"And Harry Potter is Ἅρειος Ποτήρ [Hareios Poter]- ἄρειος [areios] means "belonging to Ares", the war god - appropriate for the young warrior, and ποτήρ [poter] is a Greek word for "cup" or "goblet" - presumably the cup of wisdom from which Harry must quickly learn to drink deeply."
It doesn't look like Aryan was what the translator believes it means?
Actually, both are right, because the words are homonyms. "Hareios" is both the word we use for "aryan" and for "something of Ares". I actually thought "Aryan" was supposed to mean "sons of Ares", but apparently the root is indo-european.
I guess it's much better with his explanation, but "aryan glass" sounds amazingly funny in Greek. He basically nailed all the names, they're very well done, and all the explanations he gives for them are correct (the ones I've seen so far, anyway).
I wouldn't know :) It must be a weird task to try to translate something as bizarre as names from one language to another. Harry isn't exactly a distinctive name. It's rather common, like the name John. I wonder, why not pick a traditional Greek name for the protagonist rather than trying to find something that seems similar to the English name?
I think it's because an additional constraint. Translating it to just "John" or something is fine, but translating it to something that both sounds like the original and has meaning in the new language and is relevant to the book is just brilliant, and he did it for many of the names.
Harry, though, is a diminutive of Henry, which means something along the lines of "lord of the manor". Seems to me there'd be a Greek name beginning with "ari" that would be a closer fit. I'm not sure whether you could work in the aspiration, though; to say my Greek is weak would be understating the case significantly.
There was an article on HN in which the author was talking about the impressive translation of Asterix comics into English - not only was the translator able to make the English as pun-filled as the original French, but in most cases the translated puns were very similar in nature to the originals.
Unfortunately I can't recall enough about the article to search HN for it.
Are Greek surnames commonly profession words? I'm wondering how plausibly they could have just translated "potter" as the profession term, and whether a clay pot would be a ποτήρ or something else.
Off topic: I have been reading Harry Potter in French as my gateway to French literature. My love for French actually started with The Count of Monte Cristo which made want to learn French just so as to read the original Le Comte de Monte-Cristo.
Obviously, my French (starting from zero) a mere year or so later isn't good enough to read something like Alexandre Dumas' masterpiece, but I figured if I started with a book I've literally read dozens of times in English that I always know what the next sentence will say, well, that would be a good place to start.
Sure no harm in that. Also, some translations are really great, and you can sense the style of the original authors through them.
Yet, there is something about those particular books that just has to be said in their respective language.
Not because the message is lost, but a part of their magic will always be bound to the words used, I guess
Hemingway gets me there too, now that my English doesn't suck. Shakespeare is just really, really funny. Much ado about nothing is my favourite comedy.
Other plays like Hamlet, MacBeth, humble me. Same thing with Cervantes. Those guys pretty much redefined language and I don't think I have read enough to understand them. Maybe someday?
> The same could be said about La sombra del viento, 100 años de soledad or Neruda's poems in Spanish.
That's a surprising choice. Most Spanish readers would say that La sombra del viento is nowhere near an undisputable masterpiece such as 100 años de soledad, or even Neruda's poems (the literary stature of which is perhaps more contested).
In terms of use of language, it is just really that good. Neruda and Garcia Marquez are Nobel winners, and they are obviously better literally speaking. But the dude that wrote La sombre del viento knows how to use Spanish to describe beautiful sceneries and moments.
Also, keep in mind that this is my subjective view on things.
This is an amazing way to improve your knowledge of a foreign language. When I started reading French novels, I could mostly understand maybe 60% and guess another 30%. But after 10,000 pages, I was only running into unknown words every few pages, and my understanding of idioms was vastly better.
The same thing works for listening comprehension: Find a DVD box set of easy TV series, one where you can understand maybe 40% of the dialog, and just start watching. It's OK to use a good dub of a series you've already watched. Repeat this with, say, 5 series and you'll see an amazing boost in listening comprehension. TV series are usually better than films for this exercise, because they'll give you 50+ hours of mostly the same people speaking about a limited set of topics, which helps a lot in the beginning.
It seems like the brain is very good at upgrading partial comprehension to nearly complete comprehension. But the trick is getting to an enjoyable level of partial comprehension.
I liked to watch subtitled shows for this reason. I seem to pick up words as I go. Nouns seem to be the easiest to figure out, followed by adjectives and verbs, but this might vary depending on just how those words get morphed by the grammar in some languages.
There is a technique called "Listening-Reading" that's fairly well known within the language-learning community.
The idea is straight-forward:
Get a novel-length text in your target language, a high-quality recording of that text and a literal translation of the text in your native language. Alternate between reading the original text and the translation while simultaneously listening to the recording.
The method is supposedly fantastic, but it's incredibly difficult to gather suitable materials. While widely-translated books like Harry Potter seem ideal, the translations are not literal and occasionally the audiobooks do not match the texts exactly.
They have interlinear translations of lots of religious texts (and surely also audiobook recordings. But religious texts are not everyone's favourite reading material.
I've read the Count of Monte Cristo in English, which is basically my native language and I wouldn't be embarrassed to say that my skills aren't good enough to even read that book's English translation. It's not just the English, it's all the book's references to previous literature, ancient and otherwise, as well as French history.
Baguette does in fact mean rod, wand or baton - the bread related usage only dates from 1920 if Wikipedia is to be believed. Go to Google translate and put in “magic wand” and you’ll get “baguette magique” as the French equivalent, with “baguette” alone as an alternative.
I use comics , in the case of french Asterix or Tintin , as easier but you can go with more difficult ones, the french don't lack of good comics. And then i begin with books.
I love novels as a language learning tool, so much in fact that I've created a web-app with a reading interface to help people who enjoy learning in this way:
Hah! I used the first Harry Potter novel as an audiobook to help improve my ability to understand spoken French. There are phrases that I use even today, nearly 15 years later, that I learned from listening to that novel over and over and over again in my car. I think I must have played through it nearly 100 times.
As an aside, French literature pretty much sucks - don't kill yourself to get to the point where you can read Dumas or Zola in the original, it isn't really worth the effort (although I do have a bit of a soft spot for Maupassant, and French poetry is absolutely wonderful).
Harry Potter was the first book I read in English because I was familiar with it since I had read it a few times in French. It was a great learning experience.
"The Greeks ate a simple healthy diet, involving bread, vegetables and fruit - none which (except potatoes - γεώμηλα -in every guise) are available at Hogwarts."
Yeah, I'm not sure where this reference comes from. γεώμηλα is a Modern Greek word for potato (literally 'earth apple', presumably a calque from French pomme de terre). It might be a sensible way to refer to potatoes in Ancient Greek too, but it wouldn't be sensible to suggest they were eaten in Ancient Greece!
Were they, our history of circumnavigation would need a complete redraft, as last I checked Chiloe (from where potatoes come) is some distance from Greece.
Nor was their notion of a healthy diet quite that implied. The meals in Homer always or nearly always have meat, and the one I remember best--the suitor's lunch, shared by Odysseus after he thrashes the beggar--is goat stomachs stuffed with blood and fat.
ISO 639-2 defines "grc" for Ancient Greek. But I couldn't find a specification for HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE.
Going by the language tag best practices every program should accept 3 letter language codes if it also accepts 2 letter language codes. But with software, you never know.
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7231#section-3.1.3.1 says that Accept-Language uses a RFC 5646 language tag. That now says that the three-character ISO 639 codes are valid, although it looks like the two-character versions are preferred when available:
I learned Ancient Greek in school at the age of 15-17 years. However, I never used the language afterwards, so that description seems to be appropriate.
OMG, this is so cool. I have the translatio in linguam Latinam “Harrius Potter et Philosophi Lapis”, done by Peter Needham. If only my ancient Greek weren't that bad, I would enjoy this endlessly. The latin version is full of shrewd and imaginative adaptations of the good old lingua to our modern (and magical) times. If the greek version is anything like that (and how could it manage otherwise?), then this is apt to be highly addictive poison :) Wouldn't you like a chocolate frog?
Andrew Wilson (the translator) was my Latin teacher in school (20 years ago!), and I remember he made the subject quite fun. Having someone who is so passionate about their subject makes a huge difference as a student.
The effort and ingenuity he put into the translation is wonderful. I can't speak any Greek, so having the translations and logic laid out is a wonderful insight into translation as a process.
What a great idea. When we learned Greek, we ended up translating Homer... which would have been fine, had we not spent most of the previous year reading the Iliad and Odyssey in Latin.
Main reason I found myself ultimately disengaged with Greek was the subject material... that and the ultimately limited tolerance of a 9 year old's mind for endless declensions and beatings.
"IMPERFECT INDICATIVE, BOY! FUTURE PERFECT INDICATIVE INDEED! COME HERE. HOLD OUT YOUR HANDS."
In all languages, regular verb conjugations are taught with some example, typically the simplest regular verb you can think of. It's "cantar" in Spanish, "to sing", it's often "parler" in French, "to talk", "amare" and "vocare" (to love, to call) are common in Latin.
In Greek, it's "λύω" (I untie), because yes, that's how common regular verbs are.
Untie, eh? It was "loose" when we learned, but yeah, precisely that.
I wish that they'd involved us in it - explained the wonder of a language so ancient, so close to PIE, the tie of language to thought and semantic linking - but it was utilitarian. Latin was better as they intermingled it with roman history, but it was almost like they wanted Greek to be miserable. Our texts were printed in the 19th century - little leather bound books covered in notes on translation... In Latin. My school was such a time warp.
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[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 109 ms ] thread"And Harry Potter is Ἅρειος Ποτήρ [Hareios Poter]- ἄρειος [areios] means "belonging to Ares", the war god - appropriate for the young warrior, and ποτήρ [poter] is a Greek word for "cup" or "goblet" - presumably the cup of wisdom from which Harry must quickly learn to drink deeply."
It doesn't look like Aryan was what the translator believes it means?
I guess it's much better with his explanation, but "aryan glass" sounds amazingly funny in Greek. He basically nailed all the names, they're very well done, and all the explanations he gives for them are correct (the ones I've seen so far, anyway).
Unfortunately I can't recall enough about the article to search HN for it.
Obviously, my French (starting from zero) a mere year or so later isn't good enough to read something like Alexandre Dumas' masterpiece, but I figured if I started with a book I've literally read dozens of times in English that I always know what the next sentence will say, well, that would be a good place to start.
The same could be said about La sombra del viento, 100 años de soledad or Neruda's poems in Spanish.
In English, only Virginia Woolf inspires the same awe for language that these other books impregnated in me.
In some sense, these authors don't use words. They let words use them.
Sure do that. But no harm in reading these two books a few times before that, too.
Other plays like Hamlet, MacBeth, humble me. Same thing with Cervantes. Those guys pretty much redefined language and I don't think I have read enough to understand them. Maybe someday?
That's a surprising choice. Most Spanish readers would say that La sombra del viento is nowhere near an undisputable masterpiece such as 100 años de soledad, or even Neruda's poems (the literary stature of which is perhaps more contested).
In terms of use of language, it is just really that good. Neruda and Garcia Marquez are Nobel winners, and they are obviously better literally speaking. But the dude that wrote La sombre del viento knows how to use Spanish to describe beautiful sceneries and moments.
Also, keep in mind that this is my subjective view on things.
The same thing works for listening comprehension: Find a DVD box set of easy TV series, one where you can understand maybe 40% of the dialog, and just start watching. It's OK to use a good dub of a series you've already watched. Repeat this with, say, 5 series and you'll see an amazing boost in listening comprehension. TV series are usually better than films for this exercise, because they'll give you 50+ hours of mostly the same people speaking about a limited set of topics, which helps a lot in the beginning.
It seems like the brain is very good at upgrading partial comprehension to nearly complete comprehension. But the trick is getting to an enjoyable level of partial comprehension.
The idea is straight-forward:
Get a novel-length text in your target language, a high-quality recording of that text and a literal translation of the text in your native language. Alternate between reading the original text and the translation while simultaneously listening to the recording.
The method is supposedly fantastic, but it's incredibly difficult to gather suitable materials. While widely-translated books like Harry Potter seem ideal, the translations are not literal and occasionally the audiobooks do not match the texts exactly.
Further info:
http://learnanylanguage.wikia.com/wiki/Listening-Reading_Met...
http://users.bestweb.net/~siom/martian_mountain/!%20L-R%20th...
http://readlang.com
It allows you to:
1. upload an entire novel
2. translate the words and phrases you don't know
3. review them later with spaced-repetition flashcards containing the original context sentence
As an aside, French literature pretty much sucks - don't kill yourself to get to the point where you can read Dumas or Zola in the original, it isn't really worth the effort (although I do have a bit of a soft spot for Maupassant, and French poetry is absolutely wonderful).
Wait, Ancient Greeks didn't eat potatoes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_potato)!
This might be more relevant if HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE had a code for Ancient Greek.
Going by the language tag best practices every program should accept 3 letter language codes if it also accepts 2 letter language codes. But with software, you never know.
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5646#section-2.2.1
That said, it would be amusing to see how many servers and clients actually support this.
http://www.amazon.com/Harrius-Potter-Philosophi-Lapis-Philos...
This has been available for a while though.
The effort and ingenuity he put into the translation is wonderful. I can't speak any Greek, so having the translations and logic laid out is a wonderful insight into translation as a process.
Main reason I found myself ultimately disengaged with Greek was the subject material... that and the ultimately limited tolerance of a 9 year old's mind for endless declensions and beatings.
"IMPERFECT INDICATIVE, BOY! FUTURE PERFECT INDICATIVE INDEED! COME HERE. HOLD OUT YOUR HANDS."
Shudder.
In all languages, regular verb conjugations are taught with some example, typically the simplest regular verb you can think of. It's "cantar" in Spanish, "to sing", it's often "parler" in French, "to talk", "amare" and "vocare" (to love, to call) are common in Latin.
In Greek, it's "λύω" (I untie), because yes, that's how common regular verbs are.
I wish that they'd involved us in it - explained the wonder of a language so ancient, so close to PIE, the tie of language to thought and semantic linking - but it was utilitarian. Latin was better as they intermingled it with roman history, but it was almost like they wanted Greek to be miserable. Our texts were printed in the 19th century - little leather bound books covered in notes on translation... In Latin. My school was such a time warp.
And Quidditch is Icarusball. I love it.