supplying stock phrases to the language at an alarming rate, only matched by the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer).
yread 15y ago
What is the graph showing?

To English speakers, Greek is the traditional exemplar of incomprehensibility. See also http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/graph2.png http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/graph2.png

daeken 15y ago

My girlfriend has been teaching me Greek for a little while, and I agree wholeheartedly. There are still sounds I simply can't make; it definitely serves as a great source of entertainment for her, though.

100k 15y ago
It used to be worse. Ancient Greek had tonal accents, instead of just stresses as now. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:About_Ancient_Greek#Tonal_Accents http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:About_Ancient_Greek... I learned this reading "Empires of the Word", a book recommended in the HN 2011 best books thread. http://www.amazon.com/Empires-Word-Language-History-World/dp/0066210860 http://www.amazon.com/Empires-Word-Language-History-World/dp...
- celoyd 15y ago
  I took a semester or two of Ancient Greek, and it wasn’t a walk in the park, but it also wasn’t a headache. It’s the Indo-Europeanness: it’s full of cognate vocabulary and even idioms,[0] and while it has some new grammar, its basic structure is reasonably familiar. It doesn’t do anything freaky (to an Anglophone) like, say, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergative–absolutive_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergative–absolutive_language or what Wikipedia says about the Salishan languages: They are characterised by agglutinativity and astonishing consonant clusters — for instance the Nuxálk word xłp̓x̣ʷłtłpłłskʷc̓ (IPA: [xɬpʼχʷɬtʰɬpʰɬːskʷʰt͡sʼ]) meaning ‘he had had [in his possession] a bunchberry plant’ has thirteen obstruent consonants in a row with no vowels. A-Greek is nothing like this. And its tones are different from the ones in, e.g., Mandarin in that they’re almost never the only way of distinguishing words. It’s rare that ábà means one thing and àbá means an unrelated thing. Plus, a word’s tones are reasonably predictable from the way it’s spelled (about like stress in English or Spanish), so you just learn the tones as part of the word and then you don’t really have to think about them much. It’s trickier than not having tones, but not by much. 0. For a trivial example, if you translate I have in mind to overperform in a naïve word-by-word way to A-Greek, it would end up perfectly idiomatic: both to have in mind and the pervasive figurative use of over and under (hyper and hypo) are the same.

stan_rogers 15y ago

"Graecum est; non legitur." It's not just English; until Chrysoloras et al and the cheap Greek printing of Aldus Manutius, that was pretty much true across Europe. It has probably remained the idiom in English because of Shakespeare (he had a habit of supplying stock phrases to the language at an alarming rate, only matched by the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer).

yread 15y ago

What is the graph showing?