Zompist Bboard Again

"There is literally never a logical reason to study Ancient Greek because if any nifty features from Ancient Greek were of value they would have made it into Modern Greek."

Seems silly. Language change is not a matter of improvement or disimprovement: modern Greek is neither better nor worse than ancient Greek, just different.

Plus, a perfectly "logical" reason to study Ancient Greek is in order to read classical and Christian Greek books.

As conlanger, it sounds totally normal and reasonable; a pretty mainstream opinion within the community -- though obviously subject to bitter quibbling, as all our traditions and norms are

zompist wrote: ↑Wed Oct 23, 2024 5:52 pm Seems silly. Language change is not a matter of improvement or disimprovement: modern Greek is neither better nor worse than ancient Greek, just different.

Plus, a perfectly "logical" reason to study Ancient Greek is in order to read classical and Christian Greek books.

Agreed.

Besides, can you "logically" say that something is "nifty" or not in the first place?

The thing is that to think of languages as "better" or "worse" is not logical in the first place.

HolyKnowing wrote: ↑Wed Oct 23, 2024 5:20 pm "There is literally never a logical reason to study Ancient Greek because if any nifty features from Ancient Greek were of value they would have made it into Modern Greek."

Well, there is the idea of language diachrony as evolution which optimizes fitness to some environment or for the purpose of communicatiom. So, I could see how someone could think that this makes sense. There was a recent volume though on "Language change for the worse" here: https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/292.

HolyKnowing wrote: ↑Wed Oct 23, 2024 5:20 pm "There is literally never a logical reason to study Ancient Greek because if any nifty features from Ancient Greek were of value they would have made it into Modern Greek."

It sounds like something a non-conlanger non-linguist non-historian would say.
It’s an opinion I disagree with. Not that I’m planning to study Ancient Greek!

(PS wtf is “literally” doing in that sentence?)

HolyKnowing wrote: ↑Wed Oct 23, 2024 5:20 pm "There is literally never a logical reason to study Ancient Greek because if any nifty features from Ancient Greek were of value they would have made it into Modern Greek."

It's utter bullfrogs. Ancient languages are worth studying because they help explain why the modern languages are the way they are, but also out of themselves. People are curious about them.

let's be more pragmatic: who among the conlangers has voluntarily studied ancient Greek...
(not me...)

I did, as an optional subject in le lycée and then college. Though it wasn't for conlanging purposes. There are some languages I got an interest in because my artistic tastes ran their way, but serious study for the purpose of communication/comprehension was not the point.

I took Ancient Greek to GCSE level - we had to pick additional classes to take in the third year (that's year 9 for state schools) and I'd enjoyed Latin in the first two, so I thought why not. We went from a class of twenty-seven at the start of the third year to nine who actually took the GCSE.

I never took a course in Ancient Greek, but I feel it is a beautiful language, much like Latin but more so. And Latin was the language I contracted the "language bug" from when I learned it in school. That elegant phonology! That colourful morphology! That flexible syntax! It has informed my conlang style ever since, and Old Albic owes a lot to it.

xxx wrote: ↑Sat Oct 26, 2024 1:48 am let's be more pragmatic: who among the conlangers has voluntarily studied ancient Greek...
(not me...)

I did, for conlanging purposes; I also tried to teach myself modern Greek. I really don't have anywhere like the level of discipline to study a language by myself -- also, that was years ago so I forgot most of it

The original question appears to be trolling -- my apologies if it isn't, but it's a bit ignorant. But Modern Greek certainly felt easier than Ancient Greek and kept a lot of the interesting features.
Koine Greeks felt like an interesting midway point -- much like Attic, but with some of the difficulties ironed out.

I often heard it the claim that the Greek of the Gospels is, in fact, pretty bad Greek and obviously non-native. I'd love to know enough Greek to be able to see that for myself!

Ares Land wrote: ↑Sat Oct 26, 2024 2:19 pm The original question appears to be trolling -- my apologies if it isn't, but it's a bit ignorant. But Modern Greek certainly felt easier than Ancient Greek and kept a lot of the interesting features.
Koine Greeks felt like an interesting midway point -- much like Attic, but with some of the difficulties ironed out.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'd say it's quite likely that for any feature of Ancient Greek that Modern Greek has lost, there are probably some languages, somewhere, that are still spoken today and that have a very similar feature. Though of course in order to test my idea, you first have to know some Ancient Greek.

Raphael wrote: ↑Sat Oct 26, 2024 2:25 pm Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'd say it's quite likely that for any feature of Ancient Greek that Modern Greek has lost, there are probably some languages, somewhere, that are still spoken today and that have a very similar feature. Though of course in order to test my idea, you first have to know some Ancient Greek.

Uh, yes. I forgot a lot about Ancient Greek, but I don't think it does anything that isn't attested somewhere else
One interesting thing about Greek is that it always coexisted with earlier registers; Modern Greek has almost always been in a state of diglossia.

The impression I got (but that may be wrong) is that Greek speakers don't see Ancient Greek as a different language (in the way I, as a French speaker, see Latin). You get the idea they're not entirely convinced they don't speak the same language as Plato

(Not unique to Greek either; it's true of Arabic too -- IME Moroccans will readily admit they struggled with Classical Arabic in school and don't really understand, say, Lebanese Arabic -- but they still feel it's all the same language.)

Raphael wrote: ↑Sat Oct 26, 2024 2:25 pm Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'd say it's quite likely that for any feature of Ancient Greek that Modern Greek has lost, there are probably some languages, somewhere, that are still spoken today and that have a very similar feature.

This is an odd way to think— it's not the case that the only reason to study a language is some unique feature it has. Plus, establishing uniqueness among five or ten thousand languages is not easy to do. (E.g. if you're looking at a particular syntactic transformation, the grammars of most languages are not detailed enough to say if they have it or not. Spoken as someone who, for numbers research, has consulted at least a thousand grammars.)

Still, ancient Greek does have a key feature for linguists: it's one of the three oldest attested Indo-European languages, along with Hittite and Vedic Sanskrit. If we didn't have it, we would know a lot less about IE.

zompist wrote: ↑Sat Oct 26, 2024 3:51 pm
This is an odd way to think— it's not the case that the only reason to study a language is some unique feature it has.

I was mainly trying to respond to the idea "If any feature has been lost, it must have been a bad feature," by pointing out that any feature that was lost somewhere was also probably preserved somewhere else.

xxx wrote: ↑Sat Oct 26, 2024 1:48 am let's be more pragmatic: who among the conlangers has voluntarily studied ancient Greek...
(not me...)

In addition to the folks who posted above, William Annis is a conlanger (and former co-host of the Conlangery podcast), who has spent a great deal of time studying Ancient Greek, and even created a website about it. I have seen other conlangers online who have studied it as well.

Raphael wrote: ↑Sat Oct 26, 2024 3:55 pm I was mainly trying to respond to the idea "If any feature has been lost, it must have been a bad feature," by pointing out that any feature that was lost somewhere was also probably preserved somewhere else.

Well, couple of issues there.

One is that near-unique features are rare. Which is true by definition, but matters in practical terms. E.g. WALS lists just four languages with OSV order: Kxoe, Nadëb, Tobati, Wik Ngathana. Three of these have under 400 speakers. This is the sort of thing that worries linguists— that languages will disappear before we learn all the interesting things about them.

The other is visibility. Thousands of languages are just barely documented. Many historical languages only exist as wordlists, which means even basic features like argument order are unknown. If you want to know (say) how the middle voice works, Ancient Greek is particularly important because of the depth of the evidence.

xxx wrote:who among the conlangers has voluntarily studied ancient Greek...

One can argue that the most influential conlanger ever, Zamenhof, should have used more Greek— e.g. "phone", as in telephone and phoneme, is more recognizable for 'speak' than paroli. But it's significant that he borrowed the word for 'and' (kaj) from Greek.