Advice on Some Other Languages
This page is just for minor pointers on lesser studied languages that I don't
have enough to have on their own pages.
Gothic
Gothic is a dead language and the only thing existing in it is a partially
translated New Testament by Wulfila. It still is a very important language for
the study of Germanic and Indo-Europeanism because it is the only language of
"Eastern Germanic" so well attested. Eastern Germanic languages are distinct
from other Germanic languages in their lack of umlaut and some other
characteristically Germanic features, while Gothic still retains some earlier
Indo-European inflectional categories.
I mention Gothic only because one of the best ever language learning books I've
ever seen is written for it, and that is Thomas Lambdin's Introduction to the
Gothic Language. I actually took a Gothic class flippantly in graduate
school, but the book stuck out to me as being perfectly designed for the typical
target audience of Gothic in historical linguistics.
The book has very well designed lessons and activities, but I think greatest is
that in the back of the book, for each chapter there is a corresponding lesson
on the historical grammar of the content learned. It goes through what
conjugates of each word exist in English, Latin, Greek or Sanskrit or other
Indo-European languages and provided comparative paradigms of noun and verb
inflections. No word or concept is left without a real mneumonic device, not
a fake one fake from some joke about the word, but one tied into the actual
historical facts of the word.
I've said before that one of the reasons I never use things like Anki and
"spaced repetition software" is that the real way to retain information is to
understand how it fits within a wider web of information. In historical
linguistics, you have an ideal of this because the more you learn, the easier it
is to "remember:" remembering that the Gothic word for "field" is akrs is
incredibly simple when you realize it's the same as Latin ager, Greek
agrós, Sanskrit ájra and English acre.
Sanskrit
Sanskrit is the crown jewel of Indo-European languages and there are very few
resources for it. Luckily, there is Devavanipravesika by Goldman and
Sutherland, which again is a star in terms of language books.
I do recommend you have some of these abilities before attempting Sanskrit:
1. Some grammatical knowledge of a classical inflected Indo-European
language like Latin or Greek.
2. Knowledge of the Devanagari script which is used for Sanskrit
nowadays (also the script of Hindi and many other modern Indian languages).
Sandhi
In English, if you say the sentence "What are you up to?" it usually comes out
closer to "Whatchu up to?" This kind of phonological compression is a natural
and systematic process in all languages. What is interesting is that when
written language was younger, it was very common to express these phonological
changes in the writing system itself. It looks slangish in modern English to
write "whatchu," but it is more accurate after all.
Sanskrit overtly writes every alternation like this, including when words seem
to combine together into a single prosodic word. The term for this is
[Sandhi]{.dfn}.
The tricky thing that newbies to Sanskrit must understand is that knowing the
principles of Sandhi are the first priority in knowing Sanskrit because it's
impossible to even parse a basic sentence before you understand it.
Phonemically, many Sanskrit words end in an -s, but one of the first rules of
Sandhi is that words are not allowed to end in -s in most cases. So -s might
show up as -h or -o or something else depending on the phonetic context.
I say this because before you get excited about diving into Sanskrit, you have
to make sure you know the basics of Sandhi or it will all be a mess.
Classical/Koin Greek
Greek, much like Spanish, I never really sat down to learn. Greek is close
enough in form to Latin that I learned it from reading a biglottic Bible in both
languages. Its grammar presents very few concepts alien to Latin, the only big
hurdles probably being the novel uses of the article and if you want to learn
classical Greek like a pro, the pitch accent system.
What I mean is that I only read very little of Greek grammar before I could pick
up my Latin-Greek Bible and start reading the Greek with the aid of the
parallel Latin. This was also a nice experience because you can see the
similaries between the two languages, but also how the expressiveness of Greek
is sometimes lost in translation.
Greek, for example, has such a complete and elegant paradigm of participles that
many of them are unstranlatable in Latin. Latin has only passive perfect
participles and active present participles, while Greek has participles for the
whole spectrum of voice, tense and aspect. What that means is that Latin has to
talk around some common Greek expressions, often utilizing Latin deponents
(which can have perfect active participle) to get the meaning across.