Naturally all their derivative languages are incomprehensible across language families, but I'm wondering what the difficulty may have been for a speaker of one to learn the others... Naturally, I'd assume Greek and Latin would be easier with similar pronouns, declensions, etc. but I know nothing about Sanskrit. Thanks.
Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek
I studied both Latin (in high school) and Greek (at University) and I've tried also to learn some Sanskrit on my own.
>>Naturally, I'd assume Greek and Latin would be easier with similar pronouns, declensions, etc. but I know nothing about Sanskrit.
Surprisingly, similar pronouns, declensions, etc. I found mainly not between Latin an Greek but between Latin and Sanskrit (it seems that on average Latin is more archaic than Greek). But all of them have some easy to spot similarities.
It's a common conception that Greek is way harder than Latin but for me it was quite easy. At least word order is easier than in Latin. Greek is quite interesting and has some similarities with German. Latin vocabulary is hard to learn even for Romance speakers (like me) because each Romance language inherited no more than some 2000 basic Latin words.
As for difficulty I think Greek and Latin quite are similar.
Sanskrit is another case. It's very hard and when I say hard I mean HARD. I've studied Finnish and Hungarian and believe me they are easy compared to Sanskrit. First difficulties begin with devanagari which is tough, especially the ligatures. Then comes the phonology with vowels and consonants changing according certain rules (like, for example, srak-sraj). In fact vowel and consonant changes in Sanskrit are among the most annoying I've seen, surpassed only in some polysynthetic languages. But if you learn them well the declensions will be a little easier. Sanskrit has many declensions (a nightmare compared to Latin and Greek) inflected of course by gender (you need to learn many words together with their gender), number (dual is the most annoying - why to learn it?) and case (no comment). But I love Sanskrit and I still study it.
>>Naturally, I'd assume Greek and Latin would be easier with similar pronouns, declensions, etc. but I know nothing about Sanskrit.
Surprisingly, similar pronouns, declensions, etc. I found mainly not between Latin an Greek but between Latin and Sanskrit (it seems that on average Latin is more archaic than Greek). But all of them have some easy to spot similarities.
It's a common conception that Greek is way harder than Latin but for me it was quite easy. At least word order is easier than in Latin. Greek is quite interesting and has some similarities with German. Latin vocabulary is hard to learn even for Romance speakers (like me) because each Romance language inherited no more than some 2000 basic Latin words.
As for difficulty I think Greek and Latin quite are similar.
Sanskrit is another case. It's very hard and when I say hard I mean HARD. I've studied Finnish and Hungarian and believe me they are easy compared to Sanskrit. First difficulties begin with devanagari which is tough, especially the ligatures. Then comes the phonology with vowels and consonants changing according certain rules (like, for example, srak-sraj). In fact vowel and consonant changes in Sanskrit are among the most annoying I've seen, surpassed only in some polysynthetic languages. But if you learn them well the declensions will be a little easier. Sanskrit has many declensions (a nightmare compared to Latin and Greek) inflected of course by gender (you need to learn many words together with their gender), number (dual is the most annoying - why to learn it?) and case (no comment). But I love Sanskrit and I still study it.
"wondering what the difficulty may have been for a speaker of one to learn the others"
Very good question. Today it is certainly much easier to learn a foreign language with all the grammar books, language schools, audio/video tools etc. Also the modern languages are less complicated. In antiquity, how could a foreigner learn Latin/Greek/Sanskrit? And which time did it possibly take?
I read that Roman children learned Greek as a second language - how were they taught and what level did they reach?
Very good question. Today it is certainly much easier to learn a foreign language with all the grammar books, language schools, audio/video tools etc. Also the modern languages are less complicated. In antiquity, how could a foreigner learn Latin/Greek/Sanskrit? And which time did it possibly take?
I read that Roman children learned Greek as a second language - how were they taught and what level did they reach?
Didn't most of the Eastern Empire speak Greek? It seems like most Romans (who have left us records and, thus, had some means) possibly imported Greek speakers or sent their children there.