News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Show HN: A Latin self study course, Khan Academy-style by chrononaut on Monday March 29, 2021 @07:19AM (#26620044)
Not knowing Latin myself, I would imagine that learning Latin could also be a stepping stone to more thoroughly understand other related languages?
Re:Show HN: A Latin self study course, Khan Academy-style by wenc on Monday March 29, 2021 @09:00AM (#26620874)
The written form, maybe, but the spoken form not likely.

The Youtuber Ecolinguist ran an experiment where he had Romance language speakers (Spanish, Portuguese, Italian) try to guess at riddles in Latin. Turns out Classical Latin is actually very different from most Romance languages, which descended more from "Vulgar Latin".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C77anb2DJGk

Re:Show HN: A Latin self study course, Khan Academy-style by yorwba on Monday March 29, 2021 @07:57AM (#26620307)
But pronunciation is very variable, even living languages have multiple different pronunciations in use at any given time (a.k.a. accents) and for a language like Latin that has been in use for thousands of years, the possibilities are endless.

Being able to establish one-to-one correspondences between Latin words and their descendants in modern languages can be helpful, but it doesn't matter much whether you're using the "correct" Latin pronunciation, so long as whatever pronunciation you do use maintains those correspondences.

Re:Show HN: A Latin self study course, Khan Academy-style by tomcooks on Monday March 29, 2021 @08:05AM (#26620361)
Give it a try, it's what people do on a daily basis when trying to communicate with English speakers.
Re:Show HN: A Latin self study course, Khan Academy-style by yorwba on Monday March 29, 2021 @08:37AM (#26620626)
If you want to use Latin to talk to people, you should probably use whatever pronunciation they expect, even if it's not "correct".
Re:Show HN: A Latin self study course, Khan Academy-style by bmj on Monday March 29, 2021 @09:07AM (#26620946)
I attend an Anglican church (in the U.S.). Our rector and deacon are both from England. They endlessly argue about the pronunciation of venite.