Ancient language scholarship

As I keep mentioning in all my posts, I like to learn languages, and I have been studying Chinese, modern and classical, for the better part of 5 years. I have also dabbled in a number of other languages, such as German, Russian, and Latin.

Recently I've been getting more and more into the ancient world, the history of it's sciences and religions, among other things. By the ancient world I mean mostly the Hellenic period down to the flourishing of Islam. Actually that's closer to the medieval period than the ancient one proper, but of course, nothing is as fragmentary as our conceptual delimitations suggest, and to have a more or less complete picture implies going back all the way to archaic Greek, Perisa, and even India (I have long been interested in the Sanskrit language as well). Just outlining this scope of study comfronts me with a very wide variety of languages to consider. I've already mentioned Sanskrit, and that one is at the fringes of the region that I've set myself to learn about. Latin, though at the western extreme of the (geographical) continuum, is a lot more present since we have inherited much through them and I have the advantage of speaking a romance language as well as my previous, albeit far from complete, study of it.

Greek enjoys pride of place, even though I haven't studied it beyond some very basics, and I am not very well versed with it's vocabulary, though I am acquainted with very many words with greek etymologies. It is, however, probably the most relevant language for me, it's presence and influence never fails to manifest itself across a whole range of forms of thought. It is a difficult language for me due to it's unfamiliarity, something you wouldn't expect coming from a person who's enthusiastically embraced Chinese and Russian; the latter being so heavily influenced by Greek.

And at the far eand, besides the already mentioned Sanskrit, there are a number of other languages for which I would at least want to develop some level of familiarity, if only with their alphabet. I am talking about Hebrew (probably biblical), Egyptian, and some Arabic or Persian language. I don't think I am going to go and learn something like Aramaic, Akkadian or Ugaritic, though I must admit they all have their merits.

~bartender, I think today I'll have a beer.

I just found the writings of a man named Frithjof Schuon, and even though I have barely just started to read him, I find his whole persona very interesting. He is a scholar of comparative religion who actually does manage a number of these languages, and cites a great variety of mystical and religious traditions. This is a whole great field that I find irresistible.

I like to study and take notes, and I like it so much when my notebooks are filled with scribblings in very many different writing systems: chiense, cyrillic, greek, and then and there some mathematical and functional-programming notation. I must admit part of the reason I want to learn all these alphabets is for the vanity of having a lot more of that. Well, I may use them when the internet collapses and I have nothing but my notes to entertain myself with.

zampano

I have some familiarity with Greek! Mostly Koine (the dialect of the Eastern Roman Empire from I think around 200 B.C. through the Byzantine period), although a little bit of Classical as well. I had two years of Classical Greek in college, then a few years ago got a textbook on Koine to re-familiarize myself with the language and specifically learn how Koine works. It's thankfully simpler than Classical.

The main thing I've noticed is that what vocabulary you need to learn depends on what you're going to be focusing on. So for me, I got into Koine to read early Christian texts (so the New Testament, early Christian writers, etc.), which means learning the vocabulary that those sources use and how they use it. Even then, some things are their own animal: the Greek of the Septuagint is almost its own dialect from a vocabulary standpoint.

Feel free to hit me up if you need any help with Greek!

detritus

My main interest is in the Byzantine era, so Koine it is for me :) Of course there are books for all kinds of periods, I found resources such as: Greek for Euclid, A reading course in Homeric Greek, and a lot of books for New Testament Greek, which is likely the best place to start for me.

Right now I am learning Greek vocabulary by proxy, that is, by learning the etymologies of the words I come across which have a greek origin, for example spagyria, "Originally coined by Paracelsus, the word comes from the Ancient Greek σπάω spao ('to separate, to draw out') and ἀγείρω ageiro ('to combine', 'to recombine', 'to gather')." (from Wikipedia)

Getting more and more into western esotericism and the like, I am ever more stimulated to start getting serious with Greek, but at the same time I have already my hands full, and I have neglected the Classical Chinese. It's hard being interested in everything under the sun.

zampano

It's hard being interested in everything under the sun.

That's the truth! Definitely something I struggle with as well.

Learning by proxy seems like as good a method as any for right now, and I know for me, something like that would help new words stick better anyway.

Speaking of which, a couple questions, if I may:

1. What resources have you found for Classical Chinese? That's something I've been interested in for awhile, but have had a hard time finding books on it that aren't in Mandarin.

2. More generally, what's your preferred method for memorizing vocabulary? This is an area in which I struggle a great deal, and am yet to find anything that really works for me.

detritus

I recently found a book entitled "Coptic in 20 lessons", looks tempting. Right now I've been reading about the development of ideas in Alexandria, so there's Greek everywhere! The Corpus Hermeticum is yet another reason to learn Greek.

>What resources have you found for Classical Chinese?

I thought you'd never ask. There's a surprising wealth of resources for CC in English, actually.

Classical Chinese for Everyone, by Bryan Van Norden
A New Practical Primer on Literary Chinese by Paul Rouzer
Du's Handbook of Classical Chinese Grammar by Barnes et al
Introduction to Classical Chinese by Vogelsang
Outline of Classical Chinese Grammar by Edwin Pulleyblank
A Student's dictionary of Classical and Medieval Chinese by Kroll
Chinese Through Poetry by Archie Barnes

And that's about it, the best books you'll find on the matter. I'll leave you to check them yourself, available for illegal download through the usual media. There are also a couple books on Buddhist Chinese if you're interested in *that* part of the language.

>what's your preferred method for memorizing vocabulary?

I don't have any. I don't even make that much of an effort to memorize, really. At best I keep lists of the new words to which I refer back often, but it's not a very good method. I think the best method is to read a lot. But one has to find a good amount of graded readers, and ones that are not boring at that. It's a struggle.

zampano

Thanks very much for the suggestions on Classical Chinese! I’ll start perusing.

I have “Coptic in 20 Lessons,” as well as Lambdin’s “Introduction to Sahidic Coptic.” I’ve spent more time with the latter, but haven’t decided which (if either) I actually prefer. I’ve long been fascinated by Gnosticism, which was my motivation for starting it. I haven’t gotten very far, though, as there aren’t as many resources for graded reading as there are for e.g. the New Testament.

My approach to vocabulary mirrors your own, although I’m not as good about making vocabulary lists as I should be. For reading the NT, my go-to is the Bible Web App’s reader:

https://biblewebapp.com/reader/

Even though it’s not using the best Greek text of the NT (which I would argue is the UBS 5th edition), there’s a lot to recommend it. You can set it to have words be in different colors based on their part of speech, for example. But most importantly for me is that you can mouse over a word and get a (general) definition. I prefer this because it helps me not break the flow of reading; something that’s especially important with my iffy working memory (thanks, ADHD). If the definition doesn’t seem to fit, then it’s time to head to my paper dictionary (Bauer’s Lexicon, which is *the* dictionary for New Testament/early Christian Greek).

Bible Web App is open source, and I keep meaning to see if I can feed the UBS 5th into it, but I think it requires a *very* specific text to handle grammatical parsing and the like.

Beyond the New Testament itself, there’s a lot out there, but it can be harder to find (and harder still to read). I have a paper copy of The Apostolic Fathers, but run into the problem of my flow being broken when I have to look up words, which happens a great deal. At one point I was going through one of Origen of Alexandria’s letters, which I started translating because that was the best way I found to parse it. His Greek is *tough*: very long sentences with lots of clauses (which is not uncommon) and a very different word order to what we intuitively expect as English-speakers. His theology was really interesting, though, and can differ significantly from what’s mainstream in Christianity now.

For languages with which I’m more comfortable, reading on my iPad is by far the best way. Apple Books has various built-in dictionaries, so I can look up a word without having to change task and then keep reading. It makes things far less taxing mentally. From my time in language classes (e.g. in college, or even since then), learning phrases in context is definitely easier and tends to stick. This bothers the grammarian in me, who wants to understand the rules, but try as I might learning words in isolation simply does not work. Meanwhile, I still remember a few phrases from the two months of Arabic I took with a tutor at the start of COVID lockdown.

As far as finding a tutor, the problem there is deciding which (modern) language I want to focus on!

detritus

That's cool, I just recently realized there are dozens of apocripha out there. My interest in coptic also came from gnosticism, I'm just starting to learn just how diverse was christianity during that first millenium. Also, given that it is an egyptian language, that could be a good introduction to that language group as well!

https://ctext.org

Is the place for reading 文言 texts, I actually do recommend trying the daodejing once you have a basic grasp of the language, you can go to dictionary mode on each entry and hover words to see their meanings (works with a mouse, but not on a touch screen.)

Usually when I'm reading I take note of each unknown word, or even copy whole sentences when they are full of new words, or when I struggle to understand it's structure. But for the most part I always study with pen and paper at hand, so I can take all sorts of notes. I may get dragged mid-sentence to look up some word on Kroll's dictionary, from ctext, or wiktionary when I'm working with other languages, but I end up coming back to the text eventually, so I don't really mind the digressions, I'm in study mode after all.

I really like wiktionary, with modern languages, and sometimes with ancient ones, I can trace a lot of etymologies of words. I think that is ultimately the best mnemonic method for learning new words. Russian is abound with words which at large come from a relatively reduced set of roots. I guess all languages are, maybe they were all a sort of Toki Pona at their inception (if that makes any sense!), perhaps TP itself will grow into a number of dialects. I can imagine linguists in the 4th millenium learning about dialects of toki pona the way we learn about dialects of Greek. I also like to imagine the same with, say, lisp dialects. With just 50-ish years lisp already has a number of dialects: Lisp 1.5, MacLisp, Zetalisp, Eurolisp, NIL, etc. not to mention divergence within Scheme already happening.

I chose to focus on the hardest language I could think of, that being Chinese.

zampano

Great, that looks like a useful link. I’ve already grabbed some of the textbooks you mentioned (as well as the dictionary recommended by one of them). I still need to decide how (and how “seriously”) I’m going to approach learning this as opposed to something else.

With Russian, I struggled a lot with just how *massive* its vocabulary is. I had three years in college, and while my professor was excellent (and I could carry on a basic conversation, especially depending on the subject), it always seemed like there were 1,000 new words to learn. This is without getting into those things that most languages have, such as synonyms-but-not-quite (for Russian, I usually think of сейчас vs. теперь as an example of this).

I have a book somewhere that breaks down a bunch of the most common Russian roots and explains what they typically mean in a word, which was a nice resource as far as it goes. I never got as close as I wanted to being literate, though.

Etymology does help me learn. For Mandarin, I found this dictionary to be invaluable:

https://zhongwen.com/

It breaks down the characters into their component parts, which helped me immensely. Doubly so since I’m very visually-oriented in how I think about things.

...

Early Christianity is super fascinating. I took a couple classes at a seminary about 2 years ago: one on basic Christian theology and one on the history of Christianity from the beginning ‘til about 800-1000 or so. The theology course bored me to death, as it was basically just looking at various doctrines and ideas without ever talking about how they were reached. But I *loved* the history class, and it’s something I really wish I could spend more time with.

While I grew up (and still am) religious, we kinda did our own thing even if Christianity was typically the starting point. When I finally sat down and started reading Scripture some years ago, the biggest surprise was how much it *doesn’t* say. There’s a lot of theology that we (even non-Christians) just accept but that’s been built up over the centuries, sort of the way the legal corpus does in a common law country.

Your thoughts about future linguists mirror ideas I’ve had as well. It’s one of the reasons I think preservation is so important for things like web sites and technology more generally. The summary deletion of geocities was a huge loss. On the one hand, we produce considerably more writing than at any other point in history, but it’s so much more volatile. Imagine if Twitter just shuts down one day and takes all its data with it? I’ve been looking for awhile for a way to contribute to Archive Team (https://wiki.archiveteam.org/), but haven’t found anything yet.

detritus

Imagine if Twitter just shuts down one day and takes all its data with it?

Nothing of value would be lost.

I've been focusing on Chinese, Mandarin and Classical, these days. I still want to add Greek (classical) to the mix, especially right now, that I'm going through a detox of sorts (dopamine detox?), I think I'll be distracting myself with languages, which is what always manages to keep me busy.

I am not very used to playing games, I don't really watch movies or tv either, the internet has become boring for me, and even when I try to read fiction I don't really stick to it. Learning languages and reading about the ancient world is all that is left for me. Sometimes I get a bit burned out with that too, but it all I keep coming back to. It's like a game for me, actually, like an open-world game set in the ancient world which I can explore at my leisure. Learning Hanzi, too, is like catching pokemon, gotta catch them all!

I never did well with Christianity. I didn't grow up christian, but my country is Catholic and I've always been exposed to what seems to me a very simplistic, childish even, watered down cosmology. Just recently have I been learning about all the different aspects of actual Christianity. Gnosticism particularly strikes me as a very interesting and, dareisay, revolutionary cosmology. It honestly seems to me like eastern mysticism imported to the "west". In general, I've been discovering all that Christianity really is, nothing like the shallow cult that I often see portrayed as christian worship.

Sometimes I wonder whether this all will take me somewhere. On the other hand, I've had enough positivist materialism in my life, enough economic rationalism, and in fact, enough rationalism in general, and it hasn't lead us anywhere. Where I live we've been going through a heat wave unlike anything I can remember, while cities in Brasil are flooded. The world of men and mony and industry and of wage jobs seems to bring nothing but stress and disease, and recently, mental illness. I am learning about all the lousy habits that are inflicted upon us, from shitty food, sugary/caffeinated beverages, pornography, geopolitical fearmongering, drug abuse, how can a man not seek a way out of all this? I suspect, I hope that mysticism provides a way out of all this bullshit and a peek into a reality beyond this endless cycle of absurdity. Right now everybody around me likes to say they have OCD, ADHD, and whatever combination of letters that serves as the latest marketing campaign for prescription lobotomizing drugs. Yet the whole world is committed to strong materialism and an infatuation with hyperconsumism. Mystics, magi, they are all seen as superstitious lunatics who do not serve the "great cause" of humanity, which apparently consists in making the world an inhospitable place for all life.

Sorry for the tantrum, there's been a terrible heat wave for the past couple weeks, I can't go outside, I can't be at home, there's not much that I can do and it seems to me that the weather is just going to get worse and worse in the coming years. I need to secure material well-being but the whole world keeps digging the money hole in which we are stuck, the heat keeps me from being able to do much here at home, the bad habits that I've gotten from much encouragement from virtually everywhere and everyone are also holding me back, and I just feel stuck right now. But it's not at all hopeless, and I wouldn't want to come off as desperate, as I am already starting to take the steps to get out of this, even if mankind is adamant on making the world inhabitable.

zampano

Nothing of value would be lost.

In many ways I agree with you, but I *do* think it would be a loss for historians, sociologists, political scientists, and a host of others. As much as we wish it weren’t, Twitter represents a large part of common discourse nowadays, and I think we’d all benefit from what could be learned from it.

It's like a game for me, actually, like an open-world game set in the ancient world which I can explore at my leisure. Learning Hanzi, too, is like catching pokemon, gotta catch them all!

I like this view a lot, and would love to internalize it. “New and different” is unfortunately the only way I can get myself motivated to do most things, and as you can imagine this never lasts long. Something once new stops being so quickly, and meanwhile there’s something else which *is* new just over yonder....

Your criticisms of a “shallow cult” are spot on in my view. They’re a large part of why I haven’t been able to find a church/congregation that really speaks to me.

Regarding your last point, which I’d hardly characterize as a tantrum; this mirrors a lot of my own thinking.

Materialism (used here in a sense of “a-mysticism”) really does leave a lot out. I don’t think someone has to be religious to both need and find mysticism in one’s life, but I wonder if it may not help.

Either way, we’ve somehow become obsessed with those limited things we can *quantify*. It’s to the point that all numbers are 0 until a different value is found that comports with our overall idea of what’s rational, provable, etc.

To be clear, I’m not anti-science by any means. But I do think we often try to use those tools for things that they’re not designed to address. Happiness, fulfillment, meaning...these are not manipulable by arithmetic means.

Even if the specifics differ, I can certainly relate to feeling stuck. I’m comfortable materially, but as we see time and again that’s not enough for me to call myself fulfilled. Put another way, it may be a threshold to happiness (at least to some degree), but it doesn’t actually make one happy.

In my case, I’m just overwhelmed by powerlessness. I can barely control my own mind (see my first couple paragraphs with regards to language learning), much less anything beyond that. I’d like to develop skills that could lead to a profession I get more out of, but can’t begin to imagine what that looks like much less how I’d get there. Everything’s interesting for a little bit, then it’s not and I move on to the next thing. But none of it truly leads anywhere.

I’ve dabbled in other things. I code, I do the odd translation (between Spanish and English currently), but I keep being left with a sense of “so what?” It’s all just shouting into the void, and I’m running very low on hope that something else will come my way. I recognize that I can’t just sit around and wait for things to happen, but I can’t figure out what an alternative actually is.

detritus

I understand that need for novelty. After a while of doing something, most of the time I just lose interest, and much as I try to force myself to keep learning that particular thing, there's no power in the universe to get me to do it. Case in point with programming, something I lost interest in a long time ago, and yet I keep trying to force myself to get interested enough to do something.

On the other hand I do notice that there are certain themes, or maybe it's just a hope. Hope, or some sort of subtle perception, but it seems to me like all these lose threads are all part of something bigger, some hidden theme that runs hidden behind all of them, of which all are but aspects, or different manifestations. I don't know what it is precisely, I can vaguely sense what it might be, but I keep going with the hope that, at some point, all the different seemingly disparate things that have caught my attention and that so often I've learned just enough to claim a basic familiarity, that they will somehow converge, and the hidden thread behind it all will be revealed and my work in this world would be clear.

Of course that might never happen. In this world without meaning that humans have created, I may just end up empty handed because I never actually stuck to anything, and that I might end up becoming useless in this society. But then again, why would I value anything that humankind values?

Oh shit, I went out of character there again for a second :-)

Anyway it helps having some sort of theme, and never to give up. There are a few things for which I never lose interest. I keep coming back to them, they are long-term obsessions of mine, stuff that never fails to catch my imagination, or that intrigue me more and more as I dig into them. I like rabbit holes. There are some things that never fail to present something new.

One thing always leads to another, that's for sure. That is what mostly causes me to jump around from topic to topic. In the end I may have read about all these things, but have I really learned anything? I still don't know how to solve an integral, never cared to, but at least I can hope for an interesting conversation about ancient languages in some little known corner of the internet, so I think my interest was worth the while learning.

In the end we die, and people will likely say I died having accomplished nothing. I'll take it as a compliment, they can all go fuc[[Woah there thins got a little dark for a moment, excuse me a second]]

Sorry I keep letting that other side of me get hold of the keyboard, maybe I'm just a bit tired.

~bartender, you got anything stronger?

###edit

Damn I went way off script, I am sorry to dump all this stuff on you, I've just been in this mood lately, you know? Anyway, I'll go back to posting this stuff on my blog and we can continue talking about ancient languages.

On a more hopeful note, I've been reading Athenaze. And a truckload of books, I can hardly keep tabs on where I left each reading.

Do tell me about your translations, do you translate for your sustenance? I would like to be able to translate CC works in the future, perhaps some day come up with a translation of the Zhouyi, that'd be cool.

zampano

but I keep going with the hope that, at some point, all the different seemingly disparate things that have caught my attention and that so often I've learned just enough to claim a basic familiarity, that they will somehow converge, and the hidden thread behind it all will be revealed and my work in this world would be clear.

I’ve had a similar feeling for quite a long time. I think a lot of my more recent malaise has been from losing that hope, or at the least just finding that hope not to be enough anymore. Now that I’m more-or-less middle-aged, it’s hard for me to look back on all that bouncing, dabbling, etc. and see any meaningful results from it.

On one level I think there’s something to the idea that knowledge is its own reward, or has an intrinsic value beyond what we do with it. But on the other hand, it’s hard for me not to wonder if I wouldn’t have been better off with more focus. Granted (on the third hand?), this is a bit of a counter-factual since the whole point is, like you describe, my inability to actually stick with / remain on one thing for long.

Meanwhile, I can’t say as I’ve noticed any specific theme for what I seek out, although this isn’t something I’ve been really looking for, either. That’s worth thinking on.

In this world without meaning that humans have created...

I like the ambiguity of this phrase. It could be interpreted to mean “in this world, created by humans, that is without meaning” but also “in this world without any meaning not created by humans.” I’d say the latter is more accurate, being as I am a big fan of the absurdist school (Kierkegaard and Camus especially).

I still don't know how to solve an integral, never cared to, but at least I can hope for an interesting conversation about ancient languages in some little known corner of the internet, so I think my interest was worth the while learning.

This is a good way to look at it (and I appreciate the implied compliment!), and something I easily forget. I tend to be very inward-facing, and don’t value simple interactions with other people as much as I should. I keep trying to remind myself that it’s the little things in life that really give it value, yet can’t seem to truly internalize that.

Damn I went way off script, I am sorry to dump all this stuff on you, I've just been in this mood lately, you know?

No apologies necessary, these ideas are every bit as interesting (and more meaningful) than our starting place. Definitely don’t stop on my account!

Ancient languages

I’ve heard of Athenaze, but have never read it (my intro to Greek class used Mastronarde’s (sp?) book). For the transition from Classical to Koine, I used Rodney Decker’s textbook on the latter, which I like. I also have an “intermediate” Koine grammar reference, and finally what I understand to be the end-all-be-all of Koine dictionaries, Bauer’s Lexicon.

Translations

I wonder if I would enjoy being a full-time/professional translator, but alas, no. I have had a couple published, as I said, but never actually made anything off of them. I seriously considered going to graduate school for a foreign language (Russian, specifically). But I’ve worried that, like with anything else, I’d have a hard time sticking with any one specific project.

For subject matter, it’s mostly just Spanish-language books that I come across that are public domain, that I find interesting, and that don’t have readily-available (good) English versions. I’m not against doing a pirate translation of something, honestly, but just haven’t come across the right work.

The hard part is, as always, sticking with it. I’ll find something new, get interested in it, and then just kinda get bored after awhile, and not have any idea why I was interested in the first place. The cycle continues.

immy

Great post! Personally I've started learning Latin recently and I'm absolutely loving it. I've also started to develop an interest in the ancient world that I didn't have beforehand, so if you know any good resources please send them my way!

I think that learning classical languages must be something of a rabbit hole; Now that I've started with Latin I want to learn (in order of my level of interest) Sanskrit, Old English, Proto-Indo-European and Ancient Greek.

detritus

Yes, Germanic languages are their own rabbit hole. And so are slavic languages! Only PIE is not a language at all, its a bunch of etymological reconstructions. Speaking of which, Chinese diachronics is another hole that runs deep.

I can recommend thelatinlibrary.com for a lot of latin texts with which to sharpen your teeth.