First, sorry Sora for hijacking your thread (I am fairly sure that as soon as we said the word "declension" you stopped reading).
Heh, yeah. Thread hijacking is common... it's happened to mine lots before. It's meaning that the thread has become more like a conversation. Hopefully it's helping him a bit with suggestions, though.
AH, well then. Purple Prose is actually a phrase coined back in Roman times and it referred to individuals who would sew patches of purple fabric (purple being an expensive and noble color) onto their clothing in order to appear grander than they were (sort of like people today who put sunroof decals on their cars, or wear rolmex watches). It was used as an analogy used to describe writers who insert overly fancy words and excessive such things in order to appear more skilled than they were. It isn't that fancy words and eloquent phrasing is bad, it is when they are seemingly used as patches on otherwise mundane work that the term then applies.
Ah, yes. Now I know what you mean. Understandably criminal.
When in doubt, go with "a." Sometimes "an" is proper but most people don't know that and even fewer will notice. Generally, if the "h" is noticeable, use an "a." If it isn't very noticeable, use an "an." (for anyone else reading and not understanding, most words that start with an H and come from the Greek can be preceded by either an "a" or an "an" because H wasn't a real letter in Greek but it is in English, thus resulting in a conflict of proper grammatical rules).
Gotchya, thanks.
I tend to agree. But then again, I am fascinated by the history of calendars (and the dating methods implied there in) and I wrote a 30 page research paper on the margin variations in the Guttenberg Bible (it is also known as the 42-Line Bible... except about 14ish vellum copies have a handful of pages that are only 40 lines. I wrote the paper on why there was that change). So perhaps I am not the best judge of such things.
Heh, cool. What was the thesis statement?
True. But then again, the only reason "island" has an "s" in it is because of grammarian elitism. Some nut thought the original "iland" was a Latin word, which would have necessitated an "s." So in an attempt to make "iland" more correct, they added an "s," making it less correct. But alas, it has entered the language. If enough people believe something is true in a language, it is true (even if it is really wrong). Enough people believe you shouldn't start a sentence with "but" so that generally one shouldn't. However, rules can be broken (not that I would ever do such a thing... no, not me). Also, ye was never a word, no matter how many people believe it was. That shouldn’t be a y but a thorn (a letter no longer in English that looks like a y but had a voiced th sound). Just an aside.
Yeah, that's something that always bugs me. 'Ye olde shoppe'. Always funny that people doin't realise you say that like, well, 'the'. But yeah, there are those strange grammar things that pop up now and again. Meh, I guess it's just how language develops.
Depends on how you want to define "learn." Technically, I learned English (native language), Spanish, German, ancient Greek, and ancient Anglo-Saxon (woot for reading Beowulf in the original language!), with a self-taught smattering of Latin (which I generally don't count). I only remember a few random words of Spanish and never was at a conversational level with the other three (and my knowledge has declined from lack of use).
Hey, that's pretty good. Anglo-Saxon would be neat, I'm sure! Though you probably don't know Latin too badly. If youknow Greek and Anglo-Saxon, you already have a pretty good idea of Latin grammar, so all that remains is the technical forms. Oh, and I quite understand you not being at a conversational level. I don't think anyone is conversational in Ancient Greek.
Speaking of which, I don't remember Greek having a dual-person. Anglo-Saxon does, however (thus singular first person, dual person, second person, and third person would translate as I, me and you, you, he/she/it). How does it go in Greek again? Latin may be more familiar with people, but it is also a language that makes English look simple. Greek on the other hand is fun (I like the fact that about 90% of a sentence could be gapped and still make sense), a fair bit easier, yet still contains a good selection of grammatical rules such as cases, declensions, conjugations, tenses, voices (including the MIDDLE voice! Passive, middle, active? Those crazy, bronze-kneed Greeks).
Yep, it has dual, but very rarely. Very archaic, even Homer didn't use it much. It comes up in the Iliadic proem in the (which in the Lattimore translation is) 'stood in division' (diasteten erisante)... both those words are dual. I've noticed it once or twice in Lysias, and a tiny bit in Xenophon (I tried translating the first few lines once, and noticed the 'sons' word, in this case the general word child, 'pais', was a dual to imply 'his two sons.') But not enough to make me memorise the forms. Generally it's recognizable anyway.
You find Greek easier? Hm. Most people say it the other way around. I find Latin extremely easier because after Greek, well, it's not that tough. But yeah, Greek does have it's fun points. I do like the middle voice, I must say. Greek has it's aorist, too, which is really quite entertaining (I love it when it's used for aspect rather than tense!) And the weird thing about the aorist augment is, the only other Indo European lanuage that does that is Sanskrit! Actually, I love seeing the old IE connections. Like the word for 'bright', by extention 'god', which gives Devi (or Deva, something like that) in Sanskrit, Dios in Greek (and also Zeus!), Deus in Latin (also Jupiter, via it's origin as Deus-piter, or 'bright father'), and so on. Or one of my favourites, the word for 'man' or 'hero' in Latin, 'vir.' I can't recall exactly, but there's a Sanskrit cognate. I can't be definite, but I think the Greek cognate might just be 'heros'... generally a Greek initial aspiration is when in an old IE word the initial s was dropped in favour of an h (why do that Greeks do this? I don't know), like the Latin sequorem having a Greek cognate in hepomai, so I'm sketchy. But if there's a precedent that an inital digamma in Greek has ever turned into an aspiration, then this might be the case. Because the Latin v (like our w) is equivalent to the old Greek digamma, so if in origin heros was 'veros'... well, that's really similar to the 'vir' root. Not to mention it has the same meaning in both (not our hero, of course, but more of an aristocratic male of the warrior class... originally.) And in English this word is 'were', like in werewolf. Or in the word 'world', which is old Germanic 'were-ald' contracted, sort of 'age of man' or something. Heh. As you can tell, I quite enjoy etymological studies.
I can't remember verb declensions all that well, but every language has oddities like that (in Anglo-Saxon "heo" can mean "he," "she," "it," "they," "the," "a," and a few other things that I can't remember). In English, eat/ate, ran/run, take/took. If I had a German verb dictionary around I could easily pull out a few from that as well. Not all Greek verbs are as bad as that one, though (luckily).
Well, some of those are just mere ablaudt root changes, I think (like the sto/sta/ste changes in the root for our stand, the German stehe, Greek histemi, Latin sto.) But yeah, we do have that a bit as well; German... can't think of any at the moment. But it's just that Greek tends to be inordinately bad.
I doubt think I could call myself a historian and NOT have read Herodotus 
. Father of history and all that. It is a fun book (what other history books contain giant ants that dig up gold?), though frustrating at times (he claims that the Egyptian god Khnum is Zeus!). I've studied ancient religions as well and unfortunately the majority of records about them are from the Greeks and later the Romans (who continued the Greek tradition of making me foam at the mouth when they talk about foreign religions).
Ah, yes, loved the ants, I must say. Though in defence of the Greek religious views, I find it quite interesting that they hold their gods' names to have come originally from Egypt and elsewhere. In fact, they seem very conscious of how other cultures have influenced them, which is quite interesting. I don't find them nearly so xenophobic as some people claim.
But if you like him, then I would recommend following it up with Thucydides (the OTHER father of History). He picks up almost where Herodotus left off (it was traditional for quite some time to do that. Tacitus and Ammianus Marcelinus were in that tradition as well, along with a few others I think, bringing a "world history" from the Persian War up until around 300 C.E.). He was a bit more... careful in what stories he decided to include (still not up to modern standards, not in the least).
Yeah, well, he's a bit tougher to get into, which is why I've not yet read too much of him. Actually, the other problem is that the translation I have is one done by Thomas Hobbes, so the prose is a little old and tough (even for me, and I'm more used to formal styles in prose.) From what I know of him, though, he seems a bit more unreliable than Herodotus, in that he tells only the story he believes to be right, and we have no way of knowing if it is or isn't. He brings accross an air of accuracy, but to a large extent that's only an illusion, I believe. Nevertheless, one of these days I'll read him.
Anyway, gotta get to Herodotus here in a moment. I'm having to write a paper about retribution in Herodotus, and I have a tendency to do these things last minute.
Can't say I am familiar with Lattimore (might have read his work and just not remember... despite the fact that I studied history I have a horrible memory for names) -- I prefer the Stanley Lambardo translation usually, as it tried to preserve the vernacular feel that the Greeks would have had listening to it (but it almost essentially tosses the poetics of it aside) -- but Tolkien is a fine source to influence your writing (but I would probably say that of most of the Inklings). He is the reason that I am interesting in constructed languages (yeah, did I mention that my interests are incredibly varied?). Orson Scott Card also has influenced mine (and through him, Frank Herbert). Then there is a whole slew of History writers: from Michael Grant to Jordanes, from Tacitus to Tony Horwitz. I suppose I could even say that Thomas Pynchon influenced my writing (in that I shudder to think that I am writing in the same language as he did, let alone that any part of my writing might be similar; a postmodernist I'm not).
Lambardo... hmmm... well, my opinion on the matter is that it shouldn't feel too vernacular. It shouldn't sound like the older English of the past century, of course, but to our ears, some thing warrant a bit more stately a feel, epic being one of them. Aristotle calls the hexameter the stateliest prose, after all. And even though tragedy is a bit more 'natural', it's dialogue by it's nature of poetry is a little more formal. Comedy, on the other hand, is entirely vernacular. That's why I like Lattimore and his fellow translators for anything epic or tragic. He is a poet, you see, and writes his Iliad in modern semi-verse. Not only is he almost dead on with literal accuracy, he manages to retain the stately feel of epic without descending into sounding old and stilted.
I've never read Lombardo, so I'm not sure... I'll just go take a look and see what I think. Hmm... definitely better than Fagles, I can say that much. Still a touch too vernacular in my opinion, and more than a little inaccurate. Not sure where the word 'black' comes from in the first line; the adjective 'strong' (Gk. iphthimous) is missing from 'heroes'. It does more or less retain the feel, but I think Lattimore's 'Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son Achilleus, and its devastation / which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians / hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls of Hades / but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting of dogs and all birds / but the will of Zeus was accomplished / since that time when first there stood in division of conflict / Atreus' son the lord of men and brilliant Achilleus.' I don't think he leaves out a single word or allows himself any of his own invention. He's a remarkably disciplined translator and a good poet to boot.
Brevity is not my forte (if you hadn't noticed).
Ah, yes. Likewise. And Sora, no, there have been many, far longer posts. Look at one from a while back where I and Lord J argued religion, or things like that. I've written posts around four thousand words long... this is nothing near.
