Resources for learning ancient languages

In My Humble Opinion
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First off, not completely sure this is the right forum (should this be in MPSIMS?), so mods, feel free to move it with my apologies if it’s not.

That said, I’d like to learn Koine Greek and classical Latin. I know there is a certain amount of controversy around some aspects of the languages such as how exactly they were pronounced, or when vowel/consonant shifts took place, etc. but I’d think enough of the basics are agreed upon to get a general working understanding of the languages. So, does anyone know of any good resources for these languages? And feel free to post references for any other ancient languages that can be hard to come by, as well.

Also, since I’m posting this already, does anyone know of any particularly good, more modern “scholarly” biographies of Alexander the Great or Marcus Aurelius?

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The go-to textbook for Latin is Wheelock’s.

I still have a copy sitting on my bookshelf. Mocking me.

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Are you looking for resources to supplement learning with a teacher or do you plan on teaching yourself entirely from online material?

The classic modern treatment of Marcus Aurelius is by Birley. I absolutely do not recommend the more recent McLynn biography.

There is a gigantic literature on Alexander the Great. Perhaps start with Peter Green’s Alexander the Great and the Hellenestic Age. If nothing else, it is recent and has a real bibliography.

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Looking to teach myself, but I do have a friend who’s an unofficial “tutor” of sorts, a Greek Cypriot, in case I have any questions.

Thanks for the book recs Maeglin and Johnny Bravo. Any particular problem with the McLynn biography?

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I wish you the best of luck. Classical languages take a fair amount of time and effort to learn from competent instruction. Learning on one’s own is not easy.

The basic online resource is definitely the Perseus Project. It has dictionaries, grammars, parsers, and texts for Latin and Greek. The classic references are all there. If you want suggestions for textbooks, I can help there as well. But Perseus is all online and all free.

The McLynn has a lot of problems in the details that would trouble a historian. But two things about it really stand out to a general reader. McLynn gives Marcus Aurelius a place in a larger narrative of the Roman Empire in an effort to tell an interesting, convincing story. But he takes this narrative for granted and does not tell readers that some of the general conclusions about Roman history that he passes off as obvious are highly controversial. He asserts interpretations as though they are accepted facts. They aren’t; these interpretations are highly contingent and are the subjects of some of the most important debates about Roman history for the past 100 years or so.

The second is that Marcus Aurelius’ reign is poorly documented by ancient narrative sources. McLynn relies very heavily on a source called the Historia Augusta. This document is also very controversial; it is an ill-informed and scurrilous biography at best, an ancient literary hoax at worst. It’s a pretty bad source for the reign of Marcus, but that doesn’t stop McLynn from using it heavily.

On these grounds alone, the biography is pretty untrustworthy. You can probably get some use out of it if you already know the 2nd century sources and some of the big debates in Roman history. If not, stick to the somewhat more tediously written but far more honest book by Birley.

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Thanks for the heads up on McLynn - sounds like his book is more of a pop-history book.

I’ve used Perseus before, but only for the classics - I didn’t know they had dictionaries and what-not as well, thanks.

As for the textbooks, I’ll take anything you got - the more sources I have, the easier it is to understand :stuck_out_tongue:

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I’ve written on this topic many times, so some of this has been pieced together from previous posts.

Wheelock’s Latin Grammar is the grammar text I am most familiar with, and it does have a fair number of 3rd-party supplemental materials available. It teaches the reconstructed classical pronunciation, which I recommend as does the editor of the current edition. It maximizes the backwards-compatability of the Latin you learn, for just one reason.

However, Latin didn’t really come alive for me until I started working with the reading-intensive course Lingua Latīna per sē Illūstrāta by Hans Oerberg. The entire book is in Latin, and each chapter introduces new grammar and gives you several pages of text to read as you build familiarity. There are marginal notes and illustrations, also in Latin, to help you with anything that isn’t clear. Using this method, you learn not just to decode Latin, but to read it.

Oerberg seems to work with the premise that his method will work without a supplemental grammar text. I myself wouldn’t recommend trying it that way. Instead, I would study Wheelock to read clear explanations of grammatical concepts, then follow up with Oerberg where you will be reading rather than merely translating text using the rules you’ve learned.

Let me say a few words about readers:

Meā sententiā, time spent reading Latin, not translating, multiplies the value of the study of grammar and builds familiarity like nearly nothing else. What you want from a reader is to nearly be able to read it without assistance. There are many readers to choose from, so get your hands on as many as you can and always seek out just the right challenge level to move you ahead. You can benefit from grinding through a text that’s a bit too hard, but if you find that the thrill of understanding is not happening often enough to push through the frustration, don’t be stubborn about it. Read easier stuff, and later you’ll be amazed at how easy the hard stuff has become.

All the readers I would recommend have macrons to mark long syllables. Read aloud, observing stress and vowel quality. Always aloud, where possible. Always set aside part of your study time for pure reading. I used to do two hours of grammar in the morning and an hour of reading before bed.

First and foremost, Lingua Latīna per sē Illūstrāta is an excellent reader even if you didn’t already use it as a primer. It has a second part called Rōma Aeterna, which gradually switches from potted Latin to dumbed-down classical Latin and finally to full-throttle no-holds-barred Roman-ass Latin. But I found the jump in difficulty between the two texts a bit daunting. There are, however, other texts in the Lingua Latīna series, which you can find by searching for Oerberg Lingua Latina in Amazon.

As an aside, don’t think that the various children’s books available in Latin are going to be easy reads. They’re all written using the entire language and will mostly be a challenge even after you’ve done your full 40 of Wheelock or Full 25 of Oerberg.

My own recommendations:
[ul]
[li]Ora Maritima - A musical, if repetitive reader that excercises your paradigms. It’s available free from Archive.org.[/li][li]Pro Patria - A follow-up to Ora Maritima.[/li][li]Puer Romanus - A meandering reader, one of many that teaches about Roman life. It’s not very exciting, except that it is a thrill to perceive a narrative voice so clearly in this ancient tongue.[/li][li]Fabluae Graecae - This is really just a good edition of the classic reader Ritchie’s Fabulae Faciles, which can be found online for free, including versions with macrons. But this edition has a lot of helpful notes and appendices. The price of available copies can fluxuate, so I recommend putting it in your Amazon Shopping Cart and then set it to Save for Later. You’ll be apprised then of the current price everytime you check your shopping cart.[/li][li]Fabulae Romanae - By the same people who did Fabulae Graecae, in much the same vein.[/li][li]38 Latin Stories - Bolchazy’s reader supplement designed specifically to accompany Wheelock, so it matches neatly with the lessons by chapter.[/li][li]Short Latin Stories - A bit challenging for me, even after completing Oerberg’s Familia Rōmāna, but amusing and good practice.[/li][/ul]

This is not even an exhaustive list of even the easy readers I have opinions on, but this post is already doomed to go on a while longer, so…

Let’s talk dictionaries.

The question is which dictionary to get after you already have The Bantam New College English & Latin Dictionary by John C. Traupman. It’s six bucks, weighs three-hundred fifty grams, and has the best English-to-Latin section this side of the much more expensive Smith’s English-Latin Dictionary. I have one at my desk, one in my bag and one on my nightstand. The Latin-to-English main body is also much more readable and with better use of examples than any other Latin dictionary I’ve found. Also, for English-Latin reference and , check out Traupman’s Conversational Latin for Oral Proficiency.

Since the Lewis & Short as available through Perseus and through an application called Glossa is free and easier to use and read, I wouldn’t recommend buying the actual book any time soon, unless you find a copy really cheap or just want one for the sentimental value. The dictionary to save your pennies for is the Oxford Latin Dictionary, which is based on more modern scholarship and more modern notions of dictionary legibility. Even that is well overkill until you’ve actually enrolled your child in a classics program at college.

Although in truth these behemoth dictionaries brand new cost less than what many people pay for a phone these days, you don’t need to spend this money anytime soon. Get the Chambers Murray Latin-English Dictionary. Traupman helps teach you Latin, but for translation-only, Chambers Murray is a light and cheap alternative to Lewis & Short, and worth having even with Lewis & Short available in electronic form.

Also available electronically and not to be missed is Whitaker’s Words. It can be difficult, especially early in Latin studies, to figure out where to even look for the dictionary entries of many Latin words when you discover them in inflected form. Whitaker’s Words is an Ada program that parses the word as found and tells you what base words could possibly take that form. The brief definitions it gives won’t replace a full dictionary, though it is more comprehensive in the range of words it has than most dictionaries – encompassing classical, medieval and neo-Latin vocabulary. It also recognizes many alternate spellings that can vex a student. The program runs in its own little shell, so I recommend using a front-end application:

[ul]
[li]Notre Dame has a web-based version.[/li][li]My favorite, Legible Latin, is available for both the PC and Mac. It adds many useful features to the Whitaker’s core, including a text reading assistant and a tool to aid in searching David Morgan’s neo-Latin compilation.[/li][li]Latin Assistant is useful if Legible Latin crashes on your laptop, as is the case with mine.[/li][li]No Dictionaries is a web-based reading tool that uses Whitaker’s core to speed up reading for comprehension by making definitions readily available. Just enter a passage, and it adds a cascading vocabulary list.[/li][/ul]

Eventually, you’ll want a grammar reference. Bennett’s is available from Gutenberg, and in a nice Bolchazy edition. But my vāde mēcum is the Bolchazy edition of Bradley’s Arnold. It’s a text designed for the study of Latin composition, but not only does it have clear explanations for many grammatical concepts explained as you’d need to understand them to actually use them, but you can even look up certain words that have peculiar rules associated with them.

I am impressed with Looking at Latin, which is a grammar book made up entirely of the kind of visually-oriented explications that teachers could use as hand-outs. It’s slightly cheaper on Amazon, but check out the Google preview on the Bolchazy site. I have not tried the online practice subscription designed to accompany the book, but I have seen the author demonstrate her Latin teaching techniques in person, and just on that basis I’d say that if she put it out there, it’s worth looking at.

Now, as for Koine Greek…

Don’t study Koine, study Attic. Yes, Koine was the language of the vast Byzantine empire, but let’s face it, people study Koine so they can study the bible. I suspect if you ask even most Byzantine Empire or Biblical scholars, they also studied the Attic Greek. If you study Koine, it’s hard to then read Attic. But if you study Attic, it’s easy to read Koine. Lots of people get by quite happily all their lives half-assing things. Those people are not temperamentally suited to the study of ancient languages. You might as well one-tenth-ass it and get a book that just explicates the Koine line-by-line for you so you get a sense of what the Greek said without having to learn Greek.

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Wow, thanks Johnny Angel. Some of those books seem like must-haves. Also glad to hear more in support of Wheelock’s.

That’s interesting; I assumed there would be more resources available for Koine because of the Alexandrian Empire and its associated status as a lingua franca (and thus more ancient resources available), moreso than specifically for the bible. After spending a day or two searching different book stores and only finding books dealing specifically with biblical Greek, I assumed I was looking in the wrong places.

I also thought Attic Greek would have a smaller selection of resources for similar reasons. Sounds like I was wrong on both counts. Any book rec’s there?

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For Greek, I learned from Maurice Balme’s Athenaze.

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Hope this is not too early in the thread:

**Resources for learning ancient languages **

Really old people.

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I think Clyde Pharr’s homeric greek is the way to begin With Greek, but homer is about the only gk thing I card about. Pharr lays out a very cnvincing case tha the Homeric dialect is ideal for a first course in gk.

I also think you are getting a little to involved in the grammar learning part. You can memorize the inflections quickly. A very tiny part of beginning to begin to understand. I would go with, for Latin, he oerberg above heard good things about it, or, what I refer to sometimes is jones and sidwell, /Reading Latin/. jones has a good reader based on Ovid metam. Wheelock has a good reader I used. The vulgate bible is easy enough. Jones also has out a primer of medieval Latin which I have and read through … Or just go to Caesar he is a brilliant writer, you can read it all with basic syntax and some glosses for vocabulary

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I didn’t teach myself, so I do not have experience with most of the suggested texts. I learned from Moreland & Fleischer’s Latin: an Intensive Course. After that, we went straight to texts and that was that. The standard grammatical references are Allen & Greenough and Gildersleeve & Lodge. This is useful only when you have learned the language. I learned Greek on Hansen & Quinn, and the grammar is by Smythe.

I am going to give an alternative viewpoint to Johnny Angel on a few issues.

Your Latin dictionary should be the little Lewis & Short. The OLD is too much for almost anyone, and the lower-tier dictionaries are less helpful. If you stick to undergraduate reading lists in the beginning, you will find that many of the texts you read are directly referenced in the definitions in the little Lewis & Short. It is good practice in the beginning to use a serious dictionary. You won’t need the OLD for a long time yet.

As for learning Greek, here is what I think. Don’t overstate the difference between Attic and Koine. They’re both Greek. The morphology is more or less the same. The important thing for self-instruction is that you start actually reading Greek as soon as possible to build up momentum and a feel for the language. Conventional wisdom is to spend time only on Attic because Attic skills are transferable to Koine but the converse is not true. But using time efficiently is not the issue here. Following through with your studies over the long term is. It does you no good at all to spend three months studying dry-as-dirt morphology only to get slaughtered by Demosthenes and never go back to Greek. It also does no good to be able to become proficient at reading the “Attic” exercises written by grad students in a Greek textbook but flounder when you hit the real thing.

So my view is that once you get some grammar down, read some high quality Late Antique Greek. You can’t go wrong with Athanasius’ Life of Antony or the Sayings of the Desert Fathers (Apopthegmata Patrum). These texts are very clean, not difficult to read, and are very rewarding. It won’t help you read Aeschylus, but then again, reading Aeschylus with nothing but self-taught grammar won’t help you read Aeschylus, either. Build up enough momentum to be able to stick with Greek over time. When you feel a little more confident and facile with the language, then pick up Xenophon. When you can read that, life will start getting better.

There is a lot more Greek out there in Koine than there is in classical Attic. The size of the Attic canon is a tiny stream that leads into the vast sea of Greek texts. A lot of it, contrary to conventional Atticizing wisdom, is quite good. Important Hellenstic texts are mostly in Attic Greek, by the way.

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The Perseus Project does make actually owning Lewis & Short something you can put off for a long time, and indeed I would only bother to get a physical copy out of a minor case of collector’s mania I have.

I’ll have to defer to you if you say that Koine is not the bible-only ghetto that makes it a draw for many seekers, but in the study of Latin I find that people who study the Ecclesiastical pronunciation then find it too daunting to go back and pick up those details of the language that they at first ignored. I think it’s best to start with the system that is most comprehensive, then subsequently deal with the variants.

As much as I worry that there aren’t enough guided readers to fill all the useful niches in the course of a Latin education, the situation surely is much worse in Greek. I think the secret to potted readers is to have a lot of them available, to build familiarity. But for actual ancient texts, annotated readers make up a lot for the lack of immersion in the language and actually being able to ask people about oddities in the text. I’m currently poring through Lawall’s annotated edition of selections from Petronius, which would have been a nightmare to read without someone to explain the quirks that defied my formal grammar studies – the fact that people are using the wrong declension is intentional on the author’s part, to reveal character. What of that sort, explaining more than a formal understanding of the language could tell you, is there for Greek?

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Fair enough. I find Perseus to be pretty slow much of the time. And I’ve spent so much time using the elementary Lewis & Short that I can find things faster by feel than by typing them into Perseus. But there’s a lot of overhead there.

I think when people say Koine it often is a cipher for the NT. I study late Roman documents from the east. But nobody I know calls the language of these documents “Koine” per se. It’s just Greek.

It’s easy to overstate the difference if you’ve spent a very long time cultivating a literary sensitivity to Attic Greek or inherit a certain Atticizing sensibility. But if you just have a few months of grammar and morphology, then it’s all just undifferentiated Greek. You don’t need to learn a new system to read later texts. I think it’s best to read something accessible and fun but that is a real text intended for a real Greek-literate audience. The first real Greek I ever had to read was Lysias, and quite frankly, if I were not already so committed to classics in general, it might have turned me off forever. At the end of the semester we switched to Archilochus and some other archaic poets, which was somehow even worse.

You’re right. Part of this is a function of current academic fashion. It is not desirable in the English-speaking world to publish edited texts anymore. It is difficult and slow work, and it is not usually worth the time given the limited CV benefit. But if you are going to edit and publish a text anyway, it will certainly be for a specialized audience and will not be a guided read. It is hard to imagine someone writing a book like Pharr’s Aeneid I-VI (which I love, by the way) nowadays. The Bryn Mawr texts & commentaries often have decent commentaries, and any of the Cambridge texts has extensive introductions that usually address linguistic quirks of the authors in detail. Unfortunately there is no Cambridge text for Petronius. I think I read it in a Loeb in college, which was pretty bad. I would recommend finding some college syllabi for particular authors. Most have at least short bibliographies, including articles like “The Language of <Author>” that can provide general assistance.

In general, don’t leave home without Gian Biagio Conte’s Latin Literature: A History.

Pretty much the same thing applies to Greek, though there is no Conte and to my knowledge, no really good guided reads except for the NT. I am not even sure that those are actually good, but there are lots of them. The cliff that comes between doing grammar and reading texts is steep, and there really is no good way to negotiate it. I think that reading later texts is the best way I can think of, but these texts are not annotated to speak of and this is not a conventional viewpoint.

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It’s amazing how searching the dictionary goes from being this chore to being something that doesn’t slow you down anymore. But Perseus does have the advantage that I can search for English terms within, and it has links to the text of passages, and often to the Liddle & Scott entries on the Greek words given in the entries.

I don’t read papers in classics, but I’m frankly not very sanguine about an academic system in which the development of such teaching texts would be so poorly regarded.

I haven’t returned to the study of Greek in over a decade. I’m hoping that once I’ve got Latin pretty well nailed down, a lot of the skills I will have developed will transfer. So, I kind of think of my work grinding away at Latin readers will help me in Greek as well, some day.

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Thanks for all the help, guys. I’ve got a shipment of books you guys recommended en route :smiley:

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You might want to add one more. This text comes very well reviewed from Bryn Mawr. I’ve not used it myself since it’s brand new and I am not teaching Latin, but the review highlights some of the major issues in the transition between grammar and text that we talked about above.

How are you doing, by the way? :slight_smile:

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I saw this on LanguageHat the other day: Lexicity. It’s online resources for ancient languages. It’s got everything from Akkadian to Old English (and Latin, Greek, and Hebrew.)