Hacker News Reader

Comment by wazoox | Hacker News Reader

I have some trouble understanding so much effort given to reading 8 different translations, and not giving the original text a try. Latin isn't so hard, really.

View on HN

Mhmm, sure thing pal.

I studied Latin for five years before I read the Golden Ass. It's not a straightforward text.

What do you mean when you say a natural language isn't that hard? Surely it depends on which languages you know already.

I suppose they know English, which carries many, many words with Latin roots. Sure it's easier if you know Italian, or Spanish or French. Anyway, reading the original text side by side with the translation gives you excellent insights on the meaning and structure, seeing how long a phrase is, what form it is, this sort of things.

Recognizing the meaning of individual Latin words does not allow you in general to understand the meaning of a phrase! None of the languages you mentioned have explicit case markings, and mostly rely on word order and prepositions to signal whether nouns are subjects/objects/indirect/etc objects. Latin is starkly not like that, don't you agree? Even if people are coming from a language background with explicit case markings (i.e. German) they're still going to have to know what the endings actually mean, and get used to a different case system.

Anyway it sounds like you're recognizing that you benefit from having a parallel translation into a language in which you are fluent in order to make sense of the meaning... Which is 100% the point of having a translation, of course.

Well if that's not a humblebrag then I don't know what is. Learning any natural language (especially an ancient, complicated, and dead one) takes tremendous effort. It's not some trivial thing to do like going to med school or climbing Mt. Everest or something.

You casually read literature written in Latin?

You don't need to casually read it. Reading it side by side with the translation, however, definitely gives you a much deeper comprehension of the original and its subtleties. I read bilingual texts (particularly latin, or poetry) as much as possible for languages I can't read casually.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com