highlyeccentric and other medievalists... (also a rant. feel free to ignore that.)

[bedlamsbard]

Hmm, would it be smarter to start out taking Latin or taking Greek? I'm leaning towards Latin, just because I feel like Latin is more common during the MEMS period than Greek is, and also if I have to learn another alphabet I may shoot myself in the head, it will be faster, but the Odyssey is in Greek. And I love the Odyssey.

Also I am very behind on learning both, because I went to a public school that had two, count 'em two, languages (okay, three, but only two at a time), and then I took Japanese for three semesters, and of all the languages one apparently has to learn to be a medievalist or a classicist, surprisingly, Japanese is not one of them.

(Also, the next person who asks me why I didn't grow up speaking Japanese when my mother is a native speaker is getting punched in the face, I swear to God. One, that is none of your fucking business, two, it does not indicate a personal failing on my part or my parents' part, and three, there is nothing in the code of children of immigrant (and I don't even consider my mother an immigrant) Americans that says we have to be MOTHERFUCKING BILINGUAL GOD I HATE EVERYTHING RIGHT NOW.)

*cough* I am in a slightly (read: really) bad mood, and also about to go fail a midterm. (Administered by one of the professors who asked me that, hate people, so much. Actually, I think he was concentrating more on why I thought I could be a classicist if I hadn't started in on Latin and Greek ten years ago than why I couldn't speak Japanese, but still.)

Comments

[sporky_rat]

Latin. The lack of a new alphabet is good and it will give you a start.

(I was lucky enough that the Latin teacher in my high school had negotiated a 45-year contract about teaching Latin -if for one year, a class didn't have 12 people in it, they wouldn't have to offer Latin again ever while she was teaching... Joke was on the school admin, though. Her classes always had at least 12 people in it. Every. Single. Year. For. Forty-Five. Years.

She was awesome, too.

[bedlamsbard]

Oooh, that is awesome. My high school...did not offer Latin. We offered Spanish, German, and Japanese, after the German teacher quit, and then apparently the Japanese teacher got arrested this year, so they offered the job to my mother, who refused because she already has a full-time job. It was such a shock to come to Tulane and find that there were people who'd already been taking Latin for six years as freshmen.

[sporky_rat]

I can imagine. My brother went off to Ole Miss and found it incredibly frustrating that he was in a Japanese 101 class with people who had been taking it for 6+years.

[bedlamsbard]

Gah. When I took Japanese 203 last semester, there were a couple of freshmen who had been taking it for many many years, and thus had skipped 101 and 102. It was...infuriating.

[aella_irene]

My school offered Latin. Except the Latin teacher was having it off with the Drama teacher (while still saving herself for marriage) and when she wasn't her lessons consisted of reading the textbook, and watching Hercules and My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

This would be why I'm taking Beginners Latin in the autumn...

[bedlamsbard]

Heh. My German teacher, in high school, was not actually a very good German speaker, and I remember watching The Two Towers, in German, in about the first month of the first semester of the first year...and having to explain what was going on to the guy next to me, because he hadn't seen FotR or read the books.

I was explaining in English, of course.

If we end up both taking Latin at the same time...I think we're sharing each others' brains.

[aella_irene]

This is possible.

[bedlamsbard]

Since we are both studying the Byzantines, which is apparently not that common a field, and the incident where you went, "You should read this book!" and I went, "I bought that last week!" ... THE INTERNET BRAINSHARE.

[aella_irene]

*is sending you a psychic booklist.*

[bedlamsbard]

I don't think it's working...unless of course you wanted me to pick up "Byzantium: The Imperial Centuries AD 610-1071".

[aella_irene]

No... I was thinking of Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson...

[harpers_child]

i have to say i assume that you didn't learn Japanese as a child for the same reason my grandfather didn't learn French. the adults used it to gossip in and didn't want the kids to overhear.

[bedlamsbard]

That wasn't exactly it, though that's awesome. My dad was getting his MA in Teaching ESL, and I guess current research of the time was along the general lines of, if the kid grows in a two-language household, then instead of growing up bilingual, they'll grow up semi-lingual, not being able to speak either language proficiently. *flaps hands* Which sounds ridiculous, but I guess that's wht they were thinking...