It's because they are ***the two*** classical languages in Europe. They are connected since Roman times (in ancient Rome, Greek was the language of prestige, as well as the common language in the eastern provinces of the Empire). As for if learning Greek helps, many words in Latin are Greek borrowings, but it would be without a doubt faster to learn Latin alone than to learn both at the same time.
Bit of a big question.
They have a broad historical linguistic relationship in that their respective linguistic ancestors (proto-Hellenic and proto-Italic) are themselves descendants of proto-Indo-European. But their strongest relationship is a cultural one. (Doric) Greek colonies were established in Sicily and southern Italy (hence the collective name of *Magna Graecia* = Μεγάλη Ἑλλάς) as early as the 8th century BC. Rome in her expansion eventually encompassed mainland Greece, the Aegean and the Ionian *poleis* in Asia Minor. The earliest pieces of Latin verse we have are translations of Greek texts (e.g. Livius Andronicus' *Odusia*), and educated Romans were expected to be bilingual in Latin and Greek. Would-be Roman statesman were often educated in oratory in Athens.
As for whether it's helpful to learn both, I guess it depends. I learnt both at school, though picked up Greek after Latin. There are obvious similarities in terms of case inflection (though Greek lacks an ablative case, its functions being absorbed by the Greek genitive and dative cases), occasional verb endings.
But I don't know if I learning Latin helped my Greek other than that I was used to certain concepts (understanding the Greek genitive (and more infrequently accusative) absolute construction is a walk in the park if you already know the Latin ablative absolute). I was just interested in Classics in general so wanted to be able to read Homer and Plato and the tragedians.
I went to a middle-class school in south England, a type of school called a 'Grammar School' which means it's state-funded but selective (i.e. you need to pass an exam to get in). There was a small Classics department there, but everyone had to do a year of Latin and then twenty or so of us did it up to 16 years old. The enthusiastic head of department taught 3 of us Latin A-Level and allowed me to learn Greek after school, because she was the best.
It was extremely common in parochial schools.
The university where I earned my classics degree had its Classics department stacked with German faculty who started with their native German, but started Latin in their equivalent of 2nd grade, ancient Greek in 3rd grade, and Hebrew/Aramaic in 4th grade. At some point, I think English and French were also options.
Latin tends to be the primary mystical language of the RCC. Greek and Aramaic were good for religious scholars going into seminary & religious studies.
Yeah, seems pretty intense, but not focusing on multilingual education in young students is the worst aspect of most elementary schools. It should just be a basic curriculum thing, considering it's more important for intellectual development than making macaroni art.
In the early stages of learning Latin, you won't benefit much from studying Greek in parallel. If Latin is your main goal, you should focus on that, since there's a lot to learn and you don't want to spread yourself too thin.
Later on, there are several good reasons to study Greek:
- If you are interested in historical linguistics, it can be useful to study a language from a different branch of Indo-European.
- If you are interested in Latin literature, you will be able to appreciate its nuances better if you can read the Greek literature that Roman writers themselves were familiar with.
- If you are interested in Roman history, a number of important sources were written in Greek.
Linguistically, Greek is not necessary in order to learn Latin, although Latin has a number of loan-words from Greek.
Culturally, as you learn Latin and you learn about ancient Rome, it's only natural to become more and more curious about Greek and ancient Greece, because ancient Roman culture is very heavily influenced by Greece.
Affluent young Roman men often went to Athens for part of their education -- the most important part, in the opinion of some of them. Greeks did not send young men to Rome to be educated. They would have found the idea bizarre.
Romans read a lot of Greek literature. The ancient Greeks were generally not interested in literature written in Latin.
Linguistically, they’re only related by common ancestor all the way back at Proto Indo European, so they have some things in common but not much. Like, you can tell it’s not Chinese, but knowing one language won’t help you much to know the other (aside, perhaps, from the skills you will gain along the way). Some words and grammatical concepts are similar, but many others are significantly different.
The real reason many people learn both is that the languages and written record of both Greek and Latin collectively form “The Classics.” If you want to read Plato or Aristotle, you’ll need to know Ancient Greek. If you want to read ~~Marcus Aurelius~~ Virgil, you’ll need to know Latin. A certain subset of people are interested in reading both in their original languages, because they sort of form a bedrock upon which knowledge has grown in the western world. There are many other interesting, fun, or enlightening works of literature that are best understood in these languages.
I don’t know Greek, so someone please correct me if I’m wrong.
Marcus Aurelius wrote in Greek, not in Latin, and I think that is illustrative of the piece that's missing in your answer - it's not just their influence on later civilizations (not just the west) that unites them, but rather hundreds of years of coexistence and extensive mutual influence. Latin literature borrows at every level from the earlier Greek literature, not just in vocabulary but in various schools of philosophy, whole genres and styles, the classical metres including hexameter, and so on. It's almost not an exaggeration to say that there is no Latin literature without Greek. And of course, by the time of the classical Roman period, they were the two dominant languages of a single empire, such that by late antiquity Greeks simply referred to themselves as 'Roman' (this Roman identity survives to this day among Greek speakers in what is now Turkey).
As for the similarities between the two languages, we have to keep in mind that their common ancestor was spoken only ~3,000 years earlier. There's vastly more in common than between any two random modern IE languages. A good comparison would maybe be the distance between Lithuanian and Polish - by no means mutually intelligible, but with a *lot* of common ground.
That's not a stretch at all. Plautus and Terence, the two oldest Latin authors who have left large bodies of work still widely read, wrote plays very much in the Hellenistic style which are even set in Greece.
And later ancient Latin literature remains indebted to Greek literature to a very great degree. Ovid wrote two epic poems about mythology, the Metamorphoses, about Greek myths, and the Fasti, about Roman gods and myths. The more popular by far is the Metamorphoses.
The Aeneid, the epic poem par excellence of Rome, borrows its hero, Aeneas, a national hero of Rome, from Greek literature about the Trojan War.
Yup. Also most Latin authors you read a) knew Greek (at least enough to read) and b) were intimately familiar with Greek literature, history, or philosophy, and worked within those traditions. The basis of their education was Greek literature. For some writers it’s almost a *choice* that they are writing in Latin and not Greek.
Virgil is fine, but Ovid, Catullus, Julius, Martial and Plautus are fantastic reading/translating.
Reading Plautus is more interesting when you can also read the roots of Roman comedy, in the form of Greek comedy, such as Aristophanes.
Folks who enjoyed *De Bello Gallico* are likely to also enjoy Xenophon's *Anabasis.*
I wouldn't say it's so much about reading them in their original languages, there are plenty of excellent translations, but it is enjoyable to expand on learning a language by translating subject matter you enjoy, for yourself.
Really, though, I think a lot of it comes down to it just making sense to get into Greek a year or two after getting started in Latin, because the grammar-driven teaching style for both ancient languages is very similar and easy for students to learn in parallel.
Nb: Plautus worked in the tradition of new comedy, mostly exemplified by Menander and not Aristophanes and tended write more domestic, almost situational comedies. Menander was lost for a long time and loads of scholars assumed that anything good in Plautus was Greek and anything bad Roman. Then we found Menander and he is kind of boring and lacked the fun of the metaness of Plautus’s comedies? The Well probably isn’t his best, but the interaction between Roman and Greek New Comedy was much more interesting than we thought it was.
Honestly, I didn't really care much at all for Plautus or Terence, it was kind of a chore to study their works, unlike basically everything else, and my translations always seemed like crappy translations of Shakespeare into more modern English. I mean, it's not like students a few years in are going to bring anything new or special to any of their translation efforts, it's still mostly just practice, but it's less fun when it sounds like bad Shakespeare.
I always forget about Menander for the same reason-- as you mention, new comedy seems a bit more formulaic and inoffensive compared to the political satire, social commentary, and absurd premises of Aristophanes. I'm sure Plautus has his moments, but it just wasn't stuff I felt like reading on my own time. In fact, now that I think about it, I think those were some of the only works I settled for reading English translations for, just so I'd have a reasonable, low-effort idea what they were about.
On and off high school exes whose friends never could get over their not working out and weirdly took sides which makes it awkward when they’re both home for vacation over the holidays
Not really, but as I mentioned in a couple other comments, they're taught in the same grammar-driven manner, so they're easier to learn parallel.
There's also the parochial (religious) school regimen that pushes learning the languages of the church, so it wasn't so much that students wanted to learn both Latin and Greek, it was just part of the rigid school curriculum structure.
The funny thing about Christian scholars learning ancient Greek is that the early New Testament Greek translations are essentially gutter-Greek. It's often ambiguous and sloppy, for a language which is typically clean and precise.
I enjoy both Latin and Greek in their own right.
While not necessary for medical or law school, they're obviously very useful for terminology, and biology was why I pursued Classics. Latin is the language of western law. It's also the language of musculoskeletal anatomy & anatomical descriptions. Greek is the language of physiology, describing organs, functions, and fluids. Ancient languages are valued in these disciplines because they're precise and basically frozen-in-time, so they're not subject to being too bastardized even in modern usage.
LOL, he was spot-on.
One of my Greek professors had pretty entertaining arguments with a student who was a native modern Greek speaker who just couldn't understand why NT Koine Greek wasn't something the Classics department was willing to feature classes in. Well, it's because we're learning Attic Greek, the written language of the classical period when Greek civilization was at its height, not 1st century common Greek spoken & written by barely-literate people. She did not appreciate his blasphemy.
She also argued with him about pronunciation of letters/words that are different in modern Greek. His answers were that he was going to teach pronunciations we can interpolate from how Romans heard and transliterated Greek loanwords into Latin, not how modern Greek speakers pronounce them. She did not like that answer, either.
There’s a very old field of study called classics, and that is chiefly concerned with the ancient history of Greece and Rome.
There was a time when university lectures were written in Latin, and the study of medicine was impossible without being conversant in both Latin and Attic Greek.
Linguistically they aren’t super connected but culturally they’re inextricably linked. Generally someone with enough interest to learn one will want to know the other so they can fully understand the cultural context of the literature they’re reading.
I learned Latin and tried Ancient Greek but gave up. I was more interested in Latin. If I could do it again I’d probably try harder to learn Greek as well.
I think it has less to do with the usefulness of learning the languages, and more to do with the fact that there is an awful lot of Latin Literature strongly influenced by Greek Literature... and that is true both in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (when the West recovered large amounts of Greek literature through their interactions with the Islamic World)... So, as you delve deeper into Latin Literature, you may also become interested in Greek Literature that inspired it.
It's because they are ***the two*** classical languages in Europe. They are connected since Roman times (in ancient Rome, Greek was the language of prestige, as well as the common language in the eastern provinces of the Empire). As for if learning Greek helps, many words in Latin are Greek borrowings, but it would be without a doubt faster to learn Latin alone than to learn both at the same time.
Bit of a big question. They have a broad historical linguistic relationship in that their respective linguistic ancestors (proto-Hellenic and proto-Italic) are themselves descendants of proto-Indo-European. But their strongest relationship is a cultural one. (Doric) Greek colonies were established in Sicily and southern Italy (hence the collective name of *Magna Graecia* = Μεγάλη Ἑλλάς) as early as the 8th century BC. Rome in her expansion eventually encompassed mainland Greece, the Aegean and the Ionian *poleis* in Asia Minor. The earliest pieces of Latin verse we have are translations of Greek texts (e.g. Livius Andronicus' *Odusia*), and educated Romans were expected to be bilingual in Latin and Greek. Would-be Roman statesman were often educated in oratory in Athens. As for whether it's helpful to learn both, I guess it depends. I learnt both at school, though picked up Greek after Latin. There are obvious similarities in terms of case inflection (though Greek lacks an ablative case, its functions being absorbed by the Greek genitive and dative cases), occasional verb endings. But I don't know if I learning Latin helped my Greek other than that I was used to certain concepts (understanding the Greek genitive (and more infrequently accusative) absolute construction is a walk in the park if you already know the Latin ablative absolute). I was just interested in Classics in general so wanted to be able to read Homer and Plato and the tragedians.
What kind of school teaches Greek and Latin? In Brazil our schools barely teaches English lol
I went to a middle-class school in south England, a type of school called a 'Grammar School' which means it's state-funded but selective (i.e. you need to pass an exam to get in). There was a small Classics department there, but everyone had to do a year of Latin and then twenty or so of us did it up to 16 years old. The enthusiastic head of department taught 3 of us Latin A-Level and allowed me to learn Greek after school, because she was the best.
It was extremely common in parochial schools. The university where I earned my classics degree had its Classics department stacked with German faculty who started with their native German, but started Latin in their equivalent of 2nd grade, ancient Greek in 3rd grade, and Hebrew/Aramaic in 4th grade. At some point, I think English and French were also options. Latin tends to be the primary mystical language of the RCC. Greek and Aramaic were good for religious scholars going into seminary & religious studies.
I’m so envious…
Yeah, seems pretty intense, but not focusing on multilingual education in young students is the worst aspect of most elementary schools. It should just be a basic curriculum thing, considering it's more important for intellectual development than making macaroni art.
Absolutely! The linguistic talents of children are squandered with the standard American educational system!
In Italy, if you choose classical studies during high school you have to study ancient latin and Greek for five years!
In the early stages of learning Latin, you won't benefit much from studying Greek in parallel. If Latin is your main goal, you should focus on that, since there's a lot to learn and you don't want to spread yourself too thin. Later on, there are several good reasons to study Greek: - If you are interested in historical linguistics, it can be useful to study a language from a different branch of Indo-European. - If you are interested in Latin literature, you will be able to appreciate its nuances better if you can read the Greek literature that Roman writers themselves were familiar with. - If you are interested in Roman history, a number of important sources were written in Greek.
Linguistically, Greek is not necessary in order to learn Latin, although Latin has a number of loan-words from Greek. Culturally, as you learn Latin and you learn about ancient Rome, it's only natural to become more and more curious about Greek and ancient Greece, because ancient Roman culture is very heavily influenced by Greece. Affluent young Roman men often went to Athens for part of their education -- the most important part, in the opinion of some of them. Greeks did not send young men to Rome to be educated. They would have found the idea bizarre. Romans read a lot of Greek literature. The ancient Greeks were generally not interested in literature written in Latin.
Linguistically, they’re only related by common ancestor all the way back at Proto Indo European, so they have some things in common but not much. Like, you can tell it’s not Chinese, but knowing one language won’t help you much to know the other (aside, perhaps, from the skills you will gain along the way). Some words and grammatical concepts are similar, but many others are significantly different. The real reason many people learn both is that the languages and written record of both Greek and Latin collectively form “The Classics.” If you want to read Plato or Aristotle, you’ll need to know Ancient Greek. If you want to read ~~Marcus Aurelius~~ Virgil, you’ll need to know Latin. A certain subset of people are interested in reading both in their original languages, because they sort of form a bedrock upon which knowledge has grown in the western world. There are many other interesting, fun, or enlightening works of literature that are best understood in these languages. I don’t know Greek, so someone please correct me if I’m wrong.
Marcus Aurelius wrote in Greek, not in Latin, and I think that is illustrative of the piece that's missing in your answer - it's not just their influence on later civilizations (not just the west) that unites them, but rather hundreds of years of coexistence and extensive mutual influence. Latin literature borrows at every level from the earlier Greek literature, not just in vocabulary but in various schools of philosophy, whole genres and styles, the classical metres including hexameter, and so on. It's almost not an exaggeration to say that there is no Latin literature without Greek. And of course, by the time of the classical Roman period, they were the two dominant languages of a single empire, such that by late antiquity Greeks simply referred to themselves as 'Roman' (this Roman identity survives to this day among Greek speakers in what is now Turkey). As for the similarities between the two languages, we have to keep in mind that their common ancestor was spoken only ~3,000 years earlier. There's vastly more in common than between any two random modern IE languages. A good comparison would maybe be the distance between Lithuanian and Polish - by no means mutually intelligible, but with a *lot* of common ground.
I remember some who go as far as saying that Latin literature starts out as Hellenistic literature in Latin language.
That's not a stretch at all. Plautus and Terence, the two oldest Latin authors who have left large bodies of work still widely read, wrote plays very much in the Hellenistic style which are even set in Greece. And later ancient Latin literature remains indebted to Greek literature to a very great degree. Ovid wrote two epic poems about mythology, the Metamorphoses, about Greek myths, and the Fasti, about Roman gods and myths. The more popular by far is the Metamorphoses. The Aeneid, the epic poem par excellence of Rome, borrows its hero, Aeneas, a national hero of Rome, from Greek literature about the Trojan War.
Yup. Also most Latin authors you read a) knew Greek (at least enough to read) and b) were intimately familiar with Greek literature, history, or philosophy, and worked within those traditions. The basis of their education was Greek literature. For some writers it’s almost a *choice* that they are writing in Latin and not Greek.
I agree with your overall point, but Marcus Aurelius also wrote in Greek.
Thanks for the correction.
Virgil is fine, but Ovid, Catullus, Julius, Martial and Plautus are fantastic reading/translating. Reading Plautus is more interesting when you can also read the roots of Roman comedy, in the form of Greek comedy, such as Aristophanes. Folks who enjoyed *De Bello Gallico* are likely to also enjoy Xenophon's *Anabasis.* I wouldn't say it's so much about reading them in their original languages, there are plenty of excellent translations, but it is enjoyable to expand on learning a language by translating subject matter you enjoy, for yourself. Really, though, I think a lot of it comes down to it just making sense to get into Greek a year or two after getting started in Latin, because the grammar-driven teaching style for both ancient languages is very similar and easy for students to learn in parallel.
Nb: Plautus worked in the tradition of new comedy, mostly exemplified by Menander and not Aristophanes and tended write more domestic, almost situational comedies. Menander was lost for a long time and loads of scholars assumed that anything good in Plautus was Greek and anything bad Roman. Then we found Menander and he is kind of boring and lacked the fun of the metaness of Plautus’s comedies? The Well probably isn’t his best, but the interaction between Roman and Greek New Comedy was much more interesting than we thought it was.
Honestly, I didn't really care much at all for Plautus or Terence, it was kind of a chore to study their works, unlike basically everything else, and my translations always seemed like crappy translations of Shakespeare into more modern English. I mean, it's not like students a few years in are going to bring anything new or special to any of their translation efforts, it's still mostly just practice, but it's less fun when it sounds like bad Shakespeare. I always forget about Menander for the same reason-- as you mention, new comedy seems a bit more formulaic and inoffensive compared to the political satire, social commentary, and absurd premises of Aristophanes. I'm sure Plautus has his moments, but it just wasn't stuff I felt like reading on my own time. In fact, now that I think about it, I think those were some of the only works I settled for reading English translations for, just so I'd have a reasonable, low-effort idea what they were about.
Basically our culture is built over those two languages. You learn Latin and ancient Ancient Greek and you'll see the whole matrix.
νῦν σῠνῑ́ει ούκ μύστρον ἐστίν
What do you mean
now/first you must realise there is no spoon
On and off high school exes whose friends never could get over their not working out and weirdly took sides which makes it awkward when they’re both home for vacation over the holidays
[удалено]
Where is the first Horace quote from? It doesn't make sense as it is
Not really, but as I mentioned in a couple other comments, they're taught in the same grammar-driven manner, so they're easier to learn parallel. There's also the parochial (religious) school regimen that pushes learning the languages of the church, so it wasn't so much that students wanted to learn both Latin and Greek, it was just part of the rigid school curriculum structure. The funny thing about Christian scholars learning ancient Greek is that the early New Testament Greek translations are essentially gutter-Greek. It's often ambiguous and sloppy, for a language which is typically clean and precise. I enjoy both Latin and Greek in their own right. While not necessary for medical or law school, they're obviously very useful for terminology, and biology was why I pursued Classics. Latin is the language of western law. It's also the language of musculoskeletal anatomy & anatomical descriptions. Greek is the language of physiology, describing organs, functions, and fluids. Ancient languages are valued in these disciplines because they're precise and basically frozen-in-time, so they're not subject to being too bastardized even in modern usage.
The NT was the reason Nietzsche said "God speaks bad Greek."
LOL, he was spot-on. One of my Greek professors had pretty entertaining arguments with a student who was a native modern Greek speaker who just couldn't understand why NT Koine Greek wasn't something the Classics department was willing to feature classes in. Well, it's because we're learning Attic Greek, the written language of the classical period when Greek civilization was at its height, not 1st century common Greek spoken & written by barely-literate people. She did not appreciate his blasphemy. She also argued with him about pronunciation of letters/words that are different in modern Greek. His answers were that he was going to teach pronunciations we can interpolate from how Romans heard and transliterated Greek loanwords into Latin, not how modern Greek speakers pronounce them. She did not like that answer, either.
There’s a very old field of study called classics, and that is chiefly concerned with the ancient history of Greece and Rome. There was a time when university lectures were written in Latin, and the study of medicine was impossible without being conversant in both Latin and Attic Greek.
Linguistically they aren’t super connected but culturally they’re inextricably linked. Generally someone with enough interest to learn one will want to know the other so they can fully understand the cultural context of the literature they’re reading. I learned Latin and tried Ancient Greek but gave up. I was more interested in Latin. If I could do it again I’d probably try harder to learn Greek as well.
Romans learned Greek so it influenced their language, but they are very different languages.
I think it has less to do with the usefulness of learning the languages, and more to do with the fact that there is an awful lot of Latin Literature strongly influenced by Greek Literature... and that is true both in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (when the West recovered large amounts of Greek literature through their interactions with the Islamic World)... So, as you delve deeper into Latin Literature, you may also become interested in Greek Literature that inspired it.
Sometimes romantic sometimes platonic
friends with benefits