Modern Languages for Classics

[anphph]

This started as a comment on jeidsath's post in the word accent thread.

What modern languages should be a priority if you're doing Classics?

There's the usual culprits, German, especially for Greek studies, Italian, especially for Roman & Latin etc. And then what? Where on the ladder, if at all, would you put French and Modern Greek, Russian and Dutch, etc? Would you say there other languages more tied to specific fields of study? (From the list above, only thing that comes to mind would be Modern Greek for Byzantine studies.)

I started to write this thinking of Dutch in particular. Does anyone have anything to say for it? I can recall chancing on some interesting (and illegible) stuff every once in a while, and made the mental note that it wouldn't be terribly useless to learn it (my German is decent enough, certainly enough to read scholarship, so it wouldn't be completely out of the blue), but there's the circular argument that no one else around here uses it, so we don't have bibliography, so I don't know what exists, and so don't even know where I should look etc.

[Scribo]

Honestly...the gap between English and the other languages is considerably larger than most are aware of or willing to admit. I had to learn French, German and Italian even as an undergraduate and often the main reason I'd use the former two languages were a) consulting some great reference work or b) arguing with a recent book or journal. There's this mindset in Classics - well largely in the UK - that one needs to be completionist...it's not always helpful.

It really depends on what you're doing. There's a lot of stuff on ancient religions, mythology, structuralism etc in French that can be rescued from the inanities of literary theory for example. The amount of good work in Italian is increasing, especially the kind of traditional scholarship coming out of Pisa on textual criticism, philology and manuscripts etc. Greek scholarship often gets castigated (tbf, often rightly so) but you'd be hard pressed doing archaeology without it and, yes, there is a decent amount of byzantine stuff.

I don't know too much about Russian - I'm rightly suspicious of their scholarship - but they produce a lot of work on Scythians, the Black sea, Iranian-Greek interactions and so on and forth. I've known one or two people who picked it up as a research language.

Yes I think you do have to learn modern languages - I think at least French, German and Italian - but it's not going to be as transformative as you might think. The highly influential older works will already have spread their influence across several languages. As time goes on the amount of new stuff that you MUST read lessens immensely.

The more you read, the more obvious your needs will become so don't worry about it. I will say though that learning these other languages often comes at a reasonably low cost: If you have Latin it really is intuitive to pick up the Romance languages, I can't claim that Italian cost me any real effort per esempio.

I hope I don't sound too harsh, I just want to temper some of the unabated enthusiasm fledgling Classicists hear from day one about research languages.

[jeidsath]

I'd have trouble convincing myself to learn a language mainly for technical reading. Literature and poetry for me! I'm not really a joyful traveller -- two weeks in a foreign land always feels like a rush to me, and three months is incompatible with providing for a family.

[mwh]

After German and Italian, most definitely French, with everything else (Spanish, modern Greek) far far behind. Russian scholarship is increasingly in English, at least as far as Greek literature goes and even linguistics. Chinese scholarship on what we will have to stop calling the Classics, now burgeoning, is mostly in English; I suppose that may change in the future, so maybe that's a language to learn (for other reasons too!); but I can testify it's not easy for someone with acquaintance only with I-E languages! The big four Western languages increasingly dominate; journals and international conferences increasingly require papers to be in one of those four; and English increasingly dominates over all the rest. At international meetings even Germans and Italians (and even some French, wonder of wonders) are as likely as not to give their presentations in English, and other-national journals with articles in their native language are fading fast. Many if not most US American classicists, to their shame and to their and the world's loss (if they did but know it), speak no other language.

It’s a thoroughly deplorable state of affairs. Linguistic colonialism. But that’s the way it is, as inevitable as internationalism. And four modern languages is enough for most.

As to Dutch, no classicist of my acquaintance, except Dutch ones, knows Dutch. I can struggle through well enough thanks to German. Reading it out loud (which I do in a really bad accent) brings out the affinity more strongly. But tbh classicists have little need for Dutch, since the older Dutch scholarship is written in Latin and the more recent mostly in either English or German.

Dutch scholars, like other “minority”-language nationals, are very good in English, and not only in English. I once attended a seminar with Jan Waszink in Urbino, and he was no less fluent in Italian. I felt insulted on his behalf when Cesare Questa asked him a question in Latin (as I later discovered he was wont to do, mainly to show up the grecist Bruno Gentili and his guests). Waszink didn’t so much as blink, but carried on the discussion in Latin as fluent as Questa’s own. I reckoned I could converse in Latin myself, but it was a crude and halting apology for Latin beside theirs. — But I wander.

[Markos]

I vote for Modern Greek and, if you read Biblical Greek, Modern Hebrew.

[Scribo]

Wow offended on his behalf too. I've always been under the assumption that you switch to Latin whenever the person you're speaking with doesn't have a great command of English. It happens a lot with East Europeans for example since a lot of the older ones I've met have spent more time on German. My accent is dire in German, theirs in English. Latin tends to be easier. It's also, needless to say, dying out among the younger population. I recently had a perfectly wonderful conversation about votive offerings in English with a Pole who was only 3/4 years older than I.

But a Dutchman? Come on, these people are practically native speakers half the time! Not to mention out of the "big" countries Italians are definitely the worst offenders in the "wthdidhesayican'tmakeouthisaccent" cup. Wow.

[Bart]

I started to write this thinking of Dutch in particular. Does anyone have anything to say for it?

Well, you could read Willem Elsschot or Gerard van het Reve: they're great and close to untranslatable. Better still, you would be able to make words with consonant clusters of 8 letters or more (angstschreeuw, slechtstschrijvend).
Apart from that, nope.

[mwh]

I felt insulted on his behalf precisely because his command of Italian was impeccable and there was no need to resort to Latin. To do so seemed a slur on his proficiency in Italian. He was addressing an audience of Italians (plus me), and they all felt the same way about Questa’s intervento.
Wow.

[jeidsath]

Well, German it is for me. I listened to Cinderella a few times this morning (with the translation at first) until I understood it, and then I downloaded Der Hobbit on audiobook. After a rough start, I seem to be following along fairly well. There is an elderly gentleman at Church who is excited to teach me some German poetry. It's so much easier to learn a living language!

So what German-Greek reference books should I be looking at? Kuhner's grammar, I assume. Others? What lexicons should I be looking at?

[mwh]

German Greek grammars: choice is still btwn Kühner-Gerth and Schwyzer, both old, you can take your pick. I refer to K-G for most things (Smyth is effectively an abridgment of it, practically to the point of plagiarism), when I refer to it at all, but Schwyzer gives more examples and is better for tracing development over time. Schwyzer online but not in a form I can read (no difficulty for you, I expect), I don't know about K-G. But both very big and will probably give you more than you need, or ever will.

Lexica: German-speakers and everyone else (except some Italians) use LSJ. There's nothing to touch it. There's a great lexicon for early Greek epic, though, das Lexikon des frühgriechischen Epos (LfgrE), over 50 years in the making (25 of them on alpha) but wonder of wonders brought to completion, so now they can start again; and various others. Most of the dictionaries for later Greek are in English (NT, patristic, others).

Various good general and more specialized encyclopedias. Indispensable but v dated is Pauly-Wissowa (plus many updating supplement volumes of varying ages), and/or the much shorter and more up-to-date Kleine Pauly, a very handy thing (but with tiny print); and inbetween in scale (and guess what, newer; and for better or worse revamped) is the Neue Pauly, now englished however. If Wikipedia goes on improving so, I suppose no-one will need to use these things any more. I can’t even give away my Enc. Britannica.

And you could read intros to commentaries (or even comms themselves) and essays and such. For Homer, Ameis-Henze-Cauer is in process of being updated/rewritten (narratology etc.), and of course there are excellent comms on other works, e.g. Richard Kannicht’s on Eur. Helen (from which I learnt almost as much as from Barrett’s Hippolytus and have recently been learning from Finglass’s comms. on Pindar and Soph.).

Get your elderly gentleman to introduce you to Rilke.

[Bart]

Another vote for Rilke.
Heinrich Heine might be even better. His German is less difficult and his poems are easy to learn by heart. If you like German classicial song, you could even sing them aloud! Ah, nothing beats singing 'Ich unglückseliger Atlas' or 'Der Erlkönig' (Goethe) at the top of your voice with lots of drama & pathos. Make sure the house is empty though. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PaBNUzVSnj8
German literature is fascinating and German poetry my favourite.
Good luck!

[Paul Derouda]

A precision: the new German Homer commentaries ("Gesamtkommentar") are only on the Iliad, none on the Odyssey. And I would not call them just updates of the old Ameis-Hentze-Cauer (although that's what the authors themselves call them) but new works entirely. The new works cover much more ground than the old ones, but I don't think they replace them; for conscision and simplicity in making little grammatical points understood the old ones are still unreplaceable. If you're wondering "what does this ρα exactly mean here?", you're much more likely to find the answer in AHC (in simple German paraphrase) than any newer commentary, including the new Gesamtkommentar.

[Scribo]

Ah German! Of all my languages, anc and modern, it's my least favourite. I mean it's been very useful to me but I'm not going to pretend it's ever given me joy. Here's what I suggest.

http://english.franklang.ru/index.php?o ... &Itemid=15

You probably know of Ilya Frank and the Ilya Frank method? If not there's some cool text and audio files based on the Grimm folk tales that you can just pick up and work-through even if Gemanless. Good, free, fun, and easy supplement to any course.

II) A German reading textbook.

Seems strange to suggest this but actually I found them helpful for rapidly acquiring a reading knowledge of the language. Something like "Reading German" (it's published by OUP, it's black and yellow) doesn't teach you a lot of grammar or anything but it's fairly example heavy, gives you tips and tricks on sentence order and specific lexical usage etc. It does not replace a proper textbook or listening or conversation.

III) Learn some of the basic rules which differentiate English from German. Takes about an hour or two and suddenly transformed my active usage. What do I want to say? does it have a Germanic root? hey presto got it.

IV) http://www.dw.com/en/learn-german/german-courses/s-2547

V) http://coerll.utexas.edu/gg/gr/index.html?si=no Grammar based on the Grimm stories.

Probably some useful supplements to your course. Also one of my favourites: http://germanstories.vcu.edu/goethe/zauber_dual.html

[Markos]

Well, German it is for me...So what German-Greek reference books should I be looking at?

Get a NT diglot with the Greek and Luther.

Is code switching less of an issue when dealing with L2-L3? It's at least a different issue.

You probably heard the one about the ten volume German work. All the verbs were in volume 10.

[Bart]

You probably heard the one about the ten volume German work. All the verbs were in volume 10.

Very nice, but at least the auxiliary verb(s) should be in volume 2.

Let's counter that with a quote by Kurt Tucholsky about English: "Das Englische ist eine einfache, aber schwere Sprache. Es besteht aus lauter Fremdwörtern, die falsch ausgesprochen werden."

[jeidsath]

You may enjoy this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ds8mbgRHyM -- "Ich bin Grieche"

Thank you for all of the language advice. I do have some German experience. I studied -- more correctly, attended classes on -- German in high school. I was easily the worst student, and never got to the level where I could read or understand simple conversations. I didn't try especially hard, and when I did try, it was always with stupid methods (memorizing lists of words or grammar tables).

I grabbed Cinderella from the audio here: http://germanstories.vcu.edu/grimm/grimm_menu.html They don't have audio for many stories though, so the other links are very appreciated. I listened to the first chapter of Der Hobbit audiobook a few times yesterday, and I understand nearly all of it (mostly because I read it so often as a child). Far easier to listen to something expressively read than to attack the text directly.

Speaking of text, German is terribly ugly in modern type. I have no idea why they ditched the old Gothic script. (A moment of wikipedia research tells me that it was the Nazis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiqua%E ... ur_dispute)

[sydneylam19]

Chinese scholarship on what we will have to stop calling the Classics, now burgeoning, is mostly in English.

This depends on the field of study. Japanese, for example, is an important academic language for Neo-Confucianism and legal history research. But overall English has the upper hand.

Though tangent to the topic, I strongly encourage those interested in ancient languages learn Classical Chinese and Sanskrit. Both are beautiful languages rich in culture and will definitely open up a new world.

[sydneylam19]

I've fretted over whether to learn German or French for Classics. Eventually I chose to take German for its broader application in Classical Studies, Theology and Philosophy (in general terms, of course). One thing I notice is that there are more variations in sentence structure and expression in French than in German. For instance, in German the verb is always in the 'second position'. Also, nouns have to be capitalized. This makes locating nouns and verbs easier. The only job left is to accumulate a huge vocabulary bank through rote learning, having mastered the grammar rules well - the former is a tedious chore (truly laborious to recite long words with weird forms in the eyes of English speakers), while the latter should not be a problem to experienced Latinists who are familiar with inflection.

[seneca2008]

German is a wonderful language to learn in its own right quite apart from its utility. Anyone who doubts its beauty need only listen to some Schubert Lieder. I can recommend this disk in the complete Hyperion edition which features poems on classical themes.

http://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/dc.asp?dc=D_CDJ33014

Lieder (and opera) is an enjoyable way of acquiring some vocabulary as well as experiencing some wonderful music.

I have to say I dont know where you all find the time to learn all these languages. Sanskrit... maybe in another life.

[Ronolio]

I will agree with the consensus on German being the most important after English (Tag Pauly-Wissowa), then Italian. If you are looking into the Bronze Age, Ancient Egypt, or Mesopotamian civilizations, then French is useful. One of my fond memories of Graduate school was reading an article in Pauly-Wissowa that had both Latin and Greek passages within and then realizing that I had gone from German to Latin back to German and then to Greek without even noticing what I had done.

[sydneylam19]

German is a wonderful language to learn in its own right quite apart from its utility. Anyone who doubts its beauty need only listen to some Schubert Lieder. I can recommend this disk in the complete Hyperion edition which features poems on classical themes.

http://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/dc.asp?dc=D_CDJ33014

Lieder (and opera) is an enjoyable way of acquiring some vocabulary as well as experiencing some wonderful music.

I have to say I dont know where you all find the time to learn all these languages. Sanskrit... maybe in another life.

I am now learning German and I can guarantee that it is not as hard as what many assumed - at least for reading and writing knowledge. German is more rigid in grammar than French, which proffers to beginners like me the advantage of demystifying the roles of particular words in a sentence. In particular I really appreciate the genius who invented the 'verb at second position' rule and the convention of capitalizing all nouns!