A Few Languages among Friends

My friend and fellow weblogista Darwin has put out a request for information as regards suggestions for learning languages such as Greek, Arabic, Russian/Slavonic, and Persian. I started to write this as a comment for his entry, but the answer got sufficiently large that I decided to put it on my weblog, and to put a link on his comments page. Here is what came up:

Golly, gee, guyz: I kinda thought that what Darwin was asking for in the above entry was input as regards what textbooks to buy or obtain that would help him to learn Greek, Arabic, Russian and Persian, rather than a lot of gassing about peoples' favorite languages, numbers of genders, etc.

Silly me.

Of course, going on the assumption that that was what he was asking help with, I may have some answers.

Greek:

Why buy Pharr's Homeric Greek, when you can get it as a free pdf from www.textkit.com? In fact, why buy the Reading Course in Homeric Greek when you can get free pdf files of Seymour's Introduction to the Language and Verse of Homer, Minckwitz' Book Twelve of the Odyssey in Greek, Clapp's The Iliad, books XIX-XXIV, and Perrin's The Odyssey, books V-VIII? You can find those, and a whole lot more, here.

Just as an aside, you can get whole loads of free pdfs of Latin texts by going here.

One additional thing: I have noted that consummate classics scholars (of the caliber of Prof. Peter Green or Bishop Kallistos Ware) can shift effortlessly from quoting Classical Greek in the pronunciations handed down by Erasmus and by the 20th century Cambridge scholars, to speaking flawlessly in modern Greek. If you want to go the extra mile, a good (and free) course of Modern Greek can be found here. Basically, it is the three volume set put out by the Foreign Service Institute. www.fsi-language-courses.com has ripped the pdf and mp3 files of that, and a whole lot of other languages as well.

Of course, when you get your Latin and Greek tuned up and out of the body shop, and have driven it around the block a few times, you might want to take it out on the open road. To do that on the cheap, may I recommend visiting Mischa Hooker's Classics website? Prof. Hooker has done the immense kindness of putting links up to Google Books' vast collection of public domain works on Latin Literature, Greek Literature, Bible-Judaism-Christianity, and Classical Scholarship. With just a few clicks, you can have access to most if not all of the Latin and Greek literary corpus, as well as whole bunches of texts in Judeo-Christian scholarship. For me, the pick of the litter of the latter is most of Migne's Patrilogia Latine et Graecae. All free of charge.

Arabic:

You can find online one of the most simply presented and informative precis of the Arabic language here. In addition to providing access to a number of free online courses, it also provides links to a large number of textbooks which one can purchase. Of the bunch, I have found David Cowan's Introduction to Modern Literary Arabic to be the simplest, most straight forward, and most effective introduction to both the classical and the modern literary languages. If you work your way through that, you will have the foundation and structure for Classical and Modern Arabic. If you then go on to Wright's Grammar of the Arabic Language, there will be little to throw you as regards the written Arabic language, classical or modern.

An important point though, which www.al-bab.com above makes, is that Arabic is both a unified literary language, and a set of fourteen or so almost mutually unintelligible dialects. Of the bunch, the Egyptian, Levantine, and Saudi dialects can usually be understood by most Arab speakers, particularly the Hijazi dialect of Saudi Arabia. Hijazi has the advantage that it is the language spoken in Jidda, Mecca and Medina, is spoken by most Saudi government officials, and has many borrowings from the Egyptian, Jordanian and Levantine dialects.

Fortunately for you, FSI-Language-Courses has a free online FSI text and audio for Hijazi Arabic and for Levantine Arabic pronunciation, as well as texts on the differences between Levantine and Egyptian dialects, and between Egyptian and Western African Arabic dialects, together with a text on the Classical Arabic writing system. With the lot of them, you would have the foundation for speaking with most modern arab speakers. You might also want to listen to the various online Arabic radio and television programs, starting with the infamous www.al-jazeera.com (or however it actually appears when you google it). You can find all of the above-mentioned texts and sound files here.

Russian/Slavonic

I would like to point out that the two languages above are considerably different from one another, say like the difference between Old Norse and Modern English. Nonetheless, as at least one commenter to your entry has noted, there is a lot of interconnect between various Slavic languages. I'd suggest starting with Russian, and then going on to Slavonic.

Russian:

Alas, www.fsi-language-courses.com has only a textbook and no sound files yet for its Russian course. Pity, but they've been known to find and put them up if and when they've found free versions.

On the other hand, www.freelanguagecourses.com has a free text and sound files for the Princeton University Russian course. It may be found here.

Slavonic:

There used to be an awful lot more available for learning Slavonic on the internet. www.justin.zamora.com was particularly replete with online grammars and lexicons. Alas, no more. The nearest I can now find is this website. There are some "notes" which are almost worthy of being called a grammar. I'll keep looking, however, and if I find more, I shall certainly let you know.

Persian/Farsi:

I'm terribly afraid that you're on your own on this one. However, four out of five is not bad, you must admit.

I hope this will be of some help to you.