Hello, everyone! I am very excited to be here, and hope that I could learn from you all on Greek and Latin!
I am now a PhD candidate in Peking University, China. Although I major in Chinese philology, I am also interested in western classics very much, especially the languages. I have learnt Latin for 2 years (Wheelock’s Latin), and Greek for 1.5 years (Greek: An Intensive Course). Partly because of my clumsiness maybe, I have barely finished those two textbooks, and preliminarily understood their grammars so far. I just began to read Cicero’s Catilinarian Orations and Plato’s Symposium a few months ago, and have found that they are really difficult… (so many new words…the puzzled sentence structures…the wired grammar…How horrible they are! ) Therefore, as for my plans in the future, I want to improve and expand my vocabulary, to know more about the grammar, and to keep on reading these original works at the same.
It is very difficult to find a good Chinese forum/blog on Greek and Latin on the internet. So every time when I encountered a problem previously, I could only either go to my teacher, or think it over all by myself. So you can’t imagine how happy I am when I find this website! I hope that I could learn from you and discuss the problems with you.
There is one thing which has perplexed me for a long time so I want to ask about it here… It is about the macrons (eg. Laudāre, λῡ́ω). I find that those macrons are very hard to remember… Are they important? Could they only be remembered by rote? If I want to learn Latin and Greek well, should I make all my effort to remember them?
This reminds me of a joke. An economist meets another economist and asks “How is your wife?”. The other answers “Compare to what?”. This is to say that the length of vowels is important but that importance is always relative. By changing the length of a vowel a word can take a different meaning (e.g., populus). You need to know your long and short syllables for poetry (and to determine whether a syllable is long or short, you often need to know the length of the vowel). But then conjugations and declensions are important, syntax is important, etc. Little by little you’ll familiarize yourself with everything.
Maybe I was too anxious for a quick result… I wanted to master all the things as quickly as possible, so that I could totally enjoy reading the original texts afterwards… So every time when I encounter something which I do not know or remember, I would get worried immediately… But this is not a good attitude toward learning ancient languages. Instead, I should learn them step by step.
However, there is still one more problem concerning those little macrons… It is that I am not sure to what extent I should master them. For example, I am now reading Cicero’s Catilinarian Orations (O Tempora O mores by Susan O.Shapiro) and Plato’s Symposium (by Geoffrey Steadman). As both books do not mark the macrons either in the text or in the vocabulary list, should I look up in the dictionary every word I encounter in the text and mark their macrons all by myself? I am not a lazy person and I really tried to do that, but the reading process turned out to be too slow, and I finally gave up… Should I keep on doing that actually?
Unless you have a text with the macrons already marked, the mechanical work of looking up every word and memorizing it would get in the way of learning more important things about the language.
That said, I hope to have a text of the Iliad and Odyssey with macrons marked ready for publication within the next few months.
) Therefore, as for my plans in the future, I want to improve and expand my vocabulary, to know more about the grammar, and to keep on reading these original works at the same.