To: caww
I am glad that your grandson is learning Latin. From there he will be able to learn almost every other Western European language except for German, Czech and Slovak.
“Catholics use it here where they are up to no good”.
Now that’s funny and sad simultaneously.
Fear not.
-Theo
684 posted on
12/18/2010 8:37:11 PM PST by
Teófilo
(Visit Vivificat! - http://www.vivificat.org - A Catholic Blog of News, Commentary and Opinion)
To: Teófilo; caww
Not really -- while he may know Latin, that does not mean that he will automatically understand even Romance languages. If he knows High Latin or Church Latin, then French and Rhaeto-Romanse will be easy, if he learns Vulgar Latin then Spanish and Italian and Romanian will be easy
Germanic languages such as German, English, Frisian, BAvarian, Schweizer-Deutsch, Dutch, Luxembourgian, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish can have a lot of loan-words from Latin.
Slavic languages (Polish, Russian, Serbian, Croatian, Bulgarian, Słowak,Czech, etc) and Baltic (Lithuanian, Latvian) can be a lot more difficult but have some similarities -- however, both are more closely related to Indo-Irani languages than Latin-Germanic.
And Hungarian and Finnish and Basque are of course not Indo-European at all -- Magyar in particular is incomprehensible and IMO the most difficult language in the world
1,083 posted on
12/20/2010 7:51:21 AM PST by
Cronos
(Et Verbum caro factum est et habitavit in nobis (W Szczebrzeszynie chrzaszcz brzmi w trzcinie))
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