Re: Old Languages

Quoting Colin Halverson <CHalvrson@...>:

> I was wondering- how many people here speak dead languages, especially
> Latin, Ancient Greek, Ancient Hebrew.
Depends on you mean by "speak".  With my knowledge of English
and German, I make my way through a surprisingly large amount
of Old English if I try hard.  Took two years of Latin in HS;
my grammar's fine, but my vocab's rapidly depleting. Took 3
years of Ancient Greek at UT.  No Hebrew; no Aramaic; no
Akkadian (although I was considering taking that this year
until Georgian came along); no Sanskrit; no Hittite;  no
Old High German; no Classical Mayan; no Classical Chinese.

(All of which "no"s I'd love to learn some day.)

> Also, not quite on the subject how does Sanskrit fit into
> Indian languages.  I've heard some are European based,
> some Dravidian??
Okay, this is a rather complicated question you're asking here.
To oversimplify it:  Sanskrit is a basically Indo-European language
that, due to long exposure to Dravidian languages of South India,
has acquired quite a few loan words, and maybe even grammatical
structures, although I'm not sure on that.  As for languages of the
subcontinent: yes, some are IE-based, some are Dravidian, some are
isolates (Burushaski); some are Austro-Asiatic (e.g. Asuri); some
are Sino-Tibetan (e.g. Balti); and probably others.  India is a
giant pastiche of language.

==============================
Thomas Wier <trwier@...>

"If a man demands justice, not merely as an abstract concept,
but in setting up the life of a society, and if he holds, further,
that within that society (however defined) all men have equal rights,
then the odds are that his views, sooner rather than later, are going
to set something or someone on fire." Peter Green, in _From Alexander
to Actium_, on Spartan king Cleomenes III

Reply