Is Latin easier than ancient Greek?

[tim05000]

Many Latinists are Classicists, and most Classicists take up Greek as well as Latin.

I've been self-learning Latin for a year and it's been very slow learning because of the grammar, but at least the vocabulary and alphabet are rather simple because they tacitly remain in English currency. I wonder how self-learning ancient Greek is in comparison?

 

[Pacifica]

I've always heard that Greek is harder than Latin; and it seems to me it probably is, when I see a few more things it has that Latin doesn't (optative, aorist and all such things). Now I can't speak of experience yet, because I've just started Greek very recently (I was plunged in a lesson just now by the way) so I haven't encountered complicated stuff yet. As for the alphabet, it can look like an obstacle maybe, but really it's quickly learned. In one day I had memorized most letters, only three of them or so took a little more time for some reason (probably because they're convoluted, lol). For the rest, wait for more experienced people to answer.

 

[Lyceum]

Just because Latin words have been brought into English (or any language really) doesn't mean they convey the same kind of things as they did to the Romans.

Also the whole Latin vs Greek seems to be a perennial question, however I'd have to say that most people find getting a very good level of Latin harder. It seems simpler due to simply having less morphological variety at first glance, but that is a poor way to assess a language. Seriously it shouldn't be hard to memorise forms. It's vocabulary can be markedly varied in terms of register and syntactically it can do a lot of weird stuff in poetry, likewise metrically.

It depends on what you count as "knowing", if you just mean reading comprehension then neither is very difficult but beyond that...Latin can cause trouble, but by the time you get to Claudianus, Ierome etc it seems to fix itself.

 

[Ulfus]

This question is frequently asked! I suppose it is in the perception of the learner. Some aspects of Greek are easier, e.g. the use of the definite article makes the cases on some levels appear easier than they do in Latin. Latin nomenclature is inundated in European languages, which makes it more recognizable. For individuals from Anglosphere with their familiarity with an overwhelmingly large Latinate lexical stock, the language takes on a sense of intimacy.

Perhaps an analogy may cast light on this intriguing question. People frequently ask me if Lao is an easier language than Thai. This cannot be answered, yet everyone has an answer, depending on which side of the Mekong that you live.

I have come to the conclusion that all languages are equally difficult for me. The concept of a language with a soft landing does not exist. As I navigate through a host of languages on a daily basis, it is done equally poorly in every idiom.

 

[Oups]

Morphology : latin is easier.
Syntax : greek is easier.

 

[Arca Defectionis]

I know people like to be open-minded, but really, if you speak a Romance or West Germanic language, the leg up on vocabulary and (in the former case) morphology is such that Latin is almost certainly easier.

I find Greek to be rather syntactically complex, but I don't know if it's more complex than Latin. I didn't find Latin syntax particularly complex though.

 

[Abbatiſſæ Scriptor]

I had to learn Greek when I was reading Theology, and it was an absolute bear compared to Latin. The noun declensions are no more difficult, but the verb conjugations are far more complicated. There are three voices rather than two, three aspects rather than two, and four moods rather than three. Moreover the athematic verbs, which were at least partially tamed in Latin when they were conscripted into the 3rd and 4th conjugations, were never tamed at all in Greek, and the wreckage of various fail'd attempts to tame them only left more irregularities, the result being that six principal parts have to be learnt for every Greek verb the student is trying to master, as opposed to the four required for their Latin counterparts.

 

[Alexius V]

It's really hard to define the difficulty of a language, there are some things easier and some things more difficult. There are a lot of similarities between these two languages concerning some vocabulary, for example: nauta - ναύτης, novus - νεός, deus - θεός, pater - πατήρ, and also in some declensions (compare dea vs. θεά), but ancient Greek also has a very complicated 3rd declension system compared to Latin, for example the declension of πατήρ, which in Latin is regular, and in Greek it has 3 thematic vowel changes η>ε>α, which change depending on case & number (ablaut is the linguistic name I think), and here's where you can see it:
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/πατήρ

 

[Arca Defectionis]

It's really hard to define the difficulty of a language, there are some things easier and some things more difficult. There are a lot of similarities between these two languages concerning some vocabulary, for example: nauta - ναύτης, novus - νεός, deus - θεός, pater - πατήρ, and also in some declensions (compare dea vs. θεά), but ancient Greek also has a very complicated 3rd declension system compared to Latin, for example the declension of πατήρ, which in Latin is regular, and in Greek it has 3 thematic vowel changes η>ε>α, which change depending on case & number (ablaut is the linguistic name I think), and here's where you can see it:
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/πατήρ

Well, not all of this is quite fair - nauta is a direct borrowing from ναύτης (though the native Latin word navis is cognate with ναῦς), and the more common practice for expressing "goddess" in Greek is to keep the 2nd declension form with the feminine article: ἡ θεός. θεά is much less common. θεός and deus are also not etymologically related at all, despite the similar appearance.

The remaining two roots exist in English (and most Indo-European languages) as well: novus is just as closely related to new as it is to νεός, and pater, just as closely related to father as to πατήρ (though Grimm's law makes the English word look like the odd one out).

 

[Alexius V]

Well, not all of this is quite fair - nauta is a direct borrowing from ναύτης (though the native Latin word navis is cognate with ναῦς), and the more common practice for expressing "goddess" in Greek is to keep the 2nd declension form with the feminine article: ἡ θεός. θεά is much less common. θεός and deus are also not etymologically related at all, despite the similar appearance.

The remaining two roots exist in English (and most Indo-European languages) as well: novus is just as closely related to new as it is to νεός, and pater, just as closely related to father as to πατήρ (though Grimm's law makes the English word look like the odd one out).

I think you missed my, point, I wasn't trying to say that they were the same, I was just trying to point out the similarities, just as I could have compared French nation and Serbian nacija and said they were similar, not implying that they came from separate sources or that I think they are closely related languages. I'm fully aware for the novus example, new, neu, nouveau, nov... Point is they are similar in all languages. I used πατήρ just to show some peculiarities in Greek 3rd declension as opposed to the Latin counterpart.

 

[Filius Scriptoris]

Did anyone on here learn Greek before Latin? I would like to hear such a perspective, as I am myself likened to the opinion that language difficulty is really a matter of perspective.

 

[Ater Gladius]

Does the corpus of Ancient Greek have as many absurd hyperbatons and lengthy-as-elephant-manhood sentences? Do Greek writers prefer a style that maximally confuses the reader, like our convoluted Cicero? Are the people of Athens more slothful than the Romans, and do they abuse the accusative-with-infinitive construction more?

 

[Arca Defectionis]

Does the corpus of Ancient Greek have as many absurd hyperbatons and lengthy-as-elephant-manhood sentences? Do Greek writers prefer a style that maximally confuses the reader, like our convoluted Cicero? Are the people of Athens more slothful than the Romans, and do they abuse the accusative-with-infinitive construction more?

I forget who it was, but a very knowledgeable Greek specialist who used to frequent this board said something similar to that. Though the fundamentals of Greek, from vocabulary to morphology to grammar, are all harder than those of Latin to an English speaker, actually reading Latin at a high level is more work than Greek because of the lack of markers (like the article) and the free word order, such that whereas with Greek one may find himself forced to consult a lexicon, with Latin one may well know what every word in a Ciceronian sentence means and yet the meaning of the sentence might still totally elude him.

 

[Nooj]

Many Latinists are Classicists, and most Classicists take up Greek as well as Latin.

I've been self-learning Latin for a year and it's been very slow learning because of the grammar, but at least the vocabulary and alphabet are rather simple because they tacitly remain in English currency. I wonder how self-learning ancient Greek is in comparison?

I found Greek to be significantly easier than Latin. Even now, I read Greek much more comfortably.

Does the corpus of Ancient Greek have as many absurd hyperbatons and lengthy-as-elephant-manhood sentences? Do Greek writers prefer a style that maximally confuses the reader, like our convoluted Cicero? Are the people of Athens more slothful than the Romans, and do they abuse the accusative-with-infinitive construction more?

The style of the author depends on the author and the time period and the literary movement he belonged to. Demosthenes is different to Isocrates to Lysias.

I personally like Gorgias, but he's a bit of a unique one.

 

[Abbatiſſæ Scriptor]

I had quite enough trouble with St. Paul and I have avoided Greek ever ſince much of a dolt as that makes me in these fora.

 

[Nooj]

Better to know one language well than two languages poorly.

 

[Arca Defectionis]

I had quite enough trouble with St. Paul and I have avoided Greek ever ſince much of a dolt as that makes me in these fora.

I don't know if for religious reasons or otherwise, but I have found that people consider Paul a much better stylist than I found him to be. I think his writing has a rather tedious, droning style about it, and by the fifth time you encounter one of his trademark constructions, you get peeved. Hebrews is a pleasure to read from a stylistic standpoint, whereas most of Paul's letters end up coming across as both stylistically poor and repetitive.

 

[Abbatiſſæ Scriptor]

I was nonetheleſs always ſecretly pleaſed to obſerve that when it came to run-on sentences, Paul was an even worſe offender than I was.

 

[Imperfacundus]

The Greek verbal system is an absolute nightmare compared to Latin's.
But as mentioned, there's less potential for making convoluted sentences in Greek. Reading even fancy prose is fairly straightforward, once you've learnt the rules and common words.