Indo-European primers

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quendidil
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Indo-European primers

Post by quendidil »

This site by the University of Texas at Austin features a few primers to a number of Indo-European languages including Tocharian, to which I've linked.

Would anyone have any recommendations on how to make use of those primers? They explicitly state on the site that they've designed those lessons to focus on a linguistic standpoint, that's great, but I feel a bit lost.

annis
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Post by annis »

Are these really primers. I think they're a great way to get a quick overview of a language, but I wouldn't ever want to use them to learn from. They might make good intermediate reading, though.
William S. Annis — http://www.aoidoi.org/http://www.scholiastae.org/
τίς πατέρ' αἰνήσει εἰ μὴ κακοδαίμονες υἱοί;

quendidil
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Post by quendidil »

Well, they are advertised as such.
Moreover, the important ability with respect to these languages is that of reading texts, with or without the help of translations. The online introductions in Early Indo-European Online are designed to provide such ability.
and this
Latin Online [2002] is designed to teach you to read Latin, or to improve your reading knowledge. After completing the course, you should be able to read any Latin texts.
They do however, explicitly state that completion of the course would allow you to read the language only for Latin, Classical Greek and Old Church Slavonic, and IMO, the lessons for the 3 languages are indeed easier to go through than the Tocharian course at least, which seems more linguistics-oriented. But perhaps this may be due to the decipherment of Tocharian depending a great deal on PIE linguistics?

annis
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Post by annis »

quendidil wrote:Well, they are advertised as such.
It is an old joke that when a linguist says he's "learning a language" it really means he spent the weekend with a grammar. I love that site, but it's a pedagogical disaster for anyone who wants to use them to actually learn one of the languages with no other resources.
William S. Annis — http://www.aoidoi.org/http://www.scholiastae.org/
τίς πατέρ' αἰνήσει εἰ μὴ κακοδαίμονες υἱοί;

Bert
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Post by Bert »

annis wrote:It is an old joke that when a linguist says he's "learning a language" it really means he spent the weekend with a grammar.
I know a linguist (Well, know him is stretching matters a bit...) who said that after years of study, he knows almost all there is to know about his wife's native language but still is not able to speak it.
I guess a linguist's purpose in studying a language differs from my purpose in learning Greek

annis
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Post by annis »

Bert wrote:I guess a linguist's purpose in studying a language differs from my purpose in learning Greek
Very often, yes.
William S. Annis — http://www.aoidoi.org/http://www.scholiastae.org/
τίς πατέρ' αἰνήσει εἰ μὴ κακοδαίμονες υἱοί;

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