Here's to the aorist optative

[starlady]

Oh man, it's been years since I'd thought about the aorist optative. I'm such a bad lapsed Classicist. But here's a line from this week's Economist about the study of ancient Greek that I thought was too damn good not to share:

Intellectual elitism, as much as an appreciation of Aristophanes’s bawdy humour, is the glue that binds Hellenists together—stoked, in some schools, by a feeling of official neglect or hostility from peers.

The article concludes by saying that the real threat to the classics in general and Greek in particular is not modernity but globlization. I could see that. In the meantime, off to the grocery store.

Comments

[olewyvern.livejournal.com]

*toasts the aorist optative*

Yep, I pretty much agree with all of that, except that Aristophanes has to be humorous to others beyond Classicists. I mean, really. Frogs is just hilarious.

Of course, one of the 'impractical' things about Classics is that despite the fact that I 'know' three modern languages other than English, that knowledge only extends to reading philological junk. John asked a while back if I'd like to study in France or Germany (and work on those spoken languages). I said not really; I don't think that's the answer he's used to. I guess I'm just a homebody stuck in a globalizing world. Or something.

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Frogs is pretty good.

Your success at acquiring reading knowledge of French and German makes me hope that I too will be able to pick up at least one of them (probably French) with relative speed, as I will have to do for my future goals. Of course, I'd love to study abroad to work on my speaking abilities. :-)

[olewyvern.livejournal.com]

Dude, you speak Japanese. You can learn French over a weekend.

[spacevlad.livejournal.com]

German's not hard either, the grammar is similar to English and a lot of the vocab makes intuitive sense. The upper-level grammar stuff, like word genders, starts to get crazy, but the basics and advanced-level stuff is pretty easy.

[socair.livejournal.com]

German grammar is very similar to Greek, or at least I thought so in my semester of it...

[olewyvern.livejournal.com]

I agree, German grammar isn't too bad, but the vocab drives me nuts after a while. I think I spend enough time cramming Latin and Greek into my head that I don't care enough to remember all those German words. And I don't use it frequently enough to learn by osmosis. Whereas in French, 90% of the vocabulary is almost blindingly obvious.