Kind of a thin article, but interesting. If anyone here is working on learning “dead” languages, what’re some tips and resources? I’ve been learning German and French, but there’s plenty of resources for those two since there’s a lot of media (plus news channels that are helpful). Would like to add Latin and Greek at some point, but unlike German and French there aren’t daily news podcasts to turn on to learn the pronunciation and vocabulary. Like the article implies, it does take some dedication.
While Nuntii Latini¹ shut down a couple of years ago, their back catalogue is still available². It won't put the new in news, but it is less stale than Latin ;)
Favorited, thanks for the link. I did find some good youtube channels tonight while researching this more. Listening to the pronunciation ... boy I have some work to do. I've gotten lazy with casual German pronunciation, but Latin is going to require way more practice.
The pronunciation is pretty good, actually. It is very close to the sound of Classical Latin (as far as we can tell), and not being a native speaker of a modern Indo-European language probably helps, too.
I know some Koine Greek and am just starting on Hebrew, both of which I wanted to learn to help me understand the Bible better (as a Christian). For Greek, I bought myself a textbook to get started and did a lot of vocabulary on Memrise. To keep up my interest, I started reading "real texts" as quickly as possible, using a bilingual edition of the New Testament. It's worked fairly well, I can read and understand ~80% of the NT, though my grasp of the grammar is still thin.
I'm using the same approach for Hebrew now, hope it works again. Latin is also on my learning list because of its importance in studying history, but I haven't seriously gotten to it yet.
Yeah learning Latin is motivated partially by my attending TLM (at least, before covid). Picking up some old Biblical translations is a good idea, thanks for the tip.
The Clementine Vulgate is a great example here. You can buy a copy with the Douay-Rheims translation alongside the Latin from Baronius Press, or read it online[0].
With the creation and proliferation of Modern Hebrew, there was a cost, though. Yiddish, Judeo-Arabic (the language Maimonides wrote a lot of literature in), and Ladino were victims of the centralization of Hebrew as the common language for Jews.
Yiddish is a German dialect, Judeo-Arabic an Arabic dialect, and Ladino is a Spanish dialect and are all dying/dead languages with attempted revival movements in their own right, but nothing with too much steam and this article lays out a potential reason why; aside from traditional, historic, or cultural reasons, there's no real societal reason for these languages in today's world.
I partially disagree with you, yes Ladino and Judeo-Arabic are dying, but that's not true for Yiddish.
Many Ultra-Orthodox communities in Israel and outside of it, are using it for their day to day activities, and reserve Hebrew for religious purposes only.
To add to this, "endangered" languages aren't necessarily those with few speakers, and languages with few speakers aren't necessarily endangered. What matters is how many children are being raised to speak the language; some languages are rare but are in no danger of dying out (at least not within the next generation) while others are more common but the speakers are disproportionately old and few children are learning it.
I don't know much about Yiddish but I believe it's in the former category. Yiddish was by far the most common language among Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust; there are still fewer than 10% as many Yiddish speakers in the world today as there were in 1930. But according to Wikipedia "the number of Yiddish-speakers is increasing in Hasidic communities."
Yiddish really isn't going anywhere and there are still plenty of children raised to speak it. So it is (perhaps surprisingly) in the latter category (only among (ultra?)orthodox Jews, but they're not endangered).
The Yiddish used today by the Haredim is fundamentally different from the Yiddish used before World War II. Yiddish used to be the language of a vibrant secular arts and culture scene: some fantastic literature, theatre plays and films, along with journalism on all kinds of issues and political debate from all sides of the spectrum. However, in Europe that world largely perished in the Holocaust or through emigration to Israel, and through assimilation in North America. So yes, today the Haredim continue to use Yiddish, but for a far more limited range of topics, because they are an austere religious movement that has intentionally limited the range of topics in their lives.
(As an apt parallel, albeit perhaps obscure to many here, saying Yiddish is not dead because the Haredim use it is like saying that Sogdian is not dead because it survives as Yaghnobi. But the Yaghnobi language used by some impoverished people in an isolated valley is a pale shadow of the cosmopolitan Sogdian language that was used before.)
The same applies to German, what is spoken today isn't much like the German spoken 150 years ago. English of today is close enough to English back to around 1500, but go back to 1400 and it starts to become a different language.
Talk to a linguist if you want the very messy and complex details I just summarized to the point of butchering the truth.
> The same applies to German, what is spoken today isn't much like the German spoken 150 years ago.
This is an amazing piece of information, even more incredible it is the fact the modern speakers can read Nietzsche with no problem at all, what a fantastic coincidence.
I mean, what native German speaker could even begin to understand this Schiller poem, it is 200! years old!! It could be very well be written in proto-Germanic:
> The same applies to German, what is spoken today isn't much like the German spoken 150 years ago.
How do you mean that? Of course there were different styles of speaking (especially in polite speech), but it‘s perfectly intelligible either way. In fact, even Martin Luther‘s German still sounds colloquial today (although the spelling was vastly different).
> English of today is close enough to English back to around 1500
That‘s a hundred years before Shakespeare. Who is decently understandable with some practice, but not what I would call „close“ to modern English.
As a native German speaker who also knows English (obviously), I'd rate the comprehensibility of the others as follows:
Swedish: understood just a few words
Dutch: understood some entire phrases
Yiddish: understood entire sentences, but there were still some words I couldn't recognize, which I guess might stem from Hebrew or Slavic languages. (But I did know about some of the more regular sound changes relative to German before, like Augen → Äugen.)
Importantly, there is a difference between comprehension and production. Just because you can mostly understand a language, doesn't mean that it isn't a language in its own right. Yiddish, as an example, has many syntactic differences from German, in addition to its differing vocabulary.
Scots is absolutely a different language from English, despite it being intelligible. I can't produce that speech, even with an accent. It has different rules and formations that My English just doesn't have.
Yes, it's true. There are unique words in Ladino that a Spanish speaker won't be able to identify, but my main takeaway is that modern Spanish and Ladino are mutually intelligible.
//With the creation and proliferation of Modern Hebrew, there was a cost, though
I grew up hearing my grandmother speaking Yiddish sometimes, my wife's dad is fluent and I love hearing Chabad rabbis break into it.
But.
The Yiddish and the other languages you listed are languages of the diaspora. They came to be because our people did not have a home and ended up speaking the dialects of their neighbors. It's incredibly empowering that there's now a country where our "real" (non-diaspor) language thrives.
Of course, there's a tremendous body of work written in those languages that is valuable and must be preserved but the fact that Hebrew is people's native language nowadays should only be celebrated.
>With the creation and proliferation of Modern Hebrew, there was a cost, though. Yiddish, Judeo-Arabic (the language Maimonides wrote a lot of literature in), and Ladino were victims of the centralization of Hebrew as the common language for Jews.
As if they would have survived in the 20th/21st century without the respective communities being isolated (as it was the case when they existed).
They'd be forgotten aside from token phrases and liturgical uses maybe, like Yiddish were in the US in a couple of generations...
I've just started learning biblical Hebrew, and I must say I find it a fascinating language - especially its alphabet (or aleph-bet, rather). I'm particulary intrigued by the development visible in the writing: how it started off with only consonants as one of the very early writing systems, and then had multiple phases of "retrofitting" vowels with various systems (first the mater lectionis, then the vowel symbols). And then, finally, modern Hebrew writing, which has dropped all of those vowels again (don't quite understand that bit yet :D ).
Modern Hebrew does have the same vowel diacritics used since the early middle ages, but they're used only in children's books as training wheels, in poetry (e.g. see Haaretz's poetry section: https://www.haaretz.co.il/literature/poetry), and occasionally to resolve ambiguities in literary prose. They're rarely used in, say, news reports, even to clarify foreign names, which results in common mispronunciations (worse, they even omit the diacritic that distinguishes B/V and P/F, which makes foreign names truly ambiguous -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagesh).
BTW, because modern Hebrew was revived from biblical Hebrew, biblical Hebrew is completely understandable to the modern Hebrew speaker, and sounds only a little archaic; something like how 18th century English sounds to a modern English speaker. Shakespeare's 16th century English is more foreign to the modern English speaker than biblical Hebrew is to the modern Hebrew speaker. English has continuously changed, while ancient Hebrew was transported to the late 19th century. Funnily, because the revivers of Hebrew preferred biblical Hebrew over, say, medieval Hebrew, medieval texts might sound more archaic to modern Hebrew speakers than more ancient ones.
The vowel symbols were never truly required for reading, as is the case for most semitic languages. They became common when Hebrew declined as a spoken language to teach people how to properly read the Torah. Since the revitalization of Hebrew as a spoken language this aid is required only for language learners. Also, the language has started to evolve again (that's what invariably happens with native speakers). Slowly of course, but if I may guess, any vowel symbols on existing texts will be of purely historical interest by the end of the century.
Wait until you get to the verb stems [1]! I found Hebrew somewhat mathematical in its overall grammatical structure. Often I could predict what the next grammer construct would unlike most other language courses I've taken. It was fun! Alas, I haven't had any Israeli`s around to practice modern hebrew.
It's interesting that as a native Hebrew reader, while I _know_ that it doesn't have vowels, it doesn't feel like it when I'm reading. It dsnt rd lk nglsh wth th vwls rmvd t ll. First of all, you've got י and ו denoting i/ee, o and u/oo sounds in most words, א and ה for a word ending with a or ah, etc. But I guess it's mostly just my brain being trained in it.
Few years ago I was traveling High Atlas mountains in Morocco and happen to spend week or so hanging out in Berber village and became friendly with interesting bunch of local people that meet every evening to talk in their local dialect.
Interestingly most of original language is now gone and consist of many Arabic words. I was very surprised that most common words (say Tuesday if my memory serve me right) were lost first, but many more complex words not. Also traditional script is now gone and was replaced with modern made up script.
-I somehow think it makes sense that the common words disappeared first - after all, those are the ones which pop up in conversation with the Arabic-speaking population every time, and as such are more likely to be substituted.
That makes sense. The common words are the one you hear most, so the influence of the dominant language is the strongest with those. But the words that are more complex you hear more often, and, being complex, the acquisition has more friction.
Because the only effective language for communicating with the past is the language that the people of the past used, if those languages die then their stories and knowledge dies with them
Languages are inseperable from the culture they evolve in. Humour, historical references, values, even entire philosophical concepts can be impossible to adequately translate, because they are often so closely tied to the way a culture’s language developed and is used. Because of that, you‘ll never truly know a culture until you know its language.
Additional to the comments you got - different languages are able to express different things. There's the classic example of Innuits having hundreds of synonyms for snow: I bet you can have a much more nuanced conversation about snow in that language than any other.
Have you ever heard the phrase "lost in translation" and thought about what it actually means?
It's more a matter of "different languages force you to express different things". E.g. English forces you to specify subject and tense, while Chinese makes specifying such things optional.
It's not just that. Some languages are richer than others in various dimensions. For example: English has a single "diminutive"-type suffix but Russian has a vast range to express various related suffixes that allow you to color nouns in a way I can't really convey in English.
This makes Russian more naturally suitable to (for example) poetry, but english for Technical writing
I was thinking a few weeks ago - if you told jews living in diaspora in europe as recently as early 1900s, that there will be a modern state with the same national language as the bible, they would think you are predicting a miracle. It's amazing.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 46.8 ms ] thread¹ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuntii_Latini
² https://areena.yle.fi/audio/1-1931339
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YG20eJE4WDo
I'm using the same approach for Hebrew now, hope it works again. Latin is also on my learning list because of its importance in studying history, but I haven't seriously gotten to it yet.
[0] http://catholicbible.online/side_by_side/NT/Jn
With the creation and proliferation of Modern Hebrew, there was a cost, though. Yiddish, Judeo-Arabic (the language Maimonides wrote a lot of literature in), and Ladino were victims of the centralization of Hebrew as the common language for Jews.
Yiddish is a German dialect, Judeo-Arabic an Arabic dialect, and Ladino is a Spanish dialect and are all dying/dead languages with attempted revival movements in their own right, but nothing with too much steam and this article lays out a potential reason why; aside from traditional, historic, or cultural reasons, there's no real societal reason for these languages in today's world.
I don't know much about Yiddish but I believe it's in the former category. Yiddish was by far the most common language among Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust; there are still fewer than 10% as many Yiddish speakers in the world today as there were in 1930. But according to Wikipedia "the number of Yiddish-speakers is increasing in Hasidic communities."
(As an apt parallel, albeit perhaps obscure to many here, saying Yiddish is not dead because the Haredim use it is like saying that Sogdian is not dead because it survives as Yaghnobi. But the Yaghnobi language used by some impoverished people in an isolated valley is a pale shadow of the cosmopolitan Sogdian language that was used before.)
Talk to a linguist if you want the very messy and complex details I just summarized to the point of butchering the truth.
This is an amazing piece of information, even more incredible it is the fact the modern speakers can read Nietzsche with no problem at all, what a fantastic coincidence.
I mean, what native German speaker could even begin to understand this Schiller poem, it is 200! years old!! It could be very well be written in proto-Germanic:
An den Frühling
Willkommen, schöner Jüngling!
Du Wonne der Natur!
Mit deinem Blumenkörbchen
Willkommen auf der Flur!
Denkst auch noch an mein Mädchen?
Ei, Lieber, denke doch!
Dort liebte mich das Mädchen
Und’s Mädchen liebt mich noch!
Willkommen, schöner Jüngling!
Du Wonne der Natur!
Mit deinem Blumenkörbchen
Willkommen auf der Flur!
In practice natives had trouble understanding each other if they traveled just a few villages over
How do you mean that? Of course there were different styles of speaking (especially in polite speech), but it‘s perfectly intelligible either way. In fact, even Martin Luther‘s German still sounds colloquial today (although the spelling was vastly different).
> English of today is close enough to English back to around 1500
That‘s a hundred years before Shakespeare. Who is decently understandable with some practice, but not what I would call „close“ to modern English.
To me, a fluent Spanish speaker, it sounds like a Spanish person with a foreign accent.
The pronunciation and grammar sounds a little bit off (with respect to Spanish), but otherwise I can understand this 100%.
As a native German speaker who also knows English (obviously), I'd rate the comprehensibility of the others as follows:
Swedish: understood just a few words
Dutch: understood some entire phrases
Yiddish: understood entire sentences, but there were still some words I couldn't recognize, which I guess might stem from Hebrew or Slavic languages. (But I did know about some of the more regular sound changes relative to German before, like Augen → Äugen.)
Scots is absolutely a different language from English, despite it being intelligible. I can't produce that speech, even with an accent. It has different rules and formations that My English just doesn't have.
I grew up hearing my grandmother speaking Yiddish sometimes, my wife's dad is fluent and I love hearing Chabad rabbis break into it.
But.
The Yiddish and the other languages you listed are languages of the diaspora. They came to be because our people did not have a home and ended up speaking the dialects of their neighbors. It's incredibly empowering that there's now a country where our "real" (non-diaspor) language thrives.
Of course, there's a tremendous body of work written in those languages that is valuable and must be preserved but the fact that Hebrew is people's native language nowadays should only be celebrated.
As if they would have survived in the 20th/21st century without the respective communities being isolated (as it was the case when they existed).
They'd be forgotten aside from token phrases and liturgical uses maybe, like Yiddish were in the US in a couple of generations...
BTW, because modern Hebrew was revived from biblical Hebrew, biblical Hebrew is completely understandable to the modern Hebrew speaker, and sounds only a little archaic; something like how 18th century English sounds to a modern English speaker. Shakespeare's 16th century English is more foreign to the modern English speaker than biblical Hebrew is to the modern Hebrew speaker. English has continuously changed, while ancient Hebrew was transported to the late 19th century. Funnily, because the revivers of Hebrew preferred biblical Hebrew over, say, medieval Hebrew, medieval texts might sound more archaic to modern Hebrew speakers than more ancient ones.
1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Hebrew_verbs#Stems
ALGOL as the first language in CS education.
Interestingly most of original language is now gone and consist of many Arabic words. I was very surprised that most common words (say Tuesday if my memory serve me right) were lost first, but many more complex words not. Also traditional script is now gone and was replaced with modern made up script.
(See also: https://twitter.com/BretDevereaux/status/1359574074326982664)
Have you ever heard the phrase "lost in translation" and thought about what it actually means?
This makes Russian more naturally suitable to (for example) poetry, but english for Technical writing
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/06/22/452551172...
(There is both a textual and an audio version on that page.)