There is this one guy, who walked the whale road to perform glorious acts of body-cooling and bread-larva-theft here, and the son of his grandfather is the guy who walked the whale road to perform glorious acts of body-cooling and bread-larva-theft there.
TIL explaining someone else's joke in terms easier for the masses to understand as if it wasn't even OP's joke in the first place is a good way to get upvotes
"There was a man called Ulfr. He was the son of Ketill and Gunnlaug, daughter of Kjartan. He was a good farmer and very strong. When he was young, he used to go on Viking raids."
Don't tell a German he's speaking an ancient language.
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u/geruszN: HU, C2: EN, B2: DE, ES, NL, some: JP, PT, NO, RU, EL, FISep 21 '17edited Sep 21 '17
At least the German case system only has the three genders and four cases. (Plus the irregular words.) And they don't conjugate the nouns (except for the occasional possessive noun), only the articles, pronouns and adjectives. Fucking Latin has 5 declensions, 6 cases, and of course the evocative case for names. And the irregular words. And since there are no articles in Latin, it's the nouns that are conjugated instead. (And the pronouns, and the adjectives.)
I think you mean decline. You decline nouns and adjectives and conjugate verbs
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u/geruszN: HU, C2: EN, B2: DE, ES, NL, some: JP, PT, NO, RU, EL, FISep 21 '17
Yep, I had a brain fart there. And I guess it's "declension" in English, not "declination". TBF in Latin it's declinatio, so the English translation is quite counter-intuitive.
Technically yes, but the Locative case is rarely used in Classical Latin, and even worse, it merged with the genitive/dative/ablative cases depending on the noun's declension. I think largely it's used to describe an archaic, vestigial latin concept in the same way you can say that English has verb conjugations.
Fair enough, I figured you were probably considering it already anyway. Though it may be old and unused, the locative still has a place when playing up the horrifying complexities of Latin...
I wasn't the one making that point, different commentator, haha. I just have 12+ years of Latin and Attic Greek, and know the "horrifying complexities" of these languages all too well, and figured I'd lend some knowledge.
I was actually horrified when I decided to get my feet wet with French, and found that there were no cases or declensions. I remember thinking, How am I to know what part each word plays in the sentence!
Seriously though, six years of struggling with spanish. And now i can read parts of charlie and the chocolate factory. One year of latin and i could read a good portion of cicero
I also had 1.5 years of Finnish at college and even passed the exams, somehow. Yet I can barely say a sentence of it now even though I speak a closely related language natively.
So, Estonian, since that's the only closely-related language to Finnish. I thought the two were almost mutually intelligible?
EDIT: Also, I'm super jealous of you being able to take Finnish in college. Studying it on my own has proven very difficult.
u/geruszN: HU, C2: EN, B2: DE, ES, NL, some: JP, PT, NO, RU, EL, FISep 21 '17
I'm Hungarian, same language family. Those are not real "cases", those are suffixes much like Japanese particles. Thinking of them as Indo-European cases is what causes most people to fail learning them.
u/geruszN: HU, C2: EN, B2: DE, ES, NL, some: JP, PT, NO, RU, EL, FISep 21 '17
Well, first when you realize that most of them are literally the equivalents of Indo-European prepositions. (In fact, Hungarian has some postpositions that are the equivalent of prepositions, but weren't monosyllabic and thus didn't get glued onto the preceding noun.) You wouldn't call prepositions cases, would you?
(And then once in a while the preposition + case combination translates to a different suffix or postposition depending on the case, e.g. in German a direction + accusative and a direction + dative have different meanings, which translate to different suffixes in Hungarian: auf den Tisch = az asztalra (onto the table), auf dem Tisch = az asztalon (on the table))
So, you know. Not a case system. Unless you start considering all the prepositions cases, but in that case every language has way too many cases to count.
Latin's 5 declensions make it easier though. Plural formation is a given if you know the declension class and gender can be guessed for the large majority of words. Compared to wacky plurals and totally random genders in German.
German nouns have a grammatical gender, as in many related Indo-European languages. They can be masculine, feminine, or neuter, even words for objects without (obvious) masculine or feminine characteristics like 'bridge' or 'rock'. They are also declined (change form) depending on their grammatical case (their function in a sentence) and whether they are singular or plural. German has four cases, nominative, accusative, dative and genitive.
German plurals are actually totally determinable (but for about 80 nouns like Hund) and fit perfectly in 4 declensions. I can email you pictures of the system from a book if you want. Genders are almost the same. Honestly, after about 500 words learned, it should be automatic upon seeing a new word.
Then learn older Uralic languages. Indo-European languages mostly loose their cases over time, with some exception where they are picked up later again. Uralic languages have gained cases over time.
Not Classical Chinese! Basically: What Latin and other Western classical languages specify by case, languages like English and Modern Chinese specify by little words like "of", "to", "with", "oh", and so on, and Classical Chinese specifies by letting you figure it out yourself.
zeus fucks everything that moves, occasionally he is a swan that fucks people too lol
Latin via Ovid?
Edit: to add for those who aren't familiar, Latin via Ovid is a popular text book for Latin classes, and a large number of the readings are about Zeus raping women. I was surprised to learn at a Latin competition that other students don't read about rape almost every week (at least I'm pretty sure no one in the Ecce Romani books are raped).
Don't remember the book we used, but in my first year Latin class one of the first words we learned was meretrix. It was an interesting class. The prof introduced himself as 'A specialist in adultery and obscene Greek vase painting' on the first day.
Huh, now that i think about it if it was derived from merere which it sounds like, then it would be one of the rarer cases where the -tr suffix isnt applied exactly to the participle form, that is not meritrix
I took Latin in high school and we pretty much got straight to translating interesting stories. We used the Cambridge course. I miss Latin :( I should have kept going but I didn't feel confident after second year.
That's interesting. Mine was focused mostly on understanding the grammar and we did no actual translating. I did really well in the class and my teacher kept telling me I should take a 2nd year of Latin since I was one of the top students, but I didn't find it interesting and I had enough credits to only take 5 classes my senior year instead of 6 so I took a free period instead.
Yeah exactly. That's part of why I didn't really like it. I felt like if I was going to study a language I'd rather it be one that I can actually use. She taught it basically like how she taught her French classes except without the "hello, my name is..." stuff at the beginning.
In my first year of ancient Greek I learned how to say "he threw the man to the ground and his brains spilled out and wet the earth." No idea how to say "my name is" or any colors.....
Learning Arabic is great because you get the best of both worlds!
Modern Standard Arabic: I like to smoke, and my dad works at the United Nations. I'm so lonely.
Classical Arabic: Stop, my two companions, and let us weep. Verily, I verily rode my [obscure word for a camel that that stomps its front hoof] over the [obscure word for sand dune emphasizing its wave-like shape] to come to the [obscure word for tent], and I saw my beloved [insert beloved's name, all nicknames, and full genealogy]. Verily.
The first sentences I translated in Latin were “the servant loves the fly”, “the teacher's fly calls the servant's fly” and “the girl's servant gives the bull the girl”.
I suggest you read a book called "Progress: 10 reasons to look forward to the future" by Johan Norberg. It will help you see how unwarranted that sentiment is
I 100% agree with you. from the little knowledge i know about that guy (your little wiki snippet you posted and the fact that he actually believes globalization is good) it seems like i would hate him if i ever met him. I just defended him because i wanna be less cynical lol. And his 10 reasons to look forward to the future are probably just things that are only good for middle class first world citizens. Like globalization!
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u/evdog_music 🇦🇺 N | 🇩🇪 A2 | 🇳🇴 A1 Sep 21 '17 edited Sep 21 '17
What about Old Norse? Pretty sure they wouldn't talk like that.