Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2020 April 15

= April 15 =

Administration
I feel like a baby in here. Got sum essential information that I would like to get to someone that can do more with what I can do. --  12:50, 14 April 2020‎ (UTC)‎
 * Be more specific. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 13:15, 14 April 2020 (UTC)


 * Is it the formula to health, wealth and wisdom? It was already discovered ages ago by Ben Franklin, at least as far as the less fair sex is concerned. If it is something else, you can whisper it here into our ears. --Lambiam 16:34, 14 April 2020 (UTC)


 * Must we guess? Is it 42? — 107.15.157.44 (talk) 17:06, 14 April 2020 (UTC)


 * Please do not bite the newcomers. Alansplodge (talk) 11:54, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

It is possible to learn some language just by reading texts (that arent texts that explain how the language works)?
I have some hypothetical question: Imagine you know NOTHING about some language X (other than its name at your own language), would it be possible to learn the language just by reading texts made using this language (and that dont explain how the language works)?

More: You aren't able to use translator, ask anyone any info about the language or read a text you already read at any language you know translated to language X.177.92.128.176 (talk) 12:10, 15 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Obviously, if there's no relationship to anything already known (no possible "handle" to grab onto), then decipherment will not take place (see Byblos syllabary, Phaistos disk etc). However, some decipherments have taken place based on surprisingly small clues.  For example, in the case of the Ugaritic Cuneiform alphabet, it was noticed that what might be the word for "three" was spelled with a sequence of three symbols, where the first and third symbols were the same, and this suggested a Semitic language (where words for "three" generally have the first and third consonant the same, as in Hebrew shalosh etc).  In the case of Linear B, just about the only thing that most people agreed about it before it was deciphered was that it couldn't represent the Greek language, but a number of subtle clues were slowly assembled from word-ending patterns, probable placenames, the later Cypriot syllabary, and words found next to so-called "ideograms" (visually iconic symbols which did not directly write words), and eventually it became clear that Linear B did in fact write an early form of Greek... AnonMoos (talk) 12:31, 15 April 2020 (UTC)
 * See also this discussion from 2010, although that was about learning by listening rather than reading. --Viennese Waltz 13:22, 15 April 2020 (UTC)


 * Another illustrative example of how difficult this is is the Voynich manuscript. In spite of being a large corpus (much larger than the Byblos, Phaistos disk and Linear A corpora combined), and richly illustrated at that, it has thus far proved impervious to the strenuous efforts of armies of both enthusiastic amateurs and professional linguists and cryptologists. --Lambiam 19:52, 15 April 2020 (UTC)
 * To be fair, though, there's a considerable body of opinion that the reason the Voynich Manuscript is so difficult to recover meaning from is that it was never meaningful in the first place. --Trovatore (talk) 21:44, 15 April 2020 (UTC)
 * There have been various claims to have solved it, the most recent prominent one being that it's a coded form of Armenian. In the minds of such claimants at least, it's been solved. But since each proposed solution is different (as far as I know), at most one of them can be true. The academic consensus is that none of them is true.  --  Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  23:26, 15 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Perhaps the text has been cleverly constructed so that it is meaningful in several languages :). The string gezegende engel means "obstacle on the planet" in Turkish, and "blessed angel" in Dutch. This uses the same graphemes as in the orthographies of the two languages, but the Voynich manuscript allows for different, language-dependent interpretations of its graphemes, giving the constructor more freedom for interlingual punning. --Lambiam 07:18, 16 April 2020 (UTC)


 * In fiction, Tarzan is portrayed (in the original novel) as learning to read English (though not speak it) solely from looking at children's picture books, at a time when his only spoken language was that of the "apes" who raised him. (His first spoken human language was French.) This is generally not thought to be a realistic proposition in the real world, although the achievements of Helen Keller might give one pause.
 * However, another fictional work portrays a much more plausible scenario. In the 1957 short story 'Omnilingual' by H. Beam Piper, scientists and archeologists exploring the ruins of a dead civilization on Mars find many written texts but have no way of translating them, until they excavate a University building with a wall display of the Periodic Table which includes supplementary data for each element: this contains enough words and numbers with deducible meanings (since physics is universal) to enable a start on deciphering the written language.
 * One real-life effort of tangential relevance to the OP, to (potentially) convey meaning without direct interaction through diagrams and hopefully decipherable binary numbers, was the Pioneer plaques. The article Communication with extraterrestrial intelligence details various other similar schemes. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.203.117.240 (talk) 14:32, 16 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Tarzan still had a context to work with, though. If you see a picture of an ape with a caption that says "ape", you won't know how to pronounce it, but you can deduce that its the type of creature seen in the illustration. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 14:40, 16 April 2020 (UTC)

When I was in Riga in last June, I picked up the meaning of some common Latvian words by simply seeing them often enough in context, without understanding any Latvian beforehand. Of course, this amounts to only a couple of basic words. I'm still not able to have a conversation in Latvian. J I P &#124; Talk 22:34, 16 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Context is very important. And learning by ear is how kids do it. It comes naturally. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 02:56, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

intus in Vergil
Hello, in Vergil, Aeneid VII.192 s. ("Tali intus templo diuum patriaque Latinus / sede sedens Teucros ad sese in tecta uocauit [...]"), intus is used as an adverb or a preposition? Thank you! Galtzaile (talk) 20:46, 15 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Wiktionary lists it only as an adverb. Temerarius (talk) 22:22, 15 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Yes, intus is usually an adverb. Yet I read Latinus intus templo vocavit, so if I'm right it's clearly a preposition, which wouldn't even be this surprising, considering the further fate of the word. Still I'm doubtful as I wouldn't expect this use in Vergil. Galtzaile (talk) 22:50, 15 April 2020 (UTC)


 * Gaffiot lists it also as a preposition, but only as a Hellenism and governing the genitive case, seen in Apuleius' Metamorphoses 8.29 (intus aedium). Here we see, however, the ablative. In his 1883 commentary on the Aeneid, John Conington "resolved" the issue by declaring templo to stand for in templo, and interpreting intus as a pleonastic ornamentation. --Lambiam 06:49, 16 April 2020 (UTC)


 * Just be careful using Apuleius to explain Vergil, though. They weren't contemporary. Temerarius (talk) 03:24, 17 April 2020 (UTC)