Quote:
Originally Posted by Latinandgreek
Oh yes. I often find that portions of texts that I am reading in Greek or Latin are untranslatable. Holiness, piety and similar concepts are especially hard to translate. For example, Aeneas is often given the epithet pius, but the roman idea of piety differs greatly from a christian idea of piety.
This small digression on the difficulties of translation has managed to hammer home to me once again the importance of knowing the grammar of your mother tongue well before attempting to learn a foreign language, especially a dead one with complex morphology. Try teaching someone about declensions and cases if they don't know what an object is! (I have. It's not fun.)
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Yeah, I learned far more about English in my few years of learning Greek then in my lifetime of being a native English speaker. If you have not learned a long dead written language its hard to appreciate just how complex grammar/etc really is. At least that was the case for me.