How Did Ancient Languages Work? 

Of course I invented all languages. Everyone knows that

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

Fun fact: 55% of English vocabulary comes from Romance languages, although English is a Germanic language

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".

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

In the follow-up, you should cover Sanskrit. It had massive influence on the Indian sub-continent and South East Asia.

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.

2:48 That book isn't in Latin, it's a Slavic language, most probably Czech or Slovak

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!

Last time I was this early, these languages weren’t ancient.

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

2:06 C I V *Sid Meier has entered the chat*

I hope you do old chinese, japanese and korean sometime as well, this is pretty cool

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.

Put Old Church Slavonic in part 2

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.

'Fancy pants language of England '😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

I am all for getting another video on this topic, there are always more to look into, all interesting

Great job on the video! I would really like a part two.

Great video! I''d definiterly like to see a part 2!

Would love a follow up to this, great video :)

Great video. I'd love to watch another one on ancient languages.

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.

Yes! 2nd part please!!

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

Very interesting. Thanks

Very informative video

Great video thanks

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 think your video is REALLY superb, I loved it. Very well narrated and edited... keep up the outstanding work!

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.

Dope video

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 RU-vid pages.

Would definitely love to see a follow-up to this video.

We need more of these videos

I actually watch I Love Languages, and its one of my favourite channels! Thanks for talking about them :-D

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

Loved the video, keep it up!

Yes, as French is a romance language, our "fancy words" (such as "pork") technically came from Latin -- but indirectly. Almost all our "fancy words" (like "pork") instead came from French, when the French aristocracy ruled English some few thousand years later. The nobility viewed French as the refined tongue (and not Latin, which had already essentially been dead at that point, outside the Catholic church), and prefered it to English.

Great video as always. As for the follow up video, please cover the Arabic language and especially the old and classical Arabic.

Part 2 pls

So close to 100k! Let's go💯

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!

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

Would also be fun to see how each langauge (branch) spread accross each continent

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

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 love for you to cover the numerical systems of these languages

Please do a part 2. I have always been curious which languages did Cleopatra speak. Supposedly she spoke 7

2:49 Always a surprise when you're watching a video and can suddenly read the 'ancient' text in stock photos :D (Czech)

Nicely presented and well-researched as always! May I suggest you dive down into the different language families for followup videos?

2:47 - that book is most certainly NOT written in Latin, as it's quite obviously medieval Czech. :-)

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

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!

There is not such thing as Incan lenguage, it is called Quechua

If you ever do a part 2 you should check out norse and/or old prussian

8:44 "Sumerian and Basque ain't about checking all your little boxes!"

for a follow up, it would be interesting to hear you talk about Proto-Indo-European and other reconstructed ancient languages

Other languages you could talk about: Frankish, Hittite, Gothic, ...

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 :)

Please make videos like this

Love from London

Please cover some of the oldCeltic languages like Old Irish, Gaulish, Pictish, Celtiberian, etc in the sequel.

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

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!

You came, you saw, you conquered your knowledge of ancient languages

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.

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!

If you do a follow-up video, I would like to have the Berber (Amazigh) languages mentioned.

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.

2:47 why is there a Czech text when we are still talking about Latin?

Question : Why did you call every language by its name except Greek and Latin?

You should make a video about soft power

5:45 Such was life for Uncle CLAVDIVS.

Great video! Definitely Old Chinese, Mayan, Sanskrit, etc :)

English was formed in England. I would've never thought about that. Thank you for this knowledge. :D

How about doing videos on each family of languages, like Germanic, Latin, and Semitic?

You should make a sequel to this, maybe by talking about Sanskrit, Ancient Chinese, and ancient Mayan

Great video. I'd love to hear about basque in the next video. I always hear that it's weird and kind of baffles linghusits, but why exactly?

There is still a remote village where Coptic is spoken.

04:20 funny, aeolian, ionian, Lydian, those are all modes of the major scale (music theory)

a video about the dialects of arabic and foreign languages influence on them would be really interesting

What is the writing system in the thumbnail of the video?

More!

Please decipher Linear A and do the world's first video on the Minoan language.

@2:35 For some reason I've heard it as "VINCI" which turns out to be a plural noun form of it!

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)

Hi! Can you do a video on the Nahuatl language please? It is only spoken by 1.7 million people today which is more than Icelandic yet less teaching exist on it. I really want to learn it!

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.

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.

Last time when I was this early it was before Big Bang as much as I could remember 😂😂😜😜 Great video 😙😙

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

I love this video but do want to make a small criticism about your setup. Your microphone makes you sound muffled in a way. It's like you have a mask on and are talking through a mask. It doesn't sound as clear. I recommend looking into a new microphone at some point as your channel starts getting larger.

After one semester of Classical Greek, my prof thought we should read something by Plato, the Phaedo. I was having a lot of trouble, so I got an English translation (I'm American). I couldn't understand the English either :-) Before long we switched to Xenophon, The Anabasis. The bottom line: Greek is not as hard as you may have heard... it's a lot harder than that.

More historical linguistics pls 😍

Please put Old Church Slavonic in the next one. It's a fascinating and beautiful language

Ancient greek is way harder than modern greek and intelligibility depends on the text and the time it was written (for example a text from 100BC is much easier to understand than a text from 700BC)

Besides Greek (Linear A&B) - what is (are) the oldest written Indo-European language(s) and what writing systems did they use? Like the Hittite picture at ~09:28 looked crazy

Can you do old Norse?