History questions not worth their own thread

[Mathalamus]

you can read the exit signs.

you just like to annoy me don't you? i can read that just fine, now my question is: how does understanding Latin improve your english?

 

[Karalysia]

English is a bastardized language and it doesn't particularly help that much unless you care a lot about roots of words.

So it helps if you're Harry Potter and want to use mangled Latin to cast spells. Accio!

 

[Lord Baal]

you just like to annoy me don't you? i can read that just fine, now my question is: how does understanding Latin improve your english?

I can't speak of Latin specifically, but learning a second language always improves your ability to speak your own. You look at your own language from the point of view of an outsider and notice things about it you simply didn't as a native-speaker.

 

[ParkCungHee]

I can tell you German helps tremendously with your English. First because you become aware of minor grammatical rules, for example when you should use the word 'whom' in English, but most of all in spelling. I very rarely misplace an ei with an ie or vice versa anymore. Any word without a Germanic root is likely to have a Latin one.

Well keep in mind, I'm looking at these languages from a historical research, rather then practical use perspective. As for the use of Yiddish, I was actually thinking it might be a more useful as a generalist, as Yiddish Language Newspapers could be found all over Europe...hmmm...back to pondering it.

I know it really matters what I want to study, and that's why it's so hard to decide.

 

[Lord Baal]

The idea about Yiddish language newspapers is interesting, but I can tell you from experience that the contents of a Jewish newspaper won't differ that much from a non-Jewish one. Not even in their descriptions of Israel. At most they'll have a larger proportion of the paper devoted to Israel, the Middle East, and anti-Semitic violence than normal.

 

[ParkCungHee]

Well with the creation of Israel, Hebrew really took off as the language of the Jewish People. The heyday of Yiddish newspapers were 19th century to the 1930s.

 

[Lord Baal]

Well with the creation of Israel, Hebrew really took off as the language of the Jewish People. The heyday of Yiddish newspapers were 19th century to the 1930s.

I'm aware of that dude, I'm Jewish. Yiddish was pretty much subsumed by the more widely spoken and traidional Hebrew in Palestine, though it hung on for a bit until the Holocaust killed most people who spoke it.

 

[ParkCungHee]

I'm aware of that dude, I'm Jewish. Yiddish was pretty much subsumed by the more widely spoken and traidional Hebrew in Palestine, though it hung on for a bit until the Holocaust killed most people who spoke it.

Well yes, but you never assume that people know about a people just because they're descendant of it.

 

[Lord Baal]

Well yes, but you never assume that people know about a people just because they're descendant of it.

Point taken. And having never read the Torah, Talmud or any of the other major Jewish texts all the way through, I'm pretty much living proof of that fact.

 

[flyingchicken]

I read or dreamt or falsely remember something interesting somewhere, that ancient Greek athletes would raise a young calf for weight training; the calf getting heavier as time goes one, giving the athlete progression.

Was this true?

 

[nonconformist]

though i've never read a history of the third republic proper, i've read that its origins, and especially the interim government, could make a claim to being the first fascist state, hence why i used the term i did.

rofl .

 

[Karalysia]

My Marxist professor made the same claim actually, that the roots of fascim came from the Third Republic particularly the whole Dreyus Affair thing.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

That's what I read too. Sounds like someone somewhere conflated fascism and Antisemitism and we all got effed for it.

 

[nonconformist]

Try Cromwell.

The Third Republic had a gret number of communists and socialists working within it. Collaborators maybe?

 

[Louis XXIV]

Latin is immensely useful for anything pertaining to history and philosophy from 300 BC to AD 1600. It also improves your English.

You know, when I studied Latin, I spent so much time focusing on grammar that I didn't have time to study vocabulary. It was my knowledge of English words (borrowed from Latin) that helped me pass the class. In that sense, Latin didn't help at all with English for me.

 

[Lord Baal]

I read or dreamt or falsely remember something interesting somewhere, that ancient Greek athletes would raise a young calf for weight training; the calf getting heavier as time goes one, giving the athlete progression.

Was this true?

It's from the Hercules legend. It's not true, or if it is it was pretty damn rare.

I've actually read essays claiming that the 2nd Empire was a precursor to Fascism. Personally I think it's safe to say that Mussolini was pretty original. He took bits and pieces from elsewhere, but he made most of it up himself.

 

[LightSpectra]

exactly how does Latin improve English?

You get a greater sense of the logic between tenses and suffixes/prefixes.

 

[Dachs]

I read or dreamt or falsely remember something interesting somewhere, that ancient Greek athletes would raise a young calf for weight training; the calf getting heavier as time goes one, giving the athlete progression.

Was this true?

Either you like Ovid, or you like Louis Sachar

 

[innonimatu]

I've actually read essays claiming that the 2nd Empire was a precursor to Fascism. Personally I think it's safe to say that Mussolini was pretty original. He took bits and pieces from elsewhere, but he made most of it up himself.

He probably copied part of it from Gabriele D'Annunzio's little experience in Fiume. And that, in turn, was inspired in part on the constitutions of the late medieval italian city states - the idea of "corporatism" had its roots in that. In those times both corporatists and communists were reacting to the big economic and political changes; both advocated "community" solutions, but with the big difference that corporatism (and fascism in general) enshrined inequality between the different "corporate groups", while communism had a goal of eliminating any such inequalities. Despite that there were some very... odd collaborations during the post-WW1 years.

 

[IdiotsOpposite]

Why did the English Civil War stay so... indecisive? You're on a tiny island, you'd think they'd duke it out pretty quickly... but it lasted eight years, almost double our civil war, and we had a lot more area to kill each other with. Why did the English Civil War drag on so much?

I mean the 1640-1648 war, JTLYK.