Quote:
Originally Posted by ApK
Yes, if knowledge of the idiom was lost, then full understanding could be impossible regardless of the language.
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And this is a big problem with the ancient languages.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ApK
But didn't the ancient Greeks have, just as we will hopefully have, grammar books, or books on rhetoric, or translations between contemporary languages, a la the Rosetta Stone, that survived to inform this sort of thing?
ApK
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We do use other places where the word was used, where the meaning was known. For example βαπτίζω from above was used by the clothing industry at that time to describe the action of submersing cloth in a dye. So we know the word means to submerse under liquid.
A lot of information was lost during the dark ages, and etc.
Future peoples will have easier time of it because we store and save SO much more information then previous generations. Heck the Bible alone is in 1000's of languages, one could reconstruct much of many of our languages just from that one book, never mind everything else we have.