The Dead Language Brigade: Greek and Latin

I've created a group — Classics — for other people interested in the Greek and Latin languages.

I'm mostly self-taught (Greek, primarily), and have been involved with online communities of people studying these languages on their own, so I'm sort of intrigued by the educational possibilities of SL. I'm not sure it's better than other online methods, but it seems like something to explore.

I also sometimes fantasize about starting a Neo-Epicurean Garden in SL, but that may need to wait for a larger population.

(Oy! Neither this forum nor the SL client itself handles Unicode Greek terribly well. Valete, then.)

Just spray some Windex on it, then.
*ducks*

Occassionally I want to make a greek motto, but can't get a good translator for it.

What is the motto?

Oh, the Times!

Oh, the Morals!

Since when was Greek a dead language? They still speak it in Greece.

Well, I'm referring to the classical language, which is a different, though obviously related, thing.

It sounds fascinating, but I don't know a single thing about ancient greek or latin, or what-have-you.


Perhaps I could take up something older, but simpler.

How ancient of a language would qualify?


One where you could reasonably say "I'm experiencing lag, could it be my video card or is it from the sim itself?"

Or would the discussion limited to concepts like the number of goats you might exchange for a bride?

Well, ancient enough.

For me a classical language is a language that is still used even after the native speakers have died out. So, no one speaks Latin natively, but its still studied, in this case for historical and sometimes religious reasons.

So I'd include as classical languages: Greek and Latin, Biblical Hebrew, Classical Arabic, Avestan, Sanskrit, Pali, Classical Tibetan, Classical Chinese. Classical period Persian probably also gets in.

There are lots of other dead languages that have interesting literatures in them, but for whatever reason tend not to be widely studied.



Any of these languages could accomodate modern discussion, though some may have a harder time of it than others. In Greek and Sanskrit, for example, it's very easy to build new words by jamming two smaller words together. Latin is less happy about this procedure.

But my point isn't so much to converse in these languages — though certainly one could — because most people study these languages to get direct access to the works written in them.

Latin is actually one of the easiest languages to learn if your primary is english. So I'm told. A lot of english comes from latin. Luna is moon for example. Wich we use in english as Lunar. Stuff like that.
Anyway, I payed 4 goats for my video card.

I don't agree with this at all, and I'm pretty damn near fluent in Latin.

Although English has borrowed maybe 60% of its word content from Latin, the grammatical structure is utterly foreign to modern english. Latin is a highly inflected language, with word endings (inflections) for almost every conceivable state-of-being (although Finnish and Turkish have Latin beat in this particular category). English is a isolating, and lightly agglutinating language, that is sense comes from the order in which words are placed, and after that, by stringing together of words and/or prefixes and/or suffixes into compound words.

1000 years ago, when English was considerably more like Latin grammatically, its semantic content was almost entirely German. Then the norman French invaded and brought the vulgar Latin (by this time French) they were speaking with them. Bringing with it the words.

Old French became the language of the privileged class. Which we still see in word use today. Even your example up above: "Moon" is the germanic word, and is the common, everyday form that is used. Lunar is used in technical and scientific speech, and often in poetry and creative writing, all activities that would have been indulged in by the upper class...


oh, what was this thread about again?

There are several people I've met in SL that are interested in Classical Antiquity and Culture (not just the languages). I actually am building my own ancient-Roman themed property in Linda (it's not totally done yet so it's not in the Find yet, but if you teleport to Linda you can fly around and find it pretty easily in the northern half of Linda).

And it's not exactly Neo-Epicurean, but I do have a floating Garden space where you can read exerpts from Lucretius while there! Take the teleporter up to the Humanist Gardens.

Fascinating stuff! Thanks for posting.

Tha ithela ena kotopolo.

I took 3 years of Latin and 1 year of Ancient Greek in High School.

Unfortunately, my skills have declined. I can point out a Latin verb easy enough... Or in Ancient Greek tell you that "the" Dikaeopolis works in the fields...

Does that count?

Not sure if that was snark or genuine appreciate, but I'll assume the latter . Believe me, writing about languages is my pleasure.

A person after my own heart!

Eh, its just what I heard from people who have taken various languages.
Everyone has their way of learning an opinion.
I sure wouldn't wanna learn Chinese over Latin thou.
Not that anything is wrong with it. It's just a heck of a lot harder for me to learn.

Definately not a snark. This subject has alwasy peaked my interest, especially after finding writing on an ancient obelisk in the Rodeo region of the Forest of Kahruvel.

Modern hebrew is actually pretty close to the ancient biblical hebrew. Does this make it an Undead Language?

I'd call it revived. Hebrew's definitely a special case.

For that matter, Modern Icelandic and Old West Norse are identical in most aspects. Granted, there has been significant lexical additions to the language over the years, but the syntactic stucture has changed little. There has been some phonetic change in the last millinium, but not nearly as much as with other languages over much shorter time periods. Old Norse and Modern Icelandic are probably more mutually intelligible than many dialects of American English are to each other.

Interesting idea of a group though... I would love to have groups dedicated to individual Germanic and Slavic languages.

You can also include Irish and Maori in the revived category. Irish was almost extinct by the 1920's, but has been revived and is not only taught in schools (manditory in most, I believe), but official governmental documents are published bilingually.

There was a hugely successful revival of Maori in New Zealand, to the point that one can now receive their entire education from pre-school through PhD in the language (or so I've heard).

Pretty groovy, if you ask me.

OMGs!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Homeric, Classical, Koine, all of the above? I've gotten a bit further with Latin but it's slow-going teaching yourself.

All of the above.

Wow.

OK, how do I join; I take it membership is by invitation?