Scary AustinI've helped fellow travelers in fluent French, okay Spanish, and even my sketchy Russian, but I will never be as badass as this person.
Erik Ableson@MaryAustinBooks There is badass and there is *badass*. Hat’s off to this guy
mbpaz@erik @MaryAustinBooks To all native speakers of germanic languages, I would like to humbly remind you that Latin is different to modern romance languages... but NOT HUGELY different.
If you can speak Portuguese, Italian etc you can recognize quite a bit of Latin (with some imagination)
@MaryAustinBooks @erik The alternative to reading outlandish phallic references is reading Caesar, whose prose is something like "Caesar is great. Caesar travels to Gallia. Caesar defeats his enemies. Caesar makes Rome great", so phallic references may be preferable.
MercutioI do know his De Bello Gallico and the sentences in it spanning half of a page -- I had Latin classes for more than three years.
I just wondered where you took your simple-minded examples from.
@Mercutio @MaryAustinBooks @erik Reminiscences from my single course of Latin, close to 40 years ago. OK, maybe exaggerating a bit, but you do get the point. We teenagers could translate paragraphs from Caesar after few months of classes - and I swear Latin was not among our top interests.
Neither among mine.
But it has proven useful later, at least for learning other Romanian languages, and for understanding technical terms.
Same for ancient Greek.
\u1f0a1@MaryAustinBooks @mbpaz @erik The case system is very similar to the German case system (as we're talking Germanic languages)
CrazyDogLadySezPEACE@mbpaz @erik @MaryAustinBooks Native English-speaker here, had Spanish through the 400-level in college in the 80’s, which should’ve made me fluent but I didn’t have anyone to speak it with so it’s mostly gone. I can still read it a bit, or well if I have time and a Spanish dictionary for unfamiliar vocabulary.
I’ve watched Polish shows on Netflix (thankfully not all tv is as dumbed-down as USA tv), in Polish with English subtitles, and I was pleased to learn how much Polish is very like Spanish, I assume bc of Latin and the Catholic Church.
(I know it is not a Germanic language. Just chiming in in the Latin-is-(almost)everywhere-if-you-know-how-to-look theme.)
@Heartofcoyote @erik @MaryAustinBooks Native Spanish speaker here - can confirm after some traveling to Poland that I cannot understand a single word of Polish 😂
As far as I can tell, Polish is fundamentally slavic, but with significant Latin and Germanic influence. OK, a word here and there may resemble something I know, but it's definitely very unlike romance languages.
@mbpaz @erik @MaryAustinBooks Huh. Maybe it had something to do with accents? I would literally hear what sounded like Spanish words and see from the caption text that yeah, I had heard what I thought. Maybe it wasn’t so much, though, and just made an outsized impression. 🤷🏻♀️
@Heartofcoyote @mbpaz @erik
I was surprised how many French loan words there are in Russian (until I thought about it for a hot second and then I wasn't surprised). I was expecting my French background to be no use at all for a Slavic language, but it helped more than I thought it would.
I was surprised how many French loan words there are in Russian (until I thought about it for a hot second and then I wasn't surprised). I was expecting my French background to be no use at all for a Slavic language, but it helped more than I thought it would.
@MaryAustinBooks @Heartofcoyote @erik modern and not so modern loan words do help a lot - once you hear "machina" and "technika" it's easy to associate the words with vehicles.
On the other hand, the very literal transcriptions may sometimes shock you - It took me a while to understand "hemenex" meant... ham and eggs.
(And yes, in Spanish we write "fútbol", I know)