Native Greek here - it depends on how ancient the Greek is . The average Greek can understand koine Greek - plato or Aristotle is very hard and you can understand the words but not what they are saying - homer - extremely hard and you might only understand a word here or there
I have some grasp of modern Greek (as a second language) and I find much of New Testament Greek (Koine) comprehensible. Older Greek - not really. I sometimes see books of Plato, Aristotle and so on with the Ancient Greek on the left page and a modern Greek translation on the opposite page.
Native Greek speaker here. The degree of intelligibility between Modern and Ancient Greek depends mostly on two factors. 1) The type of Ancient Greek. There are a lot of varieties of "Ancient Greek", depending on time and area. Homeric Greek, spoken in about 800 BC, is quite hard for a Greek speaker to understand without prior exposure. The majority of the vocabulary still exists in Modern Greek, but the meaning of certain words might have changed, along with some letters in them, making them unrecognisable. The overall grammar and syntactical structure however are significantly different, complicating understanding. Classical Greek, spoken in about 500 BC, is quite a bit more understandable. I would still say you need prior exposure to understand what's being said, but I think even without that a Greek speaker can pick up on certain words, and even understand some sentences. Here is where the type of dialect really matters though. The Attic dialect would be the easiest, as it was by far the largest contributor to the later stages of Greek. After than I would put the Ionian dialect, which is similar to Attic. Lastly the hardest would be Doric and Aeolian. They both systematically either change some vowels or some endings, making it much harder to correlate a word with its modern equivalent. Koine Greek, the language of the New Testament, spoken from about 300 BC to 300 AD, I believe is, with some difficulty, understandable by Greek speakers without any prior exposure. In fact, in certain aspects, I would say Koine Greek is closer to Modern Greek than to Classical Attic Greek. 2) The amount of prior exposure. This depends on the age and the education of the individual. Pretty much all Greek children are taught at least some Ancient Greek at school, so it's hard to find somebody who has absolutely zero exposure to the language. After that, people who choose to study the humanities have to be able to translate Classical Attic Greek texts to a certain degree in order to be accepted into Higher Education, so they generally have a better grasp than those who receive technical education or are taught the natural sciences. When it comes to age, older people are generally much better at understanding Ancient Greek. That's in part because until about 45 years ago, the official language of Greek was a mix of Modern and Ancient Greek, called "Katharevousa". It was taught in school extensively, and you needed to be able to speak it if you wanted to pursue higher education, politics, etc. Fun fact: Modern Greek was probably the farthest from Ancient Greek in the beginning of the 19th century (maybe not if you count foreign loans from English during the last decade). After that it was gradually modified, under the influence of Katharevousa, until the 70s, to be closer to its "roots".
Homeric Greek was never "spoken", it's an artificial language that combines older and newer forms and that became the standard language of epic poetry. You had to emulate Homer and his language if you wanted to write an epic poem, even centuries after his death (Apollonios of Rhodos and his Argonautica is an an example). Other than this, it's pretty much spot on.
But study shows that in everyday speech, words from germanic origin were used more than the latin origin. Latin origin words are mostly (edit: not very) sophisticated fancy words.
When you literally speak Mandarin , Cantonese, Taiwanese (a dialect of hokkein which is said to be a dialect of Chinese 🤣),you will know they are so different that they're languages instead of dialects.
From native Hebrew speaker- we can understand Biblical Hebrew almost perfectly, though word order can be different (e.g. for numbers), and a few words here and there might be obsolete in the modern language. It doesn't take much effort to understand, though.
Yes but Hebrew was reintroduced recently for Israel creation, and was taken directly from ancient text so it's just normal that you understand ancient Hebrew instead of Greek that was spoken from antiquities till now so it evolved from ancient to modern Greek.
Ancient Greek is the same language with modern Greek, just in a different time. The Greek vocabulary is very conservative in nature, and most ancient Greek words are still recognisable. Not only that, but most modern words (I've heard close to half) of modern Greek, had already been coined until the first century BC. That's why, a mature speaker of Greek can vaguely understand the content of an ancient inscription or speech, as long as the modern pronunciation is utilised (even if he has never been taught ancient Greek). The main problem is grammar. Though the Greek language is to a certain extent inflectional, with various verb forms and noun declentions, it doesn't come close to Ancient Greek, which had an extra grammatical: mood (optative) structure (infinitive) voice (featuring separate passive and medio-passive, as in, for when sb does something to you vs when you do something to yourself) case (dative) number (dual) participle (well modern Greek has that too but its used mostly as an adjective, +it has lost its declention system in the active voice) And many more things that I might not remember right now. Generally, in pretty much all aspects, ancient Greek has +1 weird grammatical feature that complicates the text, and especially given that most ancient philosophical texts are hard to understand by nature, a Greek speaker with no knowledge of the ancient grammar will fail to understand any of the context the words are used. So, he might be able to understand a good portion of the words, but not the text as a whole.
I am ethnically Assyrian and I am also able to speak, write and read the ancient language. I clicked the video right away when I saw our alphabet In your thumbnail :) Happy to be included!
@@______608 If he is I will keep Replying to all of his Comments/Videos, but I won't be Replying to what he's talking about, I will spam a bunch of Phrases from the Bible because North Korea banned Religion, and they can't touch me Because I'm Miles away from North Korea.
Ancient Hebrew is still fully intelligible to modern speakers, though the grammar is slightly different. I’d say it’s as close as Modern and Early Modern English.
@@davidsilber7260"A language which is no longer in everyday spoken use, such as Latin." -Oxford dictionary "A language that is no longer spoken by anyone as their main language" -Cambridge dictionary
More languages to consider (from a linguistics enthusiast, by no means an expert though.) Old Chinese Sanskrit Classical Nahuatl (of the Aztec Empire) Quechua (of the Inca Empire) Maya Tamil Hebrew Akkadian Tibetan Amharic One of the Khoisan languages (Taa?) Navajo Arrernte
4:05 well I am from Greece and my mum is a language teacher so she told me that every kid learns ancient Greek cz all of modern Greek decents from Ancient Greek. For exmple parathiro (window) means para+thira (next to + door) this is because windows used to be next to doors.
I’m Dutch and I used to live in Greece. I can tell you that my dad’s coworker learned ancient Greek in highschool and when he first arrived in Athens, he tried speaking ancient greek to folks on the street. Suffice it to say that nobody could understand him and thought he was speaking quite strange. Its kinda like speaking Old English in England I think
Old hebrew would be interesting since hebrew was brought back from the dead but it would be interesting to go over the ancient language and see how it stacks up
For the record, Hebrew wasn't technically "brought back from the dead" because it never truly went extinct. Modern Hebrew is similar enough to Ancient Hebrew that we can understand most texts with ease. It's not like English and Old English, where you can barely understand anything.
Is was brought back to live using Arabic as a base which is the most closes they could find plus Arabic also gave words from them to hebrew like (ahlan) meaning hello. In Hebrew it's (achlan)
As a Hebrew speaker and a Jewish, I can say that the language hasn't changed but more like the pronunciation of the words especially with ח and ע. and of course we use more slang words now.
Alexis Maiman correct me if I’m wrong but my community’s local rabbi said that the pronunciation of Modern Hebrew is what you’d expect if people with only a non-Semitic background (I.e European languages) tried speaking a Semitic language. He insisted that people who had a Semitic background (mainly Arabic speakers) had a more pure pronunciation of Hebrew.
@@humo89 weird yes I always though Arabic and Hebrew are very different and I think Jewish Arabs are very close to the original because they lived with the Arabic pronunciation and Arabic was also used for the making of the Hebrew used to day.
As a native Greek speaker most people can actually understand ancient Greek to a large extent but sometimes some words may have a slight difference in meaning making sentences a little harder to understand. We also get taught ancient Greek in school which I think is really cool. We even read from ancient scripts to practice
I am very interested in the pronunciation of Homeric Greek as well as the tonic system. How is AUTW av-to pronounced? I heard one Graecist say it was OW-to and just cannot see that. I am also interested in your pronunciation scheme for Middle Egyptian. I am guessing you already have videos on this so I will explore.
I attended a traditional Greek Orthodox funeral and the preists spoke ancient Greek (from about 2000 years ago not from 5000 years ago) and it was really interesting
Quechua is the ethnic Indigenous group. The Quechua people's language is actually named Runasimi, one of the most widely spoken Native American languages today. And yes, the Quechua people are the same people who are descended from the kingdom of four parts, Tawantinsuyu, aka the Inca Empire. 👍
The Incas spoke Pukina language among themselves, which comes from the Tiwanaku Empire in bolivia. Quechua was the lingua franca not their native language and it comes from the huari Empire in peru
JF DA JF DA Quechua wasn't really an ethnic group until modern day, quechua speakers can include huancas, chancas, Huaylas, collas, q'eros, etc. The Incas were a small minority in their empire, less than 100,000 individuals, but they were really big on setting themselves aside from the subject peoples. For instance annually they would make non-incas leave the capital city and have a special festival. The Inca empire was really ethnically and linguistically diverse and had lots of revolts even before the Spanish came, and when they did they recruited the subject peoples to rebel against Inca rule which is what allowed them to conquer the country Runasimi just means "people's language" which comes from its designation as Qhapaq runasimi under Inca rule ("great language of the people")
@Connor Murphy very well explained. Thanks for your attentive comment. Btw, you have a British name, so I don't you to be a local of quechuan speaking countries (maybe I'm wrong? But) are you a linguist? Do you know any ways I could learn any quechuan dialects online? If you don't know any about that then it's ok, thanks for the comment anyways. Have a good one.
@@RenegadeShepard69 Yep I'm a linguist and into native american history, though I don't know any quechua and have never tried to learn. My name is Irish but I'm American. www.memrise.com/courses/english/quechua/ vocabulario.com.mx/blog/quechua-listas-de-vocabulario/ You can also find quechua courses at many major universities across the US and western Europe and in a few in Peru. Also just google for "learn quechua" and look through what pops up, and search for resources in spanish if you speak it, they will be more numerous and more comprehensive. Good luck
My Ancient Greek teacher actually tried speaking a few ancient dialects on a trip to Greece for fun. She said she got a ton of weird looks, but was able to do basic stuff like ask for direction and similar things, if people were patient enough. If I remember correctly, she said she had more luck with Doric than Attic. My own experience from asking a Greek acquaintance to translate and show me a passage tells me that they may pick up some word and grammatical structure, but they won't actually understand it properly
Hey, man. Had the pleasure of finding your channel and became an instant fan of the many awesome videos just like this one. Definitely dig your passion for languages and their history.
I have a feeling many people have actually heard of the native names of Latin and Greek, but not the others, like I have. Never heard of how Sumerian is called natively nor Phoenician. However, he may have decided this for other reasons.
Because you're watching a video on RUclips, from a person who doesn't have a PHD in language or history. If it bothers you that much, you can watch another channel dedicated to language.
@@OpinionesDeJACCsOpinions Phoenician was called "Kana'anim" but that just means "Canaanite" or "Phoenician". They normally said "lashun kana'anim" (canaanite tongue) or "dabarim kana'anim" (canaanite speech).
I am Greek and most modern greeks do in fact know in escence many words and phrases from ancient Greek. However, that mainly applies to the older generation who had to learn the precursor of modern Greek or Kathareuousan Greek which was a lot closer to each other and was written and spoken officially even until the 90s. Most Greeks now can read ancient texts and undestand consepts but word to word translation is not possible for most. One example of Ancient Greek still being aplied today is the Greek word for barbershop called 'κομωτήριο' which comes from the ancient Greek word 'κομη' which means hair. One aspect of Ancient Greek that has been lost is the flow of speech as they used to have one more tense that was oftenly used and was aplied to most dialogue but was discarded over the centuries and Greek now has a more 'European' flow of speach if that makes any sence :)
I *ABSOLUTELY* love languages that are now extinct, like Anglo-Saxon and Celtic. If you could make more videos about old and extinct languages i'd be so happy!
Wow. Glad I found you. A quick look at tour channel history and I will be on a deep.dive tonight. Lots of great topics. Glad to add yet another great page to my collection. I recomend fire of learning voices of the past, invicta, kings and generals and so on. So many great history like RUclips pages.
English has changed so much in the past 100 years in the USA. I like to read books written before the 20th century because there is a beauty and flow of thought unlike what we use in the present.
1:16 jsut a small correction about the map. Istriot language is spoken in a very small part of the Istrian peninsula (Around the town of Galižana and Vodnjan)
If you’re gonna do another video, I highly recommend Hungarian Runes (Old Hungarian). It’s still used in many places in Hungary, though mostly written. Great video!
Hey, if you could, please also do a video simply on ancient scripts and how they developed: pictographic, cuneiform, hieroglyphic, Chinese, Mesopotamian, syllabaries, plus all those undecyphered scripts (including the Andean quipu), and how practically all alphabets started with Proto-Sinaitic 😁 Cheers!
Please cover *Tamil, the south Indian language surviving and thriving since at least 1000 BCE* in Tamilnadu. Tamils had trade relations with Greeks, Arabs in the west and with Malays, thais, Chinese and Koreans in the east.
great video, if your follow up could be a more in depth view of these languages with sentence examples kinda like how langfocus does his videos. that would be cool
Grover S. Krantz (1931-2002), a world-renowned American anthropologist and professor at Washington State University, in his work "The Geographical Formation of European Languages", recognizes Hungarian, which until now has been treated as a stepchild of Europe, as the founder of Europe's civilization. According to him, the u.n. "Indo-European languages" developed very late in Europe. That is why 30% of their vocabulary is not of "Indo-European" origin, and there are no "Indo-European" river names on the early maps of Europe. We are more interested in the following sentence: "...so the Greek language was formed in its current location in 6500 BC, and the Celtic language in Ireland in 3500 BC. The antiquity of the Hungarian language in the Carpathian Basin is similarly surprising; I find that its origins lead to the Mesolithic, preceding the Stone Age." Furthermore: "At least on one important point, the theory of people's migration is the opposite of the previous theorem. It is generally believed that the Hungarians of the Urals lived in the 9th century. century, they moved into the Carpathian basin from an eastern area. I find that all groups speaking the Uralic language spread from Hungary, in a much earlier age, in the opposite direction." Grover S. Krantz, The Geographical Formation of European Languages. (Ősi Örökségünk Alapítvány, Budapest, 2000) Original title and publisher of the work: Geographical Development of European Languages Peter Lang Publishing Inc. New York 1988. Translated by: Imre Kálmán
My parents both speak Aramaic as their families are from the Assyrian villages in northern Iraq. It’s weird though because my parents speak both Arabic and Aramaic in the house and I have no idea which words are Aramaic and which are Arabic. For example, I only found out a little over a month ago that heyou (the Aramaic word for come here) wasn’t an Arabic word.
Lmao you got me at 2:56. On a serious note though, Latin doesn't 'keep up' with modern terminology, it's just that modern terminology in English is highly Latin-based
One ancient languege (not so ancient, 7th century AD) that you didn't talk about is old Bulgarian, also known as old church slavonic. It's not suprisingly more similiar to modern Russian than in modern Bulgarian, even though the first written sentences were in Bulgaria. The reason for that is because of the Ottomans who later took over Bulgaria and that inpacted on the Bulgarian languege losing a lot of the sounds that were originally in old Bulgarian. One example for this is that in old Bulgarian ь was a letter used in the end of a word to signify a sound at the end, which actually exists in modern russian. Another example is ѫ, which was actually used til 1945. By the end of the 18th century though, only isolated dialects spoke with ѫ, while the common speech replaced ѫ with ъ (u like in *u*nder) or а. One example about still existing forms of old Bulgarian: ѣ. Today ѣ is used in speeches but is replaced with either е or я (ja/ya). I don't wanna go too much in depth, but basically sometimes ja transforms to e. In some dialects the e doesn't change so from hljab/hlyab it transforms to hleb.
Most kids in Greek grade school can read Byzantine Greek and understand it just fine, reading Ancient Greek past 100 BC is hard but you’ll get the point, and anything from 750-100 BC is very hard with it being like an English speaker kind of understanding some Spanish words due to similarities, anything further than 750 BC is like English speakers trying to read old English.
Native Greek here - it depends on how ancient the Greek is .
The average Greek can understand koine Greek - plato or Aristotle is very hard and you can understand the words but not what they are saying - homer - extremely hard and you might only understand a word here or there
I have some grasp of modern Greek (as a second language) and I find much of New Testament Greek (Koine) comprehensible. Older Greek - not really.
I sometimes see books of Plato, Aristotle and so on with the Ancient Greek on the left page and a modern Greek translation on the opposite page.
You look like Pewdiepie mixed with Scarce from far away.
So like an English speaker looking at Dutch or Frisian. Neato!
Kinda like classical english and olde english
So when you read Plato or Aristotle you can understand like "I am sad" as separate words but not as a coherent sentence?
Native Greek speaker here.
The degree of intelligibility between Modern and Ancient Greek depends mostly on two factors.
1) The type of Ancient Greek. There are a lot of varieties of "Ancient Greek", depending on time and area.
Homeric Greek, spoken in about 800 BC, is quite hard for a Greek speaker to understand without prior exposure. The majority of the vocabulary still exists in Modern Greek, but the meaning of certain words might have changed, along with some letters in them, making them unrecognisable. The overall grammar and syntactical structure however are significantly different, complicating understanding.
Classical Greek, spoken in about 500 BC, is quite a bit more understandable. I would still say you need prior exposure to understand what's being said, but I think even without that a Greek speaker can pick up on certain words, and even understand some sentences. Here is where the type of dialect really matters though. The Attic dialect would be the easiest, as it was by far the largest contributor to the later stages of Greek. After than I would put the Ionian dialect, which is similar to Attic. Lastly the hardest would be Doric and Aeolian. They both systematically either change some vowels or some endings, making it much harder to correlate a word with its modern equivalent.
Koine Greek, the language of the New Testament, spoken from about 300 BC to 300 AD, I believe is, with some difficulty, understandable by Greek speakers without any prior exposure. In fact, in certain aspects, I would say Koine Greek is closer to Modern Greek than to Classical Attic Greek.
2) The amount of prior exposure. This depends on the age and the education of the individual.
Pretty much all Greek children are taught at least some Ancient Greek at school, so it's hard to find somebody who has absolutely zero exposure to the language. After that, people who choose to study the humanities have to be able to translate Classical Attic Greek texts to a certain degree in order to be accepted into Higher Education, so they generally have a better grasp than those who receive technical education or are taught the natural sciences.
When it comes to age, older people are generally much better at understanding Ancient Greek. That's in part because until about 45 years ago, the official language of Greek was a mix of Modern and Ancient Greek, called "Katharevousa". It was taught in school extensively, and you needed to be able to speak it if you wanted to pursue higher education, politics, etc.
Fun fact:
Modern Greek was probably the farthest from Ancient Greek in the beginning of the 19th century (maybe not if you count foreign loans from English during the last decade). After that it was gradually modified, under the influence of Katharevousa, until the 70s, to be closer to its "roots".
Koine was rather simplified compared to earlier forms of Greek, perhaps because it was in wide use as a second language.
Foreign loans. Heh
That's interesting how they artificially Engineered modern greek to be closer to koine greek. Thanks for sharing!
Don't worry almost all English speakers can't read Old English.
Homeric Greek was never "spoken", it's an artificial language that combines older and newer forms and that became the standard language of epic poetry. You had to emulate Homer and his language if you wanted to write an epic poem, even centuries after his death (Apollonios of Rhodos and his Argonautica is an an example).
Other than this, it's pretty much spot on.
Fun fact: 55% of English vocabulary comes from Romance languages, although English is a Germanic language
Ooooooooooooooooooooooo
NOICE fact😁
Actually English are always messed up... (Like me)
English, literally one of the most fucked up languages in the world.
david constantin although malt of the grammar in English comes from old Germanic languages which is why it’s a Germanic language
But study shows that in everyday speech, words from germanic origin were used more than the latin origin. Latin origin words are mostly (edit: not very) sophisticated fancy words.
@@solehsolehsoleh then it seems like many English words are sophisticated
In the follow-up, you should cover Sanskrit. It had massive influence on the Indian sub-continent and South East Asia.
Definitely, Sanskrit and Tamil are massively important in that region’s history
Yeah
OOOOH, that would be very interesting
Fun Fact: The earliest forms of Sanskrit (Vedic Sanskrit) started development while the Aryans were still in the Central Asian steppes.
And Pali, the language of buddha
Me: it’s 11:31pm, I have school tomorrow, better go to sleep
Me: **sees this video**
Me: sleep was made up by the government to sell more beds
*+*
-1 social credit
School? What about lockdown.
@@zxera9702 educations important in some countries. Like the one I'm living in even though I only go once a week.
@@arselmahmood8247 They don't even give vacations anymore lol.
When you literally speak Mandarin , Cantonese, Taiwanese (a dialect of hokkein which is said to be a dialect of Chinese 🤣),you will know they are so different that they're languages instead of dialects.
Whats chinese? Mandarin or Cantonese? Like which language is more widespread in china?
@@emp437 Mandarin is the main dialect and what people think when they say Chinese.
对
Lol
@@emp437 Mandarin, Taiwanese is wide spread of course in Taiwan, Cantonese is wide spread in Hong Kong and Macau.
From native Hebrew speaker- we can understand Biblical Hebrew almost perfectly, though word order can be different (e.g. for numbers), and a few words here and there might be obsolete in the modern language. It doesn't take much effort to understand, though.
Yes but Hebrew was reintroduced recently for Israel creation, and was taken directly from ancient text so it's just normal that you understand ancient Hebrew instead of Greek that was spoken from antiquities till now so it evolved from ancient to modern Greek.
@Saudi King Volintine Ander of Arabia thanks for the add 😉
Ancient Greek is the same language with modern Greek, just in a different time. The Greek vocabulary is very conservative in nature, and most ancient Greek words are still recognisable. Not only that, but most modern words (I've heard close to half) of modern Greek, had already been coined until the first century BC. That's why, a mature speaker of Greek can vaguely understand the content of an ancient inscription or speech, as long as the modern pronunciation is utilised (even if he has never been taught ancient Greek). The main problem is grammar. Though the Greek language is to a certain extent inflectional, with various verb forms and noun declentions, it doesn't come close to Ancient Greek, which had an extra grammatical:
mood (optative)
structure (infinitive)
voice (featuring separate passive and medio-passive, as in, for when sb does something to you vs when you do something to yourself)
case (dative)
number (dual)
participle (well modern Greek has that too but its used mostly as an adjective, +it has lost its declention system in the active voice)
And many more things that I might not remember right now. Generally, in pretty much all aspects, ancient Greek has +1 weird grammatical feature that complicates the text, and especially given that most ancient philosophical texts are hard to understand by nature, a Greek speaker with no knowledge of the ancient grammar will fail to understand any of the context the words are used. So, he might be able to understand a good portion of the words, but not the text as a whole.
I am ethnically Assyrian and I am also able to speak, write and read the ancient language. I clicked the video right away when I saw our alphabet In your thumbnail :) Happy to be included!
Dan Oraham nice!
I am A-syrian who is interested in learning Aramaic
@@appleslover Damn...
2:48 That book isn't in Latin, it's a Slavic language, most probably Czech or Slovak
I think it's Czech
@@nico27 I spotted "dnes" which is Czech.
@@stevekaczynski3793 "Dnes" is also used in Bulgarian language but we don't use the latin script.
It's Czech, with older ortography
to transform it into modern Czech, do like this
g -> j
j -> í
au -> ou
w -> v
Slovaks use Dnes too but I agree, it's Czech
Of course I invented all languages. Everyone knows that
@Smoke Tree Rocket Man😂😂😂
So are your people eating yet
@@apoet7738 The cold.... Or the bullet?
What if this guy is the real Kim jong un?
@@______608 If he is I will keep Replying to all of his Comments/Videos, but I won't be Replying to what he's talking about, I will spam a bunch of Phrases from the Bible because North Korea banned Religion, and they can't touch me Because I'm Miles away from North Korea.
I hope you do old chinese, japanese and korean sometime as well, this is pretty cool
It would but imagine all the people who would complain because he pronounces it wrong
I trust that KhAnubis’ll be able to pronounce it at least kinda correctly
2:06 C I V
*Sid Meier has entered the chat*
Last time I was this early, these languages weren’t ancient.
Ok
Emp Muneeb ok
I Use Hacks ok
last time i was this early,basques were fighting this new thing called: indo-european
Please do a part 2. I have always been curious which languages did Cleopatra speak. Supposedly she spoke 7
Already made it! ruclips.net/video/FEj4ZrF2NNY/видео.html
Ancient Hebrew is still fully intelligible to modern speakers, though the grammar is slightly different. I’d say it’s as close as Modern and Early Modern English.
That's to be expected since Hebrew is a revived language and thus skipped almost two millennia of language evolution.
BurnBird Weirdly, L2 Hebrew speakers find Punic easier to understand than L1 Hebrew speakers.
@@BurnBird1 it wasn't really dead it was still used in prayers just not as an everyday language
Yep. I'd say besides a few biblical words here and there, it doesn't take a lot of effort for a Modern Hebrew speaker to understand
@@davidsilber7260"A language which is no longer in everyday spoken use, such as Latin." -Oxford dictionary
"A language that is no longer spoken by anyone as their main language" -Cambridge dictionary
More languages to consider (from a linguistics enthusiast, by no means an expert though.)
Old Chinese
Sanskrit
Classical Nahuatl (of the Aztec Empire)
Quechua (of the Inca Empire)
Maya
Tamil
Hebrew
Akkadian
Tibetan
Amharic
One of the Khoisan languages (Taa?)
Navajo
Arrernte
How about persian language
Use ge'ez not amharic, ge'ez is the ancient one
Mangue/chorotega language of Central America was probably the language of Mexico before náhuatl arrived
Old nordic/rune
Glad you included Tibetan. Doesn't get a lot of exposure
Put Old Church Slavonic in part 2
'Fancy pants language of England '😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
4:05 well I am from Greece and my mum is a language teacher so she told me that every kid learns ancient Greek cz all of modern Greek decents from Ancient Greek. For exmple parathiro (window) means para+thira (next to + door) this is because windows used to be next to doors.
*used to be next to doors
@2bpro 722x You know you can edit comments right?
@@supernt7852 thx I editied it and fixed the grammar mystake
@@nikosperakis7475 You know you can delete comments right?
Interesting that A historic language in modern day Iraq is theorised to have relations with the Sino-Tibetan language, Uralic languages or even Basque
I’m Dutch and I used to live in Greece. I can tell you that my dad’s coworker learned ancient Greek in highschool and when he first arrived in Athens, he tried speaking ancient greek to folks on the street. Suffice it to say that nobody could understand him and thought he was speaking quite strange. Its kinda like speaking Old English in England I think
Well he probably used the abhorring Erasmian pronunciation, no Greek uses that, we learn ancient Greek at school using the modern pronunciation
2:49 Always a surprise when you're watching a video and can suddenly read the 'ancient' text in stock photos :D (Czech)
I am all for getting another video on this topic, there are always more to look into, all interesting
Please cover some of the oldCeltic languages like Old Irish, Gaulish, Pictish, Celtiberian, etc in the sequel.
Old hebrew would be interesting since hebrew was brought back from the dead but it would be interesting to go over the ancient language and see how it stacks up
For the record, Hebrew wasn't technically "brought back from the dead" because it never truly went extinct.
Modern Hebrew is similar enough to Ancient Hebrew that we can understand most texts with ease. It's not like English and Old English, where you can barely understand anything.
Is was brought back to live using Arabic as a base which is the most closes they could find plus Arabic also gave words from them to hebrew like (ahlan) meaning hello. In Hebrew it's (achlan)
As a Hebrew speaker and a Jewish, I can say that the language hasn't changed but more like the pronunciation of the words especially with ח and ע. and of course we use more slang words now.
Alexis Maiman correct me if I’m wrong but my community’s local rabbi said that the pronunciation of Modern Hebrew is what you’d expect if people with only a non-Semitic background (I.e European languages) tried speaking a Semitic language. He insisted that people who had a Semitic background (mainly Arabic speakers) had a more pure pronunciation of Hebrew.
@@humo89 weird yes I always though Arabic and Hebrew are very different and I think Jewish Arabs are very close to the original because they lived with the Arabic pronunciation and Arabic was also used for the making of the Hebrew used to day.
As a native Greek speaker most people can actually understand ancient Greek to a large extent but sometimes some words may have a slight difference in meaning making sentences a little harder to understand. We also get taught ancient Greek in school which I think is really cool. We even read from ancient scripts to practice
Nicely presented and well-researched as always! May I suggest you dive down into the different language families for followup videos?
5:45 Such was life for Uncle CLAVDIVS.
Great video as always.
As for the follow up video, please cover the Arabic language and especially the old and classical Arabic.
Tamil with connections to Indus
I actually watch I Love Languages, and its one of my favourite channels! Thanks for talking about them :-D
I am very interested in the pronunciation of Homeric Greek as well as the tonic system. How is AUTW av-to pronounced? I heard one Graecist say it was OW-to and just cannot see that. I am also interested in your pronunciation scheme for Middle Egyptian. I am guessing you already have videos on this so I will explore.
8:44 "Sumerian and Basque ain't about checking all your little boxes!"
I think your video is REALLY superb, I loved it. Very well narrated and edited... keep up the outstanding work!
I attended a traditional Greek Orthodox funeral and the preists spoke ancient Greek (from about 2000 years ago not from 5000 years ago) and it was really interesting
There is not such thing as Incan lenguage, it is called Quechua
Quechua is the ethnic Indigenous group. The Quechua people's language is actually named Runasimi, one of the most widely spoken Native American languages today. And yes, the Quechua people are the same people who are descended from the kingdom of four parts, Tawantinsuyu, aka the Inca Empire. 👍
The Incas spoke Pukina language among themselves, which comes from the Tiwanaku Empire in bolivia. Quechua was the lingua franca not their native language and it comes from the huari Empire in peru
JF DA JF DA Quechua wasn't really an ethnic group until modern day, quechua speakers can include huancas, chancas, Huaylas, collas, q'eros, etc. The Incas were a small minority in their empire, less than 100,000 individuals, but they were really big on setting themselves aside from the subject peoples. For instance annually they would make non-incas leave the capital city and have a special festival. The Inca empire was really ethnically and linguistically diverse and had lots of revolts even before the Spanish came, and when they did they recruited the subject peoples to rebel against Inca rule which is what allowed them to conquer the country
Runasimi just means "people's language" which comes from its designation as Qhapaq runasimi under Inca rule ("great language of the people")
@Connor Murphy very well explained. Thanks for your attentive comment. Btw, you have a British name, so I don't you to be a local of quechuan speaking countries (maybe I'm wrong? But) are you a linguist? Do you know any ways I could learn any quechuan dialects online? If you don't know any about that then it's ok, thanks for the comment anyways. Have a good one.
@@RenegadeShepard69 Yep I'm a linguist and into native american history, though I don't know any quechua and have never tried to learn. My name is Irish but I'm American.
www.memrise.com/courses/english/quechua/
vocabulario.com.mx/blog/quechua-listas-de-vocabulario/
You can also find quechua courses at many major universities across the US and western Europe and in a few in Peru. Also just google for "learn quechua" and look through what pops up, and search for resources in spanish if you speak it, they will be more numerous and more comprehensive. Good luck
2:47 why is there a Czech text when we are still talking about Latin?
Would also be fun to see how each langauge (branch) spread accross each continent
2:47 - that book is most certainly NOT written in Latin, as it's quite obviously medieval Czech. :-)
Absolutely! I thought it might be Old Church Slavonic, but it's definitely not Latin!
My Ancient Greek teacher actually tried speaking a few ancient dialects on a trip to Greece for fun. She said she got a ton of weird looks, but was able to do basic stuff like ask for direction and similar things, if people were patient enough. If I remember correctly, she said she had more luck with Doric than Attic. My own experience from asking a Greek acquaintance to translate and show me a passage tells me that they may pick up some word and grammatical structure, but they won't actually understand it properly
Hey, man. Had the pleasure of finding your channel and became an instant fan of the many awesome videos just like this one. Definitely dig your passion for languages and their history.
You should make a sequel to this, maybe by talking about Sanskrit, Ancient Chinese, and ancient Mayan
Question : Why did you call every language by its name except Greek and Latin?
I have a feeling many people have actually heard of the native names of Latin and Greek, but not the others, like I have. Never heard of how Sumerian is called natively nor Phoenician. However, he may have decided this for other reasons.
Because you're watching a video on RUclips, from a person who doesn't have a PHD in language or history.
If it bothers you that much, you can watch another channel dedicated to language.
@@OpinionesDeJACCsOpinions Phoenician was called "Kana'anim" but that just means "Canaanite" or "Phoenician". They normally said "lashun kana'anim" (canaanite tongue) or "dabarim kana'anim" (canaanite speech).
Other languages you could talk about: Frankish, Hittite, Gothic, ...
Aztec, Mayan, Etc. There's A Lot Of Languages. Like Russian
Would love a follow up to this, great video :)
If you ever do a part 2 you should check out norse and/or old prussian
So close to 100k! Let's go💯
English was formed in England.
I would've never thought about that. Thank you for this knowledge. :D
It was formed about the same time as sarcasm.
I am Greek and most modern greeks do in fact know in escence many words and phrases from ancient Greek. However, that mainly applies to the older generation who had to learn the precursor of modern Greek or Kathareuousan Greek which was a lot closer to each other and was written and spoken officially even until the 90s. Most Greeks now can read ancient texts and undestand consepts but word to word translation is not possible for most. One example of Ancient Greek still being aplied today is the Greek word for barbershop called 'κομωτήριο' which comes from the ancient Greek word 'κομη' which means hair. One aspect of Ancient Greek that has been lost is the flow of speech as they used to have one more tense that was oftenly used and was aplied to most dialogue but was discarded over the centuries and Greek now has a more 'European' flow of speach if that makes any sence :)
Great video. I'd love to watch another one on ancient languages.
You came, you saw, you conquered your knowledge of ancient languages
Great job on the video! I would really like a part two.
I *ABSOLUTELY* love languages that are now extinct, like Anglo-Saxon and Celtic. If you could make more videos about old and extinct languages i'd be so happy!
Anglo Saxon evolved to English and Celtic languages are still around. An extinct language is like ancient Egypt
Wow. Glad I found you. A quick look at tour channel history and I will be on a deep.dive tonight. Lots of great topics. Glad to add yet another great page to my collection. I recomend fire of learning voices of the past, invicta, kings and generals and so on. So many great history like RUclips pages.
Amazing video! Old Khmer (Cambodian) is also one of the oldest language in Southeast Asia. That would be awesome to see as well. Thank you!
English has changed so much in the past 100 years in the USA. I like to read books written before the 20th century because there is a beauty and flow of thought unlike what we use in the present.
Great video! I''d definiterly like to see a part 2!
You should make a video about soft power
for a follow up, it would be interesting to hear you talk about Proto-Indo-European and other reconstructed ancient languages
1:16 jsut a small correction about the map. Istriot language is spoken in a very small part of the Istrian peninsula (Around the town of Galižana and Vodnjan)
Ah Yes. The language with less than 1000 speakers.
@@reds.victim1023 F in the chat for istriot
@@PeoplecallmeLucifer F
If you’re gonna do another video, I highly recommend Hungarian Runes (Old Hungarian). It’s still used in many places in Hungary, though mostly written. Great video!
Please decipher Linear A and do the world's first video on the Minoan language.
2:27 When you say his name like that is sounds like arabic name "قيصر" "Qaysar"
I love for you to cover the numerical systems of these languages
Hey, if you could, please also do a video simply on ancient scripts and how they developed: pictographic, cuneiform, hieroglyphic, Chinese, Mesopotamian, syllabaries, plus all those undecyphered scripts (including the Andean quipu), and how practically all alphabets started with Proto-Sinaitic 😁 Cheers!
Would definitely love to see a follow-up to this video.
2:36 esto? Isn't that supposed to be "est"? I've never seen "esto" in Latin..
Love from London
Every time Willie said Basque, he roast it like nobody.
@2:35 For some reason I've heard it as "VINCI" which turns out to be a plural noun form of it!
I'm shocked to see a video about ancient languages and not see one of the most important languages in the ancient world i.e. Persian in it
Would love a video on the untranslated languages. Just show what we do know about them and explain why we haven't translated it yet.
What is the writing system in the thumbnail of the video?
04:20 funny, aeolian, ionian, Lydian, those are all modes of the major scale (music theory)
There is still a remote village where Coptic is spoken.
a video about the dialects of arabic and foreign languages influence on them would be really interesting
I'm subscribed with the bell but RUclips didn't care to notify me that KhAnubis posted a video today.🙄
Please cover *Tamil, the south Indian language surviving and thriving since at least 1000 BCE* in Tamilnadu. Tamils had trade relations with Greeks, Arabs in the west and with Malays, thais, Chinese and Koreans in the east.
How about doing videos on each family of languages, like Germanic, Latin, and Semitic?
We need more of these videos
Last time when I was this early it was before Big Bang as much as I could remember 😂😂😜😜
Great video 😙😙
'Fancy pants language of England' 😂😂
the amount of emojis you used is unsettling
@@amedeolivio534 exactly
@@amedeolivio534 😂😂😂😂
@Biracial Boy I don't
Dope video
great video, if your follow up could be a more in depth view of these languages with sentence examples kinda like how langfocus does his videos. that would be cool
If you do a follow-up video, I would like to have the Berber (Amazigh) languages mentioned.
So the Phoenicians called themsleves Kana'nim, interesting. As it appaears to be a cognate with Canaan
Well they are from North Canaan/Lebanon.
@AutoDriver4000 Yup. Which is why Israel and Lebanon should be such great friends- because we're almost the same ethnic group!
Very informative video
Very interesting. Thanks
I was scared you weren't going to mention Phoenician.
hi, another fun fact: 2:50 isn't actually latin, but either old slavonic or old czech :-p
Yes! 2nd part please!!
Grover S. Krantz (1931-2002), a world-renowned American anthropologist and professor at Washington State University, in his work "The Geographical Formation of European Languages", recognizes Hungarian, which until now has been treated as a stepchild of Europe, as the founder of Europe's civilization.
According to him, the u.n. "Indo-European languages" developed very late in Europe. That is why 30% of their vocabulary is not of "Indo-European" origin, and there are no "Indo-European" river names on the early maps of Europe.
We are more interested in the following sentence: "...so the Greek language was formed in its current location in 6500 BC, and the Celtic language in Ireland in 3500 BC. The antiquity of the Hungarian language in the Carpathian Basin is similarly surprising; I find that its origins lead to the Mesolithic, preceding the Stone Age."
Furthermore: "At least on one important point, the theory of people's migration is the opposite of the previous theorem. It is generally believed that the Hungarians of the Urals lived in the 9th century. century, they moved into the Carpathian basin from an eastern area. I find that all groups speaking the Uralic language spread from Hungary, in a much earlier age, in the opposite direction."
Grover S. Krantz, The Geographical Formation of European Languages. (Ősi Örökségünk Alapítvány, Budapest, 2000) Original title and publisher of the work: Geographical Development of European Languages Peter Lang Publishing Inc. New York 1988. Translated by: Imre Kálmán
My parents both speak Aramaic as their families are from the Assyrian villages in northern Iraq. It’s weird though because my parents speak both Arabic and Aramaic in the house and I have no idea which words are Aramaic and which are Arabic. For example, I only found out a little over a month ago that heyou (the Aramaic word for come here) wasn’t an Arabic word.
Great video thanks
Please put Old Church Slavonic in the next one. It's a fascinating and beautiful language
Lmao you got me at 2:56. On a serious note though, Latin doesn't 'keep up' with modern terminology, it's just that modern terminology in English is highly Latin-based
Loved the video, keep it up!
You should make a video just about undeciphered languages.
One ancient languege (not so ancient, 7th century AD) that you didn't talk about is old Bulgarian, also known as old church slavonic. It's not suprisingly more similiar to modern Russian than in modern Bulgarian, even though the first written sentences were in Bulgaria. The reason for that is because of the Ottomans who later took over Bulgaria and that inpacted on the Bulgarian languege losing a lot of the sounds that were originally in old Bulgarian. One example for this is that in old Bulgarian ь was a letter used in the end of a word to signify a sound at the end, which actually exists in modern russian. Another example is ѫ, which was actually used til 1945. By the end of the 18th century though, only isolated dialects spoke with ѫ, while the common speech replaced ѫ with ъ (u like in *u*nder) or а. One example about still existing forms of old Bulgarian: ѣ. Today ѣ is used in speeches but is replaced with either е or я (ja/ya). I don't wanna go too much in depth, but basically sometimes ja transforms to e. In some dialects the e doesn't change so from hljab/hlyab it transforms to hleb.
Most kids in Greek grade school can read Byzantine Greek and understand it just fine, reading Ancient Greek past 100 BC is hard but you’ll get the point, and anything from 750-100 BC is very hard with it being like an English speaker kind of understanding some Spanish words due to similarities, anything further than 750 BC is like English speakers trying to read old English.