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.