Reading about ancient languages for the sole purpose of advancing with contemporary ones?

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langmon
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Reading about ancient languages for the sole purpose of advancing with contemporary ones?

Postby langmon » 2018-11-10, 7:07

This question is being asked by someone who, at least for now, doesn't intend to learn any ancient language. But he (i.e. I :) ) still would like to know to what degree reading about them can help one advance with contemporary ones.

Sanskrit only is one out of many languages that come to my mind right now.
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kaitlin's inferno
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Re: Reading about ancient languages for the sole purpose of advancing with contemporary ones?

Postby kaitlin's inferno » 2022-03-26, 18:23

I hope it's alright to respond to a 4-years-old post.

I've never done this, but it's a question I've asked myself, too. Ultimately, I think it depends on how deep you're willing to go. If you were to study an ancient language to advance learning contemporary ones, it wouldn't be enough to just study the ancient language. You'd also have to study history and the changes of the language. How did we get from point A to point B? Languages experience consonant changes, vowel shifts, borrowed words, grammar changes, etc. and sometimes the connections between those changes and shifts are not so obvious. However, if you did become a scholar and achieve all of this knowledge, I think there would be a worthwhile pay-off. If only I had the time, I'm sure I would :)

What languages do you think could be made easier by studying a related ancient language? All I can think of is how drastically different Old English and contemporary English are. Old English is pretty fun to study, but I don't think it would be very useful in learning contemporary English. Though I'm sure knowledge in Latin is useful for learning contemporary Romance languages.

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Re: Reading about ancient languages for the sole purpose of advancing with contemporary ones?

Postby Osias » 2022-03-26, 20:31

(pt-br)Olá, bem-vinda ao fórum Unilang, espero que você curta o site e escreva em outros lugares além dos seus posts iniciais. E que participe dos jogos de línguas e tente aprender português brasileiro. Sugiro também preencher os dados do perfil com quais línguas estuda ou fala e se apresentar neste tópico: https://forum.unilang.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=37190

(en)Hi, welcome to Unilang forum, I hope you enjoy the site and write in another places beyond your initial posts. And that you play the language games and try and learn Brazilian Portuguese. I suggest also you to fill your personal profile with the language you study or speak and introduce yourself on that thread: https://forum.unilang.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=37190
2017 est l'année du (fr) et de l'(de) pour moi. Parle avec moi en eux, s'il te plait.

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Re: Reading about ancient languages for the sole purpose of advancing with contemporary ones?

Postby Linguaphile » 2022-03-26, 21:07

Welcome!

A question similar to this was asked on the Estonian forum several years ago: How to learn the cases historically. Really only the first couple of posts there were on this topic, though, so I'll post part of it here. Basically the thing is that while knowing historical forms can explain the modern ones, they're usually really not any easier to learn. I suspect the same would be true of other languages.
The exception might be if you want to learn several languages in a language family, then learning the ancestor language that they descended from might help with learning all of them, because you could see how each language developed out of that parent language, and compare languages to each other.

This was the question I mentioned above:
I've read quite often that once you know the historical development of the Estonian language (or perhaps if you know Finnish? ) the apparent irregularity on the formation of the genitive and partitive becomes self-evident. You learn how the patterns that once we regular started to look irregular thanks to the deletion of, say, a consonant that may even reappear in other forms. How much truth is there in this that can be used for practical learning?


And one of probably the most relevant answers there:
After I started learning Finnish, I realized how similar the two languages actually are and how it could be traced back how the seemingly random and irregular forms in Estonian actually came to be -- as Standard Finnish is much closer to Proto-Finnic, than Estonian is.

But, as fun as it is, I doubt this would be very helpful for learning Estonian. Besides these regular changes, there are also quite an amount of random stuff in Estonian :mrgreen: and things can originate from various dialects. Words from South-Estonian dialects could be especially different, because North-Estonian and South-Estonian are actually more distant relatives than North-Estonian and Finnish are.

My guess is the same sort of issues would be likely to be true in other languages, to a greater or lesser extent depending on the language, but likely to be somewhat of an issue. Loanwords and other influences from other languages would also be an issue, for example.

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Re: Reading about ancient languages for the sole purpose of advancing with contemporary ones?

Postby mōdgethanc » 2022-03-26, 22:36

Greatly depends on which one, I think. I agree that learning Old English won't help much with modern English because it's so different. Knowing a bit about historical linguistics can help a lot with some languages though, e.g. knowing about the High German consonant shift can go a long way towards learning new German words and spotting how they are linked to English. But knowing about a language isn't the same as knowing it, and this doesn't mean you have to learn how to read Old High German itself to know about things like this. It couldn't hurt, I guess.

When an older form of a language is closer to its modern form, it's more helpful. When it's very different like Old English and English, or Old Chinese and Mandarin, I guess it's not. In that case it's more like something you'd do out of academic interest.
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