I've heard that if you know Latin, that you basically know Italian, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, French, and Romanian. I want to know if there is truth to this statement.
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Anonymous2010-02-22 2:58
Learnt Latin for 6 years. Answer is no. You can sit down with a text and if you're lucky figure out a lot of the words in it or at least what they relate to - don't be expecting to be able to watch a movie without subtitles, won't happen.
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Anonymous2010-02-22 3:12
Thanks, now I know that there aren't any linguistic shortcuts like I hoped.
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Anonymous2010-02-22 4:29
And this is the answer to all those "I know language X, what is the easiest language for me to learn?" questions.
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Anonymous2010-02-22 5:28
There are a couple of linguistic shortcuts with learning Latin, I guess I should have been a little more explicit.
What I said about not just being able to watch movies without subtitles is true. However, the understanding of grammar and etymologies will help you with learning and memorising future languages to varying degrees. BUT this can be said of practically any language to a degree, including the more bizarre language isolates like Hungarian. There might be a hell of a lot less crossover in etymology that is helpful, but even still, knowing what an interrogative pronoun or the accusative case is a handy thing to know for every language.
Learning one language will help you to speed up the learning of others, but it won't teach you the others unless the differences are superficial (see: Serbian and Croatian). The differences between Latin and its child languages are not superficial.
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Anonymous2010-02-23 0:02
I have taken Latin in school for the last 3 years, and I suck at it. But I was decent at remembering vocab, so now that I'm studying Spanish words are very recognizable, but I still have to learn grammar and conjugations.
Latin will help with the verbal system and some vocabulary. As it's usually said, learning another Romance language will help much more than learning Latin.
>>8 with Finnish and Estonian as relatives it might as well be
LOL
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Anonymous2010-03-09 13:37
>>1
Like others said... you'll recognize in great extent the vocabulary. Not everything... Spanish and Portuguese borrowed Arabic words, Romanian Slav words, French Germanic words...
The Latin grammar however, in this point of view, is completely useless. ALL Romance languages buried Latin case system, even Romanian (that adoptated Greek's case system, simpler).
Personally, I like Latin because of my native lang (Portuguese). If your native lang is English, however, stick learning Old Saxon or today German.
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Anonymous2010-03-09 14:14
>>11
English has Latin words more than Germanic ones...
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Anonymous2010-03-09 16:18
I've heard that if you know Proto-Indo-European, that you basically know all Indo-European languages. I want to know if there is truth to this statement.