Question in the thread title. For bonus points, talk about some of the works you’ve read in any dead language. I expect most of the responses will involve Latin, with classical Greek a distant second, but I’m hoping for a little bit of diversity.
I studied Latin and Greek back in high school. The Latin has stuck, while the Greek has not (possibly because of the difference in teaching methods, possibly because I studied the former first). I don’t know that I’d really say that I know Latin, but I can contribute to some of the discussions around here.
I think the only work we read in Latin class was Caesar’s Commentary on the Gallic Wars. In Greek, we read a lot of things: some Homer, some Plato, some plays, and the Gospel of Mark.
My story’s much the same as yours. Studied Classical Latin for 3-4 years in school, some of which has stuck; mostly it has helped me be able to read in Spanish and spell in French. The material included Caesar’s Gallic Wars, Cicero’s Orations against Cataline and a bit of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
One of the downsides of studying a dead language is that I never attained fluency in Latin; that is, the knack of thinking in Latin rather than parsing it grammatically and analytically. After less than 2 years of French I was thinking in French. I know it’s possible to become fluent in Latin, Ancient Greek or what have you, but for me it just never clicked that way.
Hey, you don’t happen to know the word for “duck” (the bird) in Cl. Syriac, do you? I’m trying to figure out if Arabic borrowed from Persian or vice-versa, and since I don’t speak either language Aramaic would be a useful data point.
<hijack> Interesting. In Spanish, the word for “duck” is “pato.” It’s also “pato” in Portuguese (same spelling, different pronunciation.) I’ll make a bet that “pato” is a cognate to "bato,"and that the Portuguese and Spanish words both have a Semitic root. </hijack>
<complete hijack> The French words are “canard” (for a male duck) and “cane” (for a female duck.) According to the English-to-Italian dictionary I used, the Italian for duck is “papera,” (for the live bird) and “anatra” (for a cooked duck.)
The fact that such closely related languages as Spanish, French, and Italian have such different terms for a common animal makes me think that they each took the word from different source. I would bet that “pato” comes from Arabic, while “canard” has a Germanic root, and “papera” comes from the Latin.
Anyone know how to say “duck” in Latin? </complete hijack>
Three semesters of ancient Greek. Give me a text to translate, a lexicon, and a grammar reference and I can probably still in some time give you a half-decent translation. Ask me to decline a noun or conjugate a verb and I’m stumped.
The two big texts I’ve translated were the first half of Plato’s Meno and book 16 of The Odyssey. Yes, Homeric Greek and Attic Greek are very very different. With either, though, you really get a whole new level of appreciation for the text - there are lots of words (logos comes to mind here) which just don’t translate very well.
I’m torn between studying (on my own) biblical Hebrew, modern Hebrew, or modern Arabic this summer, so there may be an addition.
I would not be at all surprised if ‘pato’ in Sp. and Pg. is Arabic-derived. Italian ‘anatra’ must come from Latin ‘anas’ (dunno about ‘papera’). Duck in modern German is ‘Ente’ but I don’t know about any older forms there.