Why Reading in Translation Fails Us - Interview with Tim Griffith, creator of Picta Dicta

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

If you want to learn to read and speak Latin, Ancient Greek, Biblical Hebrew, or Old English in fun, immersive classes, sign up for lessons by August 12th for the fall semester at AncientLanguage.com 🏺📖 Who killed Latin? Why should we bother to learn Latin and Ancient Greek, instead of just reading the great works in translation? Why does translation fail us? In this interview, I speak with Tim Griffith, who is a Senior Fellow of Classical Languages at New Saint Andrews College, chairman of the Institute for Classical Languages, and director of the Universal Latin Exam. He has spent the last two decades developing methods of Ancient Language teaching, most notably the famous Picta Dicta online learning platform designed to butress immersion ancient language pedagogy in a novel and interactive way. If you have comments or questions about our discussion, please write them below! 🦂 Support my work on Patreon: www.patreon.com/LukeRanieri 📚 Luke Ranieri Audiobooks: luke-ranieri.myshopify.com 🤠 Take my course LATIN UNCOVERED on StoryLearning, including my original Latin adventure novella "Vir Petasātus" learn.storylearning.com/lu-promo?affiliate_id=3932873 🦂 Sign up for my Latin Pronunciation & Conversation series on Patreon: www.patreon.com/posts/54058196 ☕ Support my work with PayPal: paypal.me/lukeranieri And if you like, do consider joining this channel: kzbin.info/door/Lbiwlm3poGNh5XSVlXBkGAjoin 🏛 Latin by the Ranieri-Dowling Method: luke-ranieri.myshopify.com/collections/frontpage/products/latin-by-the-ranieri-dowling-method-latin-summary-of-forms-of-nouns-verbs-adjectives-pronouns-audio-grammar-tables 🏺Ancient Greek by the Ranieri-Dowling Method: luke-ranieri.myshopify.com/collections/frontpage/products/ancient-greek-by-the-ranieri-dowling-method-latin-summary-of-forms-of-nouns-verbs-adjectives-pronouns-audio-grammar-tables 🏛 Ancient Greek in Action · Free Greek Lessons: kzbin.info/aero/PLU1WuLg45SixsonRdfNNv-CPNq8xUwgam 👨‍🏫 My Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata playlist · Free Latin Lessons: kzbin.info/www/bejne/oGjLlWpvbq6tpLc 🦂 ScorpioMartianus (my channel for content in Latin, Ancient Greek, & Ancient Egyptian) kzbin.info 🎙 Hundreds of hours of Latin & Greek audio: lukeranieri.com/audio 🌍 polýMATHY website: lukeranieri.com/polymathy/ 🌅 polýMATHY on Instagram: instagram.com/lukeranieri/ 🦁 Legio XIII Latin Language Podcast: kzbin.info 👕 Merch: teespring.com/stores/scorpiomartianus 🦂 www.ScorpioMartianus.com 🦅 www.LukeRanieri.com 📖 My book Ranieri Reverse Recall on Amazon: amzn.to/2nVUfqd Intro and outro music: Overture of Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) by Mozart 00:00 Intro 1:41 Why can we not simply read Latin and Ancient Greek authors in translation? 15:39 Is English in decline? 18:49 Who killed SPOKEN Latin? 23:00 Is this just sampling error? 30:15 Politics and the English Language 36:45 Can’t we just read great English literature instead of Latin? 39:42 Why don’t we just study Latin roots and etymology of English words? 44:17 How should we teach Latin? 52:44 Should we use total immersion? 1:11:43 About Picta Dicta 1:21:11 Is Latin *itself* complex, or just the high literature? 1:26:48 Why should we care about expressing things in a complex way?

[@danielroy8232]

dang, I guess I gotta learn all the languages.

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

Haha. Well, certainly very important ones.

[@IkkezzUsedEmber]

​@@polyMATHY_Luke Are you insinuating some are more important than others? :P

[@zach3965]

Obviously

[@VABJMJ]

​@@IkkezzUsedEmberYes

[@laudermarauder]

@@IkkezzUsedEmber Yes [insert based chad meme here]

[@WelshRabbit]

Ooh, I’m lusting in my heart seeing all those Loeb Library volumes in Tim’s bookcase.

[@Latrina_Bidet_IRS_Enfrocer]

(Shh...nobody point out the Oxonii's over Tim's left shoulder!😁)

[@RichardDCook]

At 34:20 but the thing is the Latin borrowings are almost never "new words for new meanings". Nearly all the words English has borrowed, from Old Norse, French, Latin, Greek, etc are for things Old English already had words for, famously giving us the "triple vocabulary" of having words in English, French, and Latin that mean the same thing. As we know languages usually don't like exact equivalents so the words in the triplet generally take on new shades of meaning to differentiate them. Or, one or more of the equivalent words will simply go out of use, which has resulted in English losing, what, 80% of its original vocabulary. The point is that Old English had plenty of words for everything (in fact having an almost inexhaustible number of ways of saying the same thing) and didn't need foreign words to fill gaps. Just why English has loved to borrow when it already had perfectly good words that meant the same thing, who can say. We didn't need to borrow French colour-words, for example, but we did. So, why borrow "insipid" when English has that covered already?

[@johnfenn3188]

I struggle with the notion that Old English is less competent as a language at expressing difficult ideas and notions. Of course languages go through creative phases at which a lot of people are coining words. One such period was around the time of King Alfred, but his translations of Gregory and Boethius, not to mention the Bible indicate that this notion is false. Shakespeare's time was another such creative time, but not because of Latin. Old English has many features that Early Modern English does not have. Grammatically it is a totally different language and works a different way. So in several ways, in terms of vocabulary, inflexions of nouns and verbs, gender and even number, Old English was more expressive than its modern descendent, not less. The experience of translators down the centuries is that so-called "primitive" languages can indeed express complex ideas. They just do it differently from the primary language. As codes, they are equally efficient.

[@ryanpangilinan5803]

Agreed! Any language is capable, because humans are complex!

[@hrafnagu9243]

Yeah, I took major issue when he implied that Old English was a less complex and simple language compared to Latin. You also have to look at the environment that a language was spoken and see how that reflects on the language. Old English was spoken in cold, rainy, and harsh England, not the sunny and prosperous Mediterranean with thousands of years old civilizations surrounding it. So naturally Old English would've been more utilitarian than Latin, with Latin having more words for abstract ideas. Had English went through it's prosperous stage early enough to avoid being so heavily influenced by the romance languages and Greek, English would've coined it's own terms for the new ideas that people would then have time to think of.

[@_KondoIsami_]

Oft him anhaga are gebideð, metudes miltse, þeah þe he modcearig geond lagulade longe sceolde hreran mid hondum hrimcealde sæ wadan wræclastas. Wyrd bið ful aræd!

[@JoataVideos]

​@@ryanpangilinan5803 That's a _nōn sequitur._ (I mean, I know you wrote an entimema, not a complete syllogism, but I can't see what proposition could plausibly be coupled with "Humans are complex" to conclude "Any language is capable". There's also a clear difference between the propositions "Any language is capable" and "Every language is equally capable to each other".) I understand the complexity and diversity of human beings can be reflected on the complexity and diversity of our artefacts, given our different experiences, etc. A likely consequence is that multiple artifacts created for the same goal can, and usually will, present different strengths and limitations (since there will be many ways in which they can be distinct from one another, and still generally work towards their aim). What doesn't follow as seamlessly is that the individual strengths and limitations of said artifacts all cancel each other out, making them equivalent in utility. That's what seems very implausible to me. Two different softwares programmed for the same operation may have each special features, but one of them can still do its job better (or, more humbly, *I* can do my job better with one of them and worse with the other). I think we can agree on the following claim: even if one wouldn't say a language is _simpliciter_ superior to another, some of them are more useful to certain people for certain ends.

[@ryanpangilinan5803]

@@JoataVideos sure I can agree to your last statement. But I’d argue that if a language community wanted to, languages can evolve and adapt to meet the needs. Loan words, calques, etc. Even grammatical changes can occur. I find it difficult to say ideas that languages are less capable of expressing complex idea though. How do we quantify complexity? And what does it mean to be competent in doing so? If we’re using the written word as a basis, thats tough. Ie, not every language has preserved writing. In the case of Old English, I saw we have maybe 400 extant works to base this off of?

[@jameshatherly6307]

A very anglo-centric history. The continental schools, especially the Jesuit schools, were required to use spoken Latin. (They were usually punished for using the vernacular) Some of my favourite Latin writing comes from the 16th century onward. This spoken Latin culture survived into the late 19th century, and got killed by the Prussian schooling model, the STEM obsession that gripped Europe on the tail end of the industrial revolution. (We're still stuck in that STEM obsession period.)

[@NathanDudani]

sTeM

[@francisdec1615]

Schopenhauer, who wasn't only a great philosopher but also a polyglot, complained a lot about people around 1850 being less and less able to understand Latin. He didn't even consider people being educated without being somewhat fluent in Latin.

[@ekesandras1481]

@@francisdec1615 I still consider people of Western European cultural background as uneducated, when they don't even have a glimpse of classical Latin.

[@jameshatherly6307]

@@francisdec1615 Marie Luise Reinhard gives (what I think is) an excellent talk on late Germanic Latin pedagogy: kzbin.info/www/bejne/fICQd2Oipdidj9Esi=ExCvkRnqP2Y4KoEF By Prussians, I meant to say that the obsession with STEM originated (as far as I can tell) in Prussia in the late nineteenth century, and the model that followed was called "the Prussian model" in the literature; not that it was a characteristic of Prussians or Northern Germans in general throughout history.

[@vampyricon7026]

@@NathanDudani You mean sTEm. They say they're promoting "STEM" but in reality no one cares about the science and the mathematics. It's only tech and engineering that they care about.

[@joelthiescheffer8163]

That passage of Cicero at 5:26 is truly beautiful and inspiring.

[@言語の王国]

What a wonderful conversation! Thanks for shedding light on us!

[@iberius9937]

Your reactions to Professor Griffith's points, especially that of immersion as VOLUME, are priceless.

[@barrankobama4840]

Wonderful conversation, really improved my day :)

[@kaloarepo288]

I am familiar with both English and Italian and have read key Italian "classics" like Dante's "Divine Comedy," Tasso's "Jerusalem Delivered,". Ariosto's "Orlando Furioso" and Metastasio's Libretti as set to music by hundreds of opera composers and I can tell you that English translations can give you a pretty good idea of what the original was like though of course some things ARE lost in translation like puns and rhyming schemes. However this can be overcome by footnotes and, of course, striving for better and better translations and having the original in a parallel text. Of course, if you have the time and energy -learn the original language but a lot of us don't have enough time!

[@joffrethegiant]

I love syntactical complexity, but the glory of English is not therein. As Latin (and to a much smaller degree, romance languages) has its glory in its syntax, and Hebrew in its ambiguity and double entendres, the glory of English is to be found in its enormous vocabulary. The word horde is huge.

[@RichardBonomo]

English has a large vocabulary because of the aftermath of the Battle of Hastings in 1066, when the Normans invaded, took over, and added Old French to the Old English vocabulary. I think 75% of English vocabulary is Latin-derived, and another good hunk came from Greek. English is 3 men hiding under a raincoat with one head sticking out of the top.

[@RichardBonomo]

My experience with classic languages is sadly limited. However, I had "enough," even at a relatively early age, to marvel at the experience of reading classic texts in the original languages. It was as though the writer was speaking to me directly, as though the barrier of time is breached. This is not quite the same experience as reading a classic writer in translation. I have a similar experience when worshipping in Latin, knowing that I am somehow united, certainly in Faith, but also even in LANGUAGE with those who worshipped using the same words going back to at least the 9th century for formal liturgies, and even further back for the simpler prayers. Again, the barrier of time is breached, in this case, in reality.

[@joffrethegiant]

Translators must be poets. Loved the Milton mention!

[@mymo82]

I thought so too, but now I tend to disagree: in high school I read some translations of Blake's poems by Ungaretti (a prominent Italian poet of the last century) and, although enjoyable, they were too far from the original. I also read the Hamlet in a translation by Montale (a Nobel laureate Italian poet) and I wasn't impressed at all

[@watermelonman3000]

Great talk! A note on 'Pipsqueak': I read that it derived from a speech by British Conservative politician Eric Campbell Geddes (1875-1937) after The Great War. The German's were to pay reparations and, he said, they were to be squeezed like a lemon for all they were worth, until the pips squeak.

[@Busy.and.Blessed]

Picta Dicta has my kids loving Latin, engrossed and thoroughly tickled by the simple stories which they understand 100% in Latin, and already speaking in simple Latin with each other and me at home where they can. 🎉

[@billparker244]

Learned something new. Thanks!

[@hiberniancaveman8970]

Got to the end, and what a rich fruit cake of information! First I have heard of Roger Ascham. This is what Britannica says about him: ”The Scholemaster, written in simple, lucid English prose and published posthumously in 1570, is Ascham’s best-known book. It presents an effective method of teaching Latin prose composition, but its larger concerns are with the psychology of learning, the education of the whole person, and the ideal moral and intellectual personality that education should mold. His success in tutoring three females-Lady Jane Grey, Queen Mary, and Queen Elizabeth-has led some to consider Ascham an early proponent of education for girls.” Maybe the first phrase of the second sentence needs a wee bit o’ revision. Now an off-subject question. I have been watching an Indian video concerning (inter alia) how they find it difficult to distinguish *v* and *w* , but that they possess an “intermediate” consonant. Would this be similar to semi-vocalic *u* in Classical Latin, and could both be derived from the same source in Proto-Indo-European?

[@alirubaii4839]

In defense of the Tolkien thing, he was very hands on with the translators (at least for French, Spanish, and German) to make the translations as linguistically compelling as his English original. Also, we have to consider the ARTFUL translations, like Pope’s Iliad and Odyssey are two of the best things I have ever experienced in English.

[@acaydia2982]

I’ve been saying that “lost in translation” has robbed us of so much depth and value. It’s probably one of the greatest tragedies of our time. The loss of Latin & Greek specifically. We’ve been dumbed down as a result.

[@alirubaii4839]

Have you started learning?

[@user-sc5iv2rp2t]

Can you make a video about the belief of the Romans that their language was an Aeolic Greek dialect?

[@RichardDCook]

At 9:56 yes to make something that is beautiful literature in the target language can require not a word-for-word literal translation, but rather having an author who already writes beautiful literature in the target language follow the themes and ideas (rather than the words) of the original. Now this will sound a silly analogy but I think the point remains: in Japan I had dinner with a group which included a Japanese professor of English at a major Tokyo University. She announced that she had got a major commission: to translate the scripts of all episodes of the American TV series Friends into Japanese. The Americans at table pointed out that humour, perhaps more than anything else, is culture-dependent and language-dependent. To demonstrate we started telling jokes. She understood the words but none were funny to her. My belief is that the Japanese firm which had acquired the rights to Friends would do far better to bin the English scripts and soundtracks and hire a team of good Japanese comedy writers to write original scripts. All these scripts need do is more or less follow the images on the screen, and be funny.

[@andrelegeant88]

Griffith is right that Latin had a tremendous effect on written English grammar in the 17th-19th centuries. However, it had little impact on the construct of spoken English. Instead, English was developing a type of diglossia where written English and spoken English were diverging, and the written language was itself an artificial one. I think it is better that English has moved back toward reflecting the spoken language. The effect is primarily one of keeping related words closer together in sentences, making subjects clear, and capturing ideas in smaller sentences rather than using participles and subordinate clauses that are not confusing in Latin - with its case structure and clear subjunctive - but that are confusing in English.

[@ryankaufman3590]

I was thinking similarly...at least somewhat. Part of me loves the raw and terse nature of the Germanic side of English. Part of me also loves that latinate complexity, even if it may take some skill, thought, and experience. Maybe that's the beauty of English though: that as a mashup language it can be and do so much.

[@cameronmcintyre1236]

I'm not sure that I can understand his reasoning for how Old English is simple or incapable of expressing complex ideas. Old English almost certainly lacked the vocabulary to express nuanced and complex theological questions in Christianity, just as Sumerian, Zulu and Nahuatl also lacked this vocabulary. They didn't need it. Christianity, born into a Greek and Latin world, developed its theological terminology in that linguistic context, coining and reanalyzing terms as needed. Old English and its antecedents must have had a set of varyingly complex terms to meet the theological needs of its pre-Christian speakers. As Christianity grew in the Anglo-Saxon period, the Latin came entangled with it.

[@williambranch4283]

But Basic English just as Old English, can express any humanistic thought, thru abduction, by idioms extending field of meaning. Even modern English can't frame quantum mechanics well ;)

[@daciaromana2396]

You needed certain vocabulary to explain certain abstract concepts that weren’t commonly known to the Anglo-Saxons. How could an Anglo-Saxon understand ideas such as: "ethos", "logos" or "pathos" if no words for these concepts existed in their native tongue? Sure you can, theoretically, create words from the existing language to describe foreign ideas, but it's much easier to borrow words from other languages. This is semi-related, but I always found it amusing that a simple Latin word like "morituri" is translated into English as "we/those who are about to die". You need 6 independent English words to describe one word, because the concept of "morituri" (people about to be killed for entertainment) can only exist in Roman civilization.

[@87advil]

Yeah I think it's great he's helping people learn Latin, all respect to him for those efforts, but I couldn't take what he was saying about the evolution of English seriously. It seemed very subjectively based and there wasn't anything that indicated a deep level of knowledge of older forms of English that would give his opinion any particular weight.

[@phirion6341]

Yeah I'm always fascinated by the classicist space tbh, surely some basic Modern Linguistics would help dispell some deductive assumptions about how language works 😢

[@vampyricon7026]

@@daciaromana2396 "morituri" > "the dying"

[@Laocoon283]

He looks like Luke but with the sliders maxed out

[@klodno6164]

💀

[@thisguyisnotable]

that made me spit out my drink

[@imrahilification]

I agree that some works are better in translation than others. People have had their lives changed by reading Dante in English because his vision of the world and theology comes through. A lot of translations of lyric verse fall flat partly because the translators themselves are not using meter, which is fundamental to the enjoyment of poetry. To translate lyric poetry in a way that is really enjoyable as poetry, it seems you almost have to write a new poem inspired by the original language. I enjoy Ryan Wilson's iambic pentameter translations of Horace in his collection of translations from many languages, Proteus Bound.

[@infinitelink]

relevant to approx 01:26:00 discussion: "Historical present" for story-telling was introduced to me by my grandfather in his ordinary habit when telling stories, who came from backwoods in Tennessee: it once was common in ordinary English speech, then survived only in certain dialects of English, but they crossed the pond and survived among people whose speech would be frowned upon by "gilded age armchair philologists", as one author put it. It's always bothered me that literature as significant as the Bible are through translation elevated to "propah King's Anglish guffah!" and in the process such very evident details (like either the gospel writers or in the speech of Jesus switching to the present to communicate about past events as though present now) are eviscerated for... embarrassment among "polite" society that's actually poorly read in spite of voluminous reading!? Side note: Interesting to me is how the archaic (at the time of translation!) English of King James and modern Spanish have a lot of overlap (e.g. tendencies to simplify verbal tenses and aspects, and in order). Still, they elevate where inappropriate though at least retain "he that pisseth..." 😂

[@susannewcomer9614]

This was a very interesting topic as you examined the effects on English writing that were influenced by the study of Latin. It also demonstrated the value of studying the humanities. It is especially upsetting that a number of colleges are no longer going to offer degrees majoring in some humanities subjects including history and various languages.

[@PrestonRobertNorris]

I appreciate hearing Tim’s perspective, but it sounds like he is equating several things constantly throughout the interview: expressiveness, vocabulary size, a tradition of abstract thinking within a language, syntactic complexity, and difficulty of learning. Certainly there are correlations between many of these, but I would have liked to hear examples of ways in which English improved and then declined. Not splitting infinitives? The avaliability of kingly vs. royal vs. regal? From a morphological standpoint the influence of French and Latin (and Old Norse first) really reduced English’s complexity, which as I understand should correlate with its “robustness”

[@floretion]

So do we have some kind of double irony going on where Roger Ascham inadvertently "destroys" Latin by excluding it from school curricula but then again "saves" Latin by preserving it as it was, which was apparently his original intention?

[@Pink--Black]

Since a lot of the comments here are about the 'dumbing down' phenomenon, I feel I should comment on this too. We have not been 'dumbed down', we have been 'democraticized'. Since WW2, lower class and other previously marginalized voices have gradually become more prominent, and these voices are still becoming more prominent every day. However, these voices have always been, and still are, much less educated than those of the elite. The people have not become dumber (in fact, they have become less dumb), but you are now actually hearing them. And so what you hear, what you see, what you are flooded with every day in the media, has indeed become less educated, has become much dumber. All those who previously were silenced are heard now, yet what comes out isn't necessarily always interesting. The reality is that people are becoming more educated every day, but at the same time they are still less educated than the elite, and they have gained a wealth of opportunities to show off their relative lack of education. If you find what I or anyone else is writing on the internet dumb, consider that I wouldn't have been able to write a comment like this just two decades ago. I would still have been dumb, you would just not have known. I have found this type of reasoning to be a powerful tool against undue cultural pessimism. 💜🖤

[@Latrina_Bidet_IRS_Enfrocer]

Thank you for such a well thought-out comment. I'm not yet convinced of your position but it's certainly food for thought. In rebuttal I'll pose of all things, a useless but interesting anecdote. I recently bought an old book of Cicero's speeches off Ebay. The book was shipped from Solon, Ohio. Inside the front cover it had the original owner's name, a young lady's, and after it "S.H.S. 1925, Sophmore". Presumably this stands for "Solon High School". The book is marked throughout in pencil, in beautiful cursive I might add, showing it was well used by this young lady. My point is, 100 years ago a girl in a small podunk farm town in the pre-television era was studying the speeches of Cicero. Was she a "one off" case, or did all the students at her local rural school study Latin? Many different arguments can be made here, but the thing is, I've found similar artifacts in buying old Latin books online, and I have the sneaking suspicion these books' former owners would be appalled at the techno-barbarism we've fallen into. In studying and judging the past, one realizes the past is also judging us in a way, and I'm pretty sure these people would quickly see past all our fancy gadgets and doodads and marvel at our collective cognitive decline.

[@Pink--Black]

@@Latrina_Bidet_IRS_Enfrocer I'm glad you liked my comment; reasonable people can and often do disagree. Your point about old Latin books is a good one. I would say, however, that the subject of Latin in particular is complicated by the fact that it is a traditional part of elite culture. The middle classes have turned away from looking up to and emulating the elite towards looking up to and emulating lower class culture. Latin truly is in decline, but this is due to a cultural shift, not to a more general educational decline. Young girls today may not be studying Cicero, but they are studying mathematics and physics (which must have seemed well-nigh impossible in 1925), as well as modern foreign languages like Spanish or (in the non-Anglophone world) English, which they use to interact with pop songs, movies and video games. Certainly on a global scale, it is an objective fact that people are becoming better educated. In developed countries there is a certain stagnation (as there is in economic growth), which tends to give the subjective impression of decline (make x great again!), but in reality we too are only still progressing. This is the objective reality as shown out by research; I was merely giving a suggestion on how to see that reality rather than only the false impressions.

[@RiccardoRadici]

You reasoning is not stupid, but it is incorrect nevertheless. It is sufficient to observe the "dumbing down" of today's elites compared to past elites to disprove your argument. If we look at the common people, I can recount an anecdote: I had the occasion to read an article written by my grandfather almost a century ago: even if he had only attained primary education, he could write better the most PhD graduates today. About the process of democratization, it ceased half a century ago: it's not a reality anymore, unfortunately (and most of the "dumbing down" happened in the last 50 years).

[@أفلاكالأفكار]

The issue with giving a focus to the less education rather than the elites is that it lowers the overall standards of society, which then does cause a dumbing down effect since higher standards are no longer expected as they once were.

[@أفلاكالأفكار]

@@Pink--Black I would argue that Cicero is far more useful to the average boy or girl than mathematics (beyond Algebra) and physics. Yes, if someone wishes to become a physicist or engineer, etc. then those subjects are useful but for the average clerk, secretary, nurse, waiter, customer service representative, etc., advanced mathematics and physics are completely useless subjects that like 90% of them will never use once they graduate from high school.

[@francisdec1615]

10:00 Sometimes texts sound very outdated within one language as well, not because of very different grammar and vocabulary but because of the style that it was written in. Bishop Esaias Tegnér was considered the greatest Swedish poet ever during his lifetime, but today, 200 years after they were written, most people find most of his poems boring or pathetic because of his pompous style.

[@mymo82]

This is something that happens in every language, when an author belongs too much to their time instead of transcending it

[@uamsnof]

Great conversation! Although I have to say, I don't like overgeneralised statements like "English is in decline" because it is inherently meaningless or easily refutable. He also never actually explained/defended that point, because English is nothing of not constantly growing to be able to express more and more new concepts, be it because it is a global language used to talk about anything from sociology, psychology, technology, politics, etc. or because it has a rich and vibrant online culture, constantly spawning new expressions and ideas, and a living culture of poetry in the form of Hip-Hop/Rap artistry... English is and continues to be extremely complex and more "robust" than many other languages, that aren't yet able to accomodate many of the new concepts developed in the anglophone world.

[@justinleemiller]

When yall going to collaborate with Told in Stone?

[@RichardDCook]

At 16:32 I thought linguists had long ago debunked the notion that there is such a thing as "simple" or "primitive" languages. Rather, studying languages across the world and across time show that all human languages are capable of expressing the entire range of human experience (excepting of course aural experiences only expressible through music and visual experiences only expressible through visual art).

[@andrelegeant88]

This is generally correct. There are some limits inherent to languages, but they can usually be overcome with new vocabulary and more words. For example, English doesn't have an optative mood like Greek, but we can use phrases like "might could" that can really capture the sense.

[@wenbacik]

All languages can develop ways to speak about new ideas, but not all languages are at the same stage of development. Some languages have no writing system, have a small vocabulary, or are more difficult to concisely express some ideas in. Where one language uses a syllable to express an idea, another language takes a sentence to express the same idea. You can invent new words and grammar for new ideas, but it takes a while before a majority of speakers start using it.

[@RichardDCook]

@@wenbacik "Not at the same stage of development" is just a different way of saying "primitive". European colonists used to believe in that stuff until linguists began studying the languages.

[@wenbacik]

@RichardDCook If you have no words for: wheel, electricity, chair, writing, book, letter, thousand, million etc. because those ideas do not exist in your language - it's not surprising they found these languages primitive. If your language has no writing system, or body of literature, or poetic vocabulary, or a small vocabulary - it's not a surprise when people think it's primitive.

[@nidhishshivashankar4885]

The main issue with premature output is just that it won’t be as idiomatic and you’re gonna reinvent the wheel a lot of the time

[@hasafienda]

Reminds me of reading Céline in French versus reading him in English. Yes, controversial to say the least, but he's an important author. The French just was brighter, more alive to me than rhe English.

[@alex10291]

Love your content

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

Gratias!

[@friiq0]

Hey Luke, did you see that somebody did a cover of All Star by Smash Mouth in Latin? I would love to see you react to it and give your opinion of their grammar/pronunciation/translation choices! The title of the video is “all star cover in classical latin”. If you search that in KZbin you should be able to find it.

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

I don’t like to put down other people’s hard work.

[@friiq0]

@@polyMATHY_Luke No worries! ✌️

[@krupam0]

I'm merely a beginner with Latin, but I already noticed that the song doesn't observe syllable lengths, making its rythm a complete mess. Already in the first sentence of the song, the first line seems feasible, but the second one I can barely understand. I'm assuming they used the word "fátum" for fate, in which case why would it be in genitive of all things? That line should be in accusative with infinitive to match the first one, so assuming the verb "rapere" even works in this context, I'm guessing - with my limited knowledge, admittedly - it should be "fátum mé raptúrum esse" or really "mé fátó raptum írí" to use the passive. And third line says "sharper sword" instead of "sharpest sword". Just looking at that it seems that analyzing the whole song would to be quite a task.

[@shamicentertainment1262]

@@krupam0sounds like you’re a bit more than merely a beginner 😂

[@krupam0]

@@shamicentertainment1262 Eh. Cases are one of the first things you learn in Latin, and the ACI syntax is taught pretty early, too. And the future infinitives I just ripped from Wiktionary.

[@أفلاكالأفكار]

I feel like it's off base to blame Roger Ascham for killing Latin because the reality is that for two centuries after he died, Latin was thriving at a high level among the elites in England. They were fluent in the language and students using his method were conversing naturally and fluently in Latin long after his death. The issue is when later teachers took the spoken and immersive portions of Latin education out of the curriculum and only had the kids do translation and worse when they began obsessing over minute parts of grammar. Ascham's method works great in the beginning for burning vocabulary into your head using native texts (like the Bible) and being able to switch between English and Latin very easily. And then once the student has a good vocabulary base well burned into their minds because of the constant translation back and forth (in addition to having to speak and write essays using their new words), they are then in a very good position to do extensive reading to expand their vocabulary. Whereas the issue with LLPSI just by itself is that there are a lot of uncertainties if you cant figure out what Orberg is trying to say, it doesnt force you to really memorize vocabulary well (the hope is that with enough repetition you'll eventually get it) plus you are dealing with artificial Latin. Every single one of us has experienced great difficulties moving from graded readers to the real thing whereas with Ascham's method (which again was very effective for like two centuries) you (depending on the teacher) are dealing with authentic texts that have significant cultural meaning (whether the Bible or Caesar or Cicero) from Day 1

[@barrankobama4840]

Without an output and a feedback on that output is even possible that the students may fool themselves and believe to understand while they are not.

[@hiberniancaveman8970]

Watched the first 13½ minutes at a rather late hour. Very interesting and informative, but too much KZbin in one go and it’s a case of: Crustulum, Crustulum, Crustulum crum, Cerebrum meum est fatiga-tum As a friend remarked in reply to this, “Winnie-the-Pooh is much better in the original Latin” !

[@crbgo9854]

Anglo saxon is amazing to me with its freedom of word play that it seems like now is blocked by standardization. i tend to enjoy using the possessive as a standard genetive in my writings because why not its personal

[@NathanDudani]

Best English is mid-16th to late 18th century, especially reading across its diversity of grammar and orthography.

[@87advil]

Any recs for 18th century? I like romantic period and seventeenth century prose but never been too familiar with anything in the middle

[@NathanDudani]

​@@87advil Rotuli Parliamenti from ca. 1789

[@stefanodadamo6809]

To me the best is 18th century English. The first newspapers - a delight to read. Same as 17th century French - so classical, so comparatively easy for an Italian who studied his high school Latin.

[@NathanDudani]

​@@stefanodadamo6809 I don't know, 14th century French is pretty darn good.

[@gandolfthorstefn1780]

How about G.P.Goold's or anyone's translation of Marcus Manilius's Astronomica? It's a technical piece expressed through poetry,so it covers both glories. So would the English translation suffice for such a work?

[@EdwardM-t8p]

Looks like I need to learn Latin and Greek better than what I know of them now.

[@vladimirkravchenko6399]

Callide, Luce!

[@gandolfthorstefn1780]

Learn Welsh if you want poetry. Even pots and pans and kitchen talk sounds poetic. Latin is a beautiful language but doesn't compare with the Brythonic tongue. Its not the phone is ringing, its the phone is singing(Mae'r ffôn yn canu).

[@Jaden.mp3]

Was the 100th like 🎉

[@daciaromana2396]

ooof. I read Robert Fitzgerald's translation of the Aeneid in University. Despite promising myself that I'd learn Latin, I've been struggling to find motivation for it. Hopefully this will do it.

[@ellenorbjornsdottir1166]

47:00 cultural appropriation: the (sometimes financially) exploitative, oppressive, and/or inaccurate coöptation of elements of a culture by members of another, often more dominant culture (closely paraphrasing Wiktionary). is it cultural appropriation to want to learn someone's language to meet them at their level, be they alive or dead? I'd say not. and I think it's pretty clear that the Romans were absolutely 100 with other peoples learning their language(s), as long as they made an effort to make sense.

[@muskyoxes]

There are just way too many thing to learn now. If anyone's curriculum includes Latin, then it doesn't include something else, and the something else is probably really important. (Case in point, the old civil war letters thing. Writing letters like that is literally what those people learned in school. Now people in school have to learn a whole bunch of different things.)

[@uamsnof]

Amen. I want to see them keep up those writing skills on top of learning to write scientific essays, do calculus, or how to use Excel or Powerpoint to hold presentations on microeconomics.

[@RikkiestAndTikkiest]

Speaking to the causes of the fall of English composition among the educated, I believe the cause of this is the utter incompetence of English educators. In my own educational experience, I was specifically told multiple times to never write in the passive voice, and to only write short sentences. The plan was to have their students write at the eighth grade level, forever. What if I had a complex thought which required an equally complex sentence to express? Well, too bad. At no point in my English education was the instruction rigorous or valuable, so it's no wonder an adult with an average education would be ill trained in composition.

[@ellenorbjornsdottir1166]

Yeah, this kinda thing, impoverished composition in English, really grates my brain tissue. Ours is a very straitjacketed language, but many a great work has been written in similar, and not suffered even a whit for it.

[@melissamcconeghey1051]

The advent of TV and even radio has shortened our attention spans. Plus publishers and newspapers, etc. consciously want the reading level of what they publish to be able to be able to be read by the widest audience.

[@Ehuatl]

I totally disagree with his statement he starts with, that reading e.g. Plato in translation will really allow you to access his ideas. It's not. Every translation is already a interpretation. It loses a wealth of things that are suggested by a certain choie of words, which can be quite important for interpretation. Word choice matters in conferring a meaning, they are not just an esthetic choice. If you really want to understand Plato, Aristotle or any of those philosophers, or even just appreciate the problems of properly interpreting them to arrive at a possible understanding of the text, you have to read them in the original. That argument about 'different glories' mainly shows what Tim Griffith is interested in and it is apparently not meaning conferred, not the what is said, but the how. That is fine, but it totally blinds him to the fact that yopu loose out on a lot if you read Plato in translation that is not just esthetics. That every translation is intimating a certain interpretation some more than others. But the only way to really know which biases the translation transports is reading the original and having a good idea of the life-world of the author, too. I'm shocked he really brushes over all this like that.

[@MrLaulaulaulau]

Thank you! You make a great point. In fact, the exact words used in a work of philosophy (and especially in Plato’s philosophy) are absolutely integral to the work’s meaning. The exact meaning, etymology, definition and connotations of words are, in fact, MORE important in the Republic than in, say, the Aeneid or any work of poetry. Beyond that, any conversation about translation can’t go very far without professional translators who could bring their expertise about the subject. This feels a little bit like a vague discussion about surgery between non-surgeons, or an exposé about cabinet-making by furniture users. I am not at all convinced that Anna Karenina cannot be rendered beautifully into Portuguese - in a way that allows you to access the work’s exact meaning and special beauty. Experience shows that it is possible. That’s not denying that a translation of a masterpiece is rarely a masterpiece formally itself.

[@jerendonb]

Chill

[@ludwigvanbeethoven8164]

i learned latin in college and wish Tim was my teacher. very pragmatic. agree with everything he's said.

[@jperez7893]

The biggest loss of latin and koine greek happened after Vatican 2. Prior to this most priests spoke Latin or were at least very proficient. And the monks and religious were also well versed in koine

[@RichardDCook]

I'm a 67 year old Catholic but I'm a convert (RCIA) and wasn't around when Latin was still used. I have found a Parish which has introduced some Latin, which I love. I think all the Priests there speak Italian and Latin as well as English (I know they lived in Rome) and they do one full Latin Mass a week.

[@davidweihe6052]

If monks and religious were familiar with Koine, it was very anti-Catholic, since the Western Church forced everyone to speak Latin, not the original language of the New Testament. That is why the Church burned pre-Protestants for translating the New Testament into English from Greek.

[@jperez7893]

@@davidweihe6052 that’s the stupidest thing i ever heard. The vatican library is one of the largest repositories of greek manuscripts. The monasteries of southern italy as well. Particularly monte cassino. The burning of non canonical books and heretical writings happened in both east and west. That’s why copies of the gospel of thomas, gospel of judas iscariot, gospel of mary Magdalen etc were only discovered in the 19th century, in Egypt. In a garbage dump. The popes preserve history. The roman census of judea was still available in Rome until it was destroyed by the barbarians in the 5th century. So was the altar of incense, the menorah, and the table of the show bread of the temple of Jerusalem. The writings of Maimonides are in the Vatican. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

[@iberius9937]

Only 42 minutes in but you both get a big like nonetheless. Fascinating and very important topic, especially in today's world with today's "education."

[@ehhe4381]

1:13:03

[@ehhe4381]

10:43

[@felixarquer7732]

1:24:00 Do you really think it’s that unusual for conquerors to be inferior to the conquered? Except in brutality, of course.

[@scoon2117]

I just got a translation of herodotus history of persian war

[@letsrelaxwithtexts2114]

Roger ascon killed latin?

[@MrRabiddogg]

Even a poem/story written in an older dialect of English translated into modern English loses something. There is a podcast I listen to called the History of English podcast and through out the history of the podcast he's read poems from Saxon era; Shakespearian era, Etc. in both the current and period language and they are light years different.

[@werlynakadera1944]

Duas cosas: 1) tue puves intenderme? 2) tue haves une fore Discord?

[@pierreabbat6157]

Ezekiel 10 has not survived translation in any version I've read. I'm not that good at Hebrew, but from the verse "I heard the ofanim called galgal" ("ofan" was the current term for "wheel" in Ezekiel's day, "galgal" is the modern word) I get the impression that Ezekiel, who lived during the Babylonian captivity, heard someone explaining an electric motor (which appears to be built into the wheels) in modern Hebrew.

[@ellenorbjornsdottir1166]

some of the comments here are cursed...

[@yarrowification]

I disagree with the notion that simplicity is English's default; that it can only be brought out of by why latin knowledge. That being said I do think english is in decline.

[@nidhishshivashankar4885]

This is why I’m tackling Persian, just to read Hafez as it was written, and I’m already learning Latinate languages for the sake of Horace through Dante but I was wondering if Greek philosophy was as important to read verbatim. According to the convo it seems it and Homer are not.. What about Archilochus and Sappho etc? I wasn’t sure if in that region I should be more interested in tackling Turkish or Greek after Persian but if I’m not missing much with the Greeks I may as well just go for Turkish

[@gandolfthorstefn1780]

I guess Beowulf in Latin would be like two roadworkers speaking like Shakespeare. Rediculous!

[@RichardDCook]

Beowulf sure makes the case for reading poetry in the original language, it's amazing. I've only read one Modern English translation that captured some of the rhythm and alliteration of the Old English.

[@FlexibleFlyer50]

Latin and ancient Greek are seen as elitist. Academics themselves have worked to eliminate the Great Books, ancient languages, ancient history and The Classics from the college and even high school curriculum. My late aunt died three years ago; she won the Latin prize in junior high school and for four years running in high school. At 89 she was still doing a crossword puzzle in Latin. When I went to high school in the '60s Latin was no longer offered in junior high or high school. These languages were considered elitist and dead. With the canon wars and diversity in literature, the death knell sounded for Latin and Greek. Even languages such as German, French and Italian are no longer offered in secondary schools today. Spanish is the only survivor right now, but that, too, may change. What these so-called educators fail to realize is that learning a language demands critical thinking abilities, order sequencing, and a host of higher level thinking skills that schools---elementary through graduate levels---no longer want to encourage or teach today. Anything that involves work and study is seen as racist and a waste of time-----it's always the path of least resistance today in learning. I studied French, Spanish and Italian. I never regretted for a minute learning the languages. Language study improved my vocabulary, expanded my literary appreciation, and gave me an excellent foundation for critical thinking skills.

[@francisdec1615]

I have a friend, whose father was a professor of physics and whose mother was a sociologist. We were both born in Sweden in the sick 1970s. His parents were very anti-establishment when they were young. He considers Latin more or less BS, as far as I understand. I also know a lawyer who told me that if you use Latin judicial terms in a Swedish court, the judge will most likely ridicule you. But I hear that it's even worse in the US.

[@FlexibleFlyer50]

@@francisdec1615 The educational system has been dumbed down over the past 35 years---no critical thinking; therefore, you have a drugged, alcohol fueled stupid populace that is malleable and quiescent. You see it now. People can't think.

[@ludwigvanbeethoven8164]

The only reason why ancient Latin, ancient Greek, and ancient Hebrew (especially Latin and Greek) were the foundations for the first universities was because the Catholic Church was the first to establish universities in Europe in the 11th century and the set Latin, Greek, and Hebrew as the foundation. Even the word university is Latin in origin. The Roman Catholic Church set these three languages as corner stones for universities is because it's the three languages Pilate wrote on Jesus' cross...the INRI. These three languages then have been designated as sacred languages by all people who followed Jesus and is still attested to their massive frequency of ancient languages above the rest, such as another dead language like Phoenician, which no one uses nor has any merit in learning, really. After Jesus' ascension, the 12 disciples spread across the globe at that point, with the first Pope (Peter) going to Rome. There Peter wrote the Tridentine Mass, also called the Latin Mass, which there is evidence coming out, recently, since some people deny that Peter wrote the first Mass in Latin, but Greek, which is false, it was Latin. This is also why the first rendition of a full "Bible", composed and translated by Jerome in the 4th century was in Latin, which the Pope at the time commissioned him to do; translate the old Latin into contemporary Latin (4th century Latin). This is why Latin has been used for 2,000 years in the Catholic Church. This is why every university for 2,000 years held Latin in high-regard. This is why even your average folk knew a sizable amount of Latin in the past 2,000 years. Fast forward a millennium, to 1962. This is when everything changed. The Roman Catholic Church wanted to be different and become more like the modern world. The Roman Catholic Church at the Second Vatican Council 1962 had removed Latin from its core. Whereas Latin was in every single inch of the Roman Catholic Church, in every single inch of the world, the Roman Catholic Church decided that the vernacular (local dialects) of the people was to be in place. If you were in China, the Mass was now in Chinese. If you were in Russia, the Mass was now in Russian. If you were in Germany, the Mass was now in German. US/England/Australia English. Japan Japanese. Mexico Spanish. The Tridentine Mass was stripped of tradition, both in the form and the language. That is why Latin is now obsolete. People might say that the world doesn't follow the Roman Catholic Church, but you would be wrong. And 2,000 years of history shows that. And easy example is in the 16 century, the Roman Catholic Church noticed that the core Christian dates such as Christmas, Easter, All Saints Day, Solemnity of Mary, etc...were all moving away from their original seasonal dates. This is because the Julian Calendar, used by all people of Europe and many parts of the world for 1,500 years was flawed...so Pope Gregory the 13th instituted a new calendar which every single person in the world now uses. What about Protestants who broke away from Rome and the Papacy? Even now, they use the date the the Roman Catholic Church uses to pick Easter, since Easter is not a set date like November 1st, December 25th, January 1st. Anyways. People wonder why ancient Latin (ancient Greek and ancient Hebrew) is obsolete now, and this is your true answer.

[@FlexibleFlyer50]

@@ludwigvanbeethoven8164 In part it's the church, but it's also laziness too. Language study demands attention to detail, critical thinking skills, and WORK. Today, when you have students majoring in Native Basketweaving, don't expect much academic rigor.

[@lazydictionary]

Many schools still offer Latin. My AP English course went over many ancient Greek works to inform our modern vocabulary. And there are very few schools that offer only Spanish as a foreign language option.

[@martinmichalek]

I'm not sure how much of this navel-gazing and Sapir-Whorf linguistic relativity stuff I buy into. It's a nice thought and sounds grand, but the notion that reading something in translation is not reading the author-and they can't be interacted with in translation-or that their charisma is gone-is an absurd amount of credence in the linguistic turn. Nice thought, but lathered in machismo. Sure, Horace's syntax is vital to encountering and appreciating his poetry, but that's a quite different from, like, reading the Hobbit in Spanish.

[@martinmichalek]

I suppose it's a good way to get people to sign up for your class, though.

[@martinmichalek]

also the Beatles example-the proper example wouldn't be that it's a spoken word poem (because by that extension we have no joy to extract from Latin poetry except "superficial basic meanings of words"). The proper cognate would be listening to the Beatles songs that were translated into German.

[@Latrina_Bidet_IRS_Enfrocer]

Until you learn Latin, read Horace, and then compare it for yourself to the English translation, your opinion is just uninformed nonsense that you pulled out of your posterior orifice.

[@miroirs-jumeaux]

Twenty and fifth

[@TheOtherCaleb]

He’s a bit snobbish, eh? 😂

[@palikariena7292]

How about we stop dumbing down education and start requiring introductory Greek or Latin to get a HS degree and proficiency for university

[@NathanDudani]

Because HSs aren't pre-WW1 Ivy League universities....

[@EdwardM-t8p]

​@@NathanDudani Well people not learning Greek and Latin is but one reason why the English Language is collapsing (very slowly over the decades, now rapidly, then all at once). Just listen to old videos with Walter Cronkite, Harry Reasoner, Huntley and Brinkley, and then to TikTok videos or KZbin shorts by today's GenAlpha 🤮

[@greenguy369]

​​@@EdwardM-t8p Just to clarify... We should compare the most elite journalists of yesteryear, masters at very at the top of their field reporting on world shifting and shattering events, then compare them to bored 13 year olds goofing off with their friends in no-stakes, 60 second videos?

[@IkarusKommt]

Latin is a conlang created by Italians in the 16th century. To think one can read or understand 'Classic Latin' by learning said conlang, is as absurd as one can understand Chaucer or even Shakespeare.

[@NathanDudani]

Cope. Latin was used in English law through 1349...

[@13tuyuti]

Then what did the old Roman authors write in?

[@IkarusKommt]

@@13tuyuti In 'Classic Latin'. It is still unclear what language they spoke and thought in.

[@IkarusKommt]

@@NathanDudani It was the Medieval Latin, a completely different language both to the real and 'new' Latin.

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

That is false. Latin is easily observed in the inscriptions all around Rome today and the former Roman Empire. Moreover, the works of many Classical Roman authors survive to this day. Whoever told you it was a conlang was fooling you.

[@johnfenn3188]

I struggle with the notion that Old English is less competent as a language at expressing difficult ideas and notions. Of course languages go through creative phases at which a lot of people are coining words. One such period was around the time of King Alfred, but his translations of Gregory and Boethius, not to mention the Bible indicate that this notion is false. Shakespeare's time was another such creative time, but not because of Latin. Old English has many features that Early Modern English does not have. Grammatically it is a totally different language and works a different way. So in several ways, in terms of vocabulary, inflexions of nouns and verbs, gender and even number, Old English was more expressive than its modern descendent, not less. The experience of translators down the centuries is that so-called "primitive" languages can indeed express complex ideas. They just do it differently from the primary language. As codes, they are equally efficient.

[@RichardDCook]

Exactly right. Portraying Old English as a "simple" language which required an infusion of Latin to become a tongue capable of the full expression of human experience is absurd and clueless. Nearly all the words English borrowed from Old Norse, Latin, French, etc were for things English already had perfectly good words for. These borrowings did often eventually lead to the original English word falling out of use, but it's anachronistic and false to look at all the French and Latin borrowings and assume that they filled gaps in the English vocabulary.

[@johnfenn3188]

@@RichardDCook I’m not sure the speaker was doing that exactly, but he appeared to believe that the glory of the English Language is its ability to enrich itself with loan words, and that its expressiveness and poetry come from there. I don’t thing the authors of Beowulf, The Wanderer and the Seafarer would agree! And to claim that the Norman invasion and its attempt to suppress the English language altogether as the real enrichment so misrepresents our history as to be a gross distortion. 60% or our dictionary word stock may be of romance origin, but 80% of the words we use every day are Old English or Old Norse in origin. And everything Shakespeare could say was capable of being said before 1066.

[@RichardDCook]

@@johnfenn3188 Definitely English's propensity for borrowing words sets it apart from, say, German, which prefers to coin words from native elements for new things. Thus English's borrowing of foreign words is never really necessary, and usually is for things that English already has words for. Is the Inkhornish Latinate "multitudinous seas incarnadine" better than "make bloody the waters of the earth"? I don't think so. The King James committee would have gone with the latter.

[@johnfenn3188]

@@RichardDCook I’d three quarters agree with that. I started learning German at the age of about 6 from my grandpa. I’m 72 know so the acquaintance has been a long one. At school we learned the German terms for all sorts of things, which are now known by loan words. Since ww2 the number of British and American English terms in common use in Germany is legion! I’m often caught out in Germany these days. I'll talk for instance about the Gehsteig - and people will answer with das Sidewalk, or das Pavement (depending on which part of Germany and the kind of English taught in school (both are common). There are older loan words, like das Hotel, which have no ready German root. Herberge is of a different order.

[@RichardDCook]

@@johnfenn3188 das Sidewalk!! LOl. It's like the French "le laptop" "le weekend" etc. However, even if post-WWII Occupied Germany and modern tech Germany have got the habit of borrowing, the fact remains that for the thousand years prior, when English was borrowing tons of Norse words and French words for things that English already had words for, German preferred to create equivalents out of native elements. Just the other day I heard somebody use the word "boneyard" when giving directions to a cemetery. Why not?