Linguistics for Objectivists


kiaer.ts

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The sciences of historical and comparative linguistics seem like abstruse and impractical subjects to most people. If the subject brings to mind anything, it will be Professor Henry Higgins in the Musical My Fair Lady. He is a somewhat exaggerated phoneticist who can tell the street corner of your birth by the peculiarities of how you pronounce your vowels and consonants. His character's powers of observation are somewhat exaggerated, but in fact a good phoneticist can often tell with astonishing accuracy when and where you developed your accent, almost always down to the metropolitan television viewing area to which you belonged as a child, if not the county, borough, or neighborhood. Trained linguists have been known to achieve fluency in a new language within days. Linguists have predicted the existence of specific words and sounds in languages that haven't been spoken for millenia - decades before those languages have been discovered or deciphered. Linguists can determine the vocabulary and culture of ethnic groups that have left no known archeological remains and which existed more than 10,000 ago at the end of the last ice age or even further back. There is good evidence to reconstruct some words of what is called proto-world, a language which must have existed 60,000 to 75,000 years ago. We can demonstrate that English with its word father and Latin with its word pater have a common root called Indo-european that was spoken in the Pontic-Caspian steppe circa 4,5000 BC and that Proto Indo-European with its roots ignis "fire" and avis "bird" is related in turn to Proto-Eskimo-Aleut with its words igniq- for "to set fire" and @wi- for "to nest." (I use the @ symbol for the schwa sound of the vowel of cup or love.) Linguists can explain why some words are regular and why some are irregular and how they got that way. Linguists can trace the origins of the original meanings of our words and hence the evolution of our concepts, a matter of great interest to Objectivists.

And linguistics, if you like word puzzles like cryptograms or if you like evolution or just the sound of words on your tongue can be fun.

Friederich Nietzsche was a philologist, and so was J. R. R. Tolkien. Noam Chomsky is also known as a linguist. But his effect on linguistics is not universally praised even among trained linguists, and especially among those who study more than just the way that untrained, and ungrammatical modern speakers happen to use their limited knowledge of English. Since World War Two, widespread comparison of languages has become unfashionable (the Nazis were interested in long-distance comparisons) the study of historical linguistics has come to be seen as quaint and often controversial, and vicious skeptical and epistemologically faulty arguments have been used to attack those who do long-distance (in time or in breadth of family relationship) comparisons. But the data is there and has much to say to those who are not limited by the fashions of the Chomskyists and the skeptics.

Those controversies need not concern the Objectivist who is interested in learning about the basic of linguistics. Anyone who has a passing knowledge of at least one other language can learn the basic concepts on his own. In this thread I hope to offer suggestions to help those who are interested in some study of their own.

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If you want to study lingusitics, I would recommend five books for beginners. The first is Anthony Burgess's A Mouthful of Air. Burgess wrote A Clockwork Orange in which he created a future dialect of British English highly influenced by Russian. His book A Mouthful of Air serves as a very gentle but interesting introduction to linguistics for the lay reader. He introduces the reader to English and its sounds and offers a rigorous way to describe them called the IPA or international phonetic alphabet. The IPA provides one symbol for each sound and there is only one sound for each symbol. Most of the IPA letters are based on the Latin alphabet with letters also used from the Greek and other alphabets as well as even some runes and specially made up symbols. Some forty such symbols serve to describe all the sounds in English. They are easy to learn, and one learned they are not tricky to use.

Burgess then shows how English evolved through time from Old English (also called Anglo-Saxon) and he provides a survey of the world's languages, from close and closer relatives of English like Russian and Welsh to German and Dutch to languages like Japanese and Arabic which are usually describe as unrelated to English, although that is a relative and not an absolute description. Burgess shows how to compare the basic vocabulary of languages in order to classify them if possible into groups and thus indicate that they are related. Once the reader has finished his book which has no technicalities greater than the IPA (and you do not even need to master it, just get the idea in order to benefit from it) he will be prepared to move on to ever so slightly more technical books which will give him a window on the languages of the world.

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coming: Fromkin and Rodman, An Introduction to Language, Campbell, Concise Compendium of the World's Languages, Calvert Watkin's American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots and Merritt Ruhlen, The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue.

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Ted,

Thank you for contributing on this topic.

The relationship between linguistics and psychology is an important (and vexed) issue for those of us who work in cognitive psychology.

I will bring it up after you have posted about the 5 books.

Robert Campbell

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The IPA

The IPA is an internationally used alphabet with set values for the sounds of the sybols. The IPA is used in schooling in just about every country except America, where we use various cumbersome "phonetic" alphabets for English that vary by book publisher. The wikipedia article on the IPA serves as a very poor introduction. It is presented haphazardly, it includes symbols for all languages, not just English, so the sound meanings of half the symbols will be totally obscure and it uses British pronunciation as the standard when a not too narrow Philadelphia accent or an American stage pronunciation would be closer to average or Shakespearian pronunciation.

Here are the consonant letters of the IPA that are relevant for American pronunciation, almost all are as one would expect:

m as in mom

n as in nun

ŋ "ng" as in singing /siŋiŋ/. The "ng" of "finger" is /fiŋger/ since the "g" is pronounced as a separate sound. People from Loŋɡ Island pronounce all "nɡ's" as in "finɡer."

p as in pop

b as in bib

t as in tot

d as in did

k as in kaka

ɡ as in ɡaɡa, never as in ɡeorɡe.

f as in fifty

v as in vivacious

θ as in thin and thigh

ð as in then and thy

s as in sis

z as in zoo

ʃ as in shush

ʒ as in asia or Zhivaɡo

h as in haha

r as in roar

l as in lolly (the sound in ɡold made further back and not with the tip of the tonɡue is technically different, but the difference doesn't matter in Enɡlish, while it does in Russian, which has two "ells."

w as in with

y as in yet (technichally, the IPA uses a "j" with a latin or ɡerman pronunciation, and the "y" is the lonɡ ü sound. But for Enɡlish /y/ as "yet" is fine.

tʃ note that the sounds ch of church

dʒ and the sound J/dɡ of judɡe are really compound sounds, which we sometimes see in our spellinɡ. Often č with a mark called a hachek is used and a j with the same mark (I can't type it) is used for the sound of judɡe.

The vowels are a little more complex, there are ten basic sounds and three diphthonɡs or compound sounds. I'll attack that later.

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George Cambell's Concise Compendium of the World's Languages provides a brief standardized description of over 100 of the world's languages spread out to include an example of most of the major families and stocks. It gives a better idea of the diversity of world languages than any other collection available. Each chapter spends about seven pages describing the specific language's sound system, its verbal and nominal grammar, its sentence structure, how it deals with number and negation, if it has genders or other distinctive charactersistics like a distinction between an inclusive we form (you and I) and an exclusive we form (He and I, but not you) unlike English which lacks the distinction. Basic vocabulary is given, and a translation of a bible verse that allows one to read and compare extended text. It includes examples of such tongues as Navajo, Quechua (Incan), Mapudungu (of Argentina), Guarani (Uruguay) Navajo, Breton, Basque, Berber, Lapplander, Zulu and Nivkh. The work does have its flaws, in, for instance, that the bible verse chosen is highly idiosyncratic (In the beginning was the word, from the Gospel of John) and hence likely to give forms unnatural to the spoken language. But for a brief, cheap, broad introduction to the world's languages, there is none better. This book's list price of $80.00 is absurd. It can be had used for under $20. The amateur linguist will find hours of enjoyment.

51VFK760V9L._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA240_SH20_OU01_.jpg

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Ted,

Thank you for contributing on this topic.

The relationship between linguistics and psychology is an important (and vexed) issue for those of us who work in cognitive psychology.

I will bring it up after you have posted about the 5 books.

Robert Campbell

Thanks Robert. Feel free to interrupt at any time.

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The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots

by Calvert Watkins

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This handsome and inexpensive little book is a must for any educated speaker of English. It shows the derivation of English words, whether native like wit or borrowed like the Latin video and the Greek idea from their origins in the Proto-Indo-European language.

Proto-Indo-European is the name we give to a language that was spoken in what is now the Russian/Ukrainian steppe around 3,500 to 4,500 BC. There are no written records of that language. We know it existed because we have the evidence of its daughter branches, which include ANATOLIAN (Hittite, et al.,), ITALIC (Latin, its sisters Oscan and Umbrian, and its daughters, the Romance Languages such as Portuguse, Spanish, Catalan, Provencal, French, Italian and Romanian), CELTIC (Irish, Welsh, Breton, Ancient gaulish), GERMANIC (English, Dutch, German, Danish, Icelandic, gothic) SLAVIC (Polish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian), BALTIC (Lithuanian, Latvian, Old Prussian), IRANIAN (Old persian, Farsi, Kurdish) INDIC (Sanskrit, Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali), HELLENIC (Greek), ARMENIAN, and ALBANIAN, among others. When we compare the basic vocabulary of these languages, we see that the words in the modern languages are later evolved forms the ancestor of which is reconstructed as Indo-European. Each of the daughter languages elvolved from the mother tongue as each tribe moved into its own homeland and the way it pronounced its sounds and the words it used began to diverge through time due to local influences and random variation just as American English and British English have come to diverge through time. This language divergence is a universal process, and so far as moder evidence allows us to reconstruct what must have been the earlier forms we can be more and more certain of what the proto-language looked like.

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Here are the numbers of Indo-European languges, the first column is the reconstructed numbers of the mother language (giros for "one" seems to be an error, it should be oinos)

cogw1.gif

cogw2.gif

cogw3.gif

Compare these to the numbers one thru ten in, for example, Japanese and Arabic. They show no resemblance, since they do not descend from the same roots. (Seven may be a borrowing from Semitic, however!)

1_10_English_and_Japanese_by_Dragonlordofcheese.png

arabic-numbers-1-10.jpg

There are some 3,000 root words that have been reconstructed for Indo-European, such as the PIE verb root *weid- which meant "to see", and hence "to know." (The asterisk means the root is reconstructed, that no written record exists. ) This root *weid- which would have sounded just like the man's name "Wade" evolved in German to mean "to know" and it is found in the English words "wit" and "wise" and in the archaic verb "to wot." In Latin, the verb evolved to videre, "to see," which gives us video, which means "I see." In Greek, there was a rule that all Indo-European w- sounds became silent and were lost. Hence we have the derived noun idea which would mean "vision," which itself is another Latin reflex (descendent) of that same root! Words like ideal, vision, and wise that derive from the same root are called cognates. Watkins' Dictionary provides the roots of most of the words of English, and groups them by roots for the heading with all the cognates listed below.

Go here and you can look inside the book at Amazon. You can also see my review, which is the third one on the page.

It is very interesting to consider that words like ideal which have come to have very abstract meanings originated in more concrete words closer to the perceptual level. This development from concrete to abstract applies to human concepts. It applies to an individual's intellectual development. And it applies in the history of language. Knowing PIE roots can make it easier to remember spellings, to figure out meanings of new words, and to think of the proper word to express your ideas.

Burgess's A Mouthful of Air is the ideal introduction to the concepts of linguistics. You never know what your own language is until you learn to compare it to another. Watkins' dictionary is the ideal reference. It lets you learn which words you use are cognate sisters, like word and verb or love and liberty, and to trace the intellectual development of Western man back 6,500 years. If you buy any books I mention, buy these two.

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I am off the forums, due to self-imposed deadline restraints. But, I could not resist a brief entree'.

All this is fascinating. The Burgess thing is absolutely true.

But the real thing is this: you either read, write, or both. If you write, the very simplest first thing you do is write, and write a lot.

Practice makes perfect. Once you start sharpening the saw, you can look at your own work (to varying levels of satisfaction), and see that. But, it will offer the additional benefit of changing how you view the work of others.

It's basically Thomas Edison style. There is no substitute for hard work. Lead, follow, or get out of the way.

Great thread, I'll try to glance in once in awhile.

rde

Just came off a 12 hour straight writing burn, headed off to decompress, momentarily, at yonder pool/jacuzzi thing, and smell today's Florida fragrance. It changes every day, and is always better than anything one purchases over-the-counter.

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Ted,

I am leaning toward ordering this on your say so - can't beat the Amazon price for used copies. But let me say this: (1) 65% of the words in English are based on Latin (roots, prefixes, suffixes, more than one of each, and its the -hard- 65%; (2) The Latin roots of English is a subject I already am rather knowledgeable in [i've been a Latin and French and some Spanish student, English teacher, tutor of Latin roots]; (3) I already have a huge 'to be read' stack of books; (4) I've read other etymology and origins of English books over the years.

Would you still think this vital for someone already pretty knowledgeable, at least of how the Latin/Romance language offshoot of this has developed? (I don't want to violate the 80/20 rule.)

...whoops, what about this point (Amazon customer review): "This booklet is merely a reprint of the appendix found at the back of the American Heritage Dictionary. I already have the dictionary -- so, had I known that this booklet contained nothing new, I would not have purchased it!"

...I have that dictionary: the appendix by Watkins entitled "Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans" followed by a dictionary of indo-european roots that runs about 30-40 pages very large pages, 3 columns each (starting with abel- and ending with yu-.)

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  • 1 month later...

Ted,

I am leaning toward ordering this on your say so - can't beat the Amazon price for used copies. But let me say this: (1) 65% of the words in English are based on Latin (roots, prefixes, suffixes, more than one of each, and its the -hard- 65%; (2) The Latin roots of English is a subject I already am rather knowledgeable in [i've been a Latin and French and some Spanish student, English teacher, tutor of Latin roots]; (3) I already have a huge 'to be read' stack of books; (4) I've read other etymology and origins of English books over the years.

Would you still think this vital for someone already pretty knowledgeable, at least of how the Latin/Romance language offshoot of this has developed? (I don't want to violate the 80/20 rule.)

...whoops, what about this point (Amazon customer review): "This booklet is merely a reprint of the appendix found at the back of the American Heritage Dictionary. I already have the dictionary -- so, had I known that this booklet contained nothing new, I would not have purchased it!"

...I have that dictionary: the appendix by Watkins entitled "Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans" followed by a dictionary of indo-european roots that runs about 30-40 pages very large pages, 3 columns each (starting with abel- and ending with yu-.)

I am sorry, Phil, I only just saw this request for information. I haven't seen the AHD appendix, so I can't comment on if it is identical in format. Does the appendix have the "Language and Cultural Notes" asides within the text, such as the note on the ssacredness of contracts after the entru mei4- for "to bind"? The separate book does have over twice as many total entries as the appendix to the 2000 AHD.

As for Latin, well, most of our technical language does come from Latin, and about 50% of native English roots do have a cognate with Latin (like "I wot" to "video") if you know how to spot them.

If you find the appendix at all helpful I would strongly recommend Watkins' book, especially since it is much more handy, stands on its own as a reference and as pleasurable reading, and since knowing an etymology is in many places a tutorial on the origins and development of a concept.

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> knowing an etymology is in many places a tutorial on the origins and development of a concept. [Ted]

Yes, very perceptive. And that in its turn, of course, has great epistemological and thinking value.

Knowing that "spectacles, inspect, extrospection, perspicacious, perspective, introspection, spectacular" all came from a very simple Latin concept --- spectare: to look, behold, contemplate; then the latin root spec, spic = look or see --- enables one to understand or build up or analyze those more complex English concepts I named.

species [in Latin] = a seeing, sight, look, view

perceptive = per--through + capio, cepi, captum--take, seize, grasp.

The other great epistemic value is that one needs to grasp simple concepts first and in our education, too often that step is skipped as we are rushed into parroting the 'big words' of our elders and of our readings without having ever grasped the component parts.

epistula [L] - letter, epistle

Edited by Philip Coates
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QUICK QUIZ (for anyone other than the classically trained Ted):

Can anyone list four very different* English words, which come from this Latin verb: "capio, cepi, captum--take, seize, grasp." Hint: A couple of them are heavily used in Oist writings.

......

*forms of the same word -- classify, classifying, classified, classification (verb, gerund, adjective, noun form)-- will not be allowed and will be strictly punished.

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QUICK QUIZ (for anyone other than the classically trained Ted):

Can anyone list four very different* English words, which come from this Latin verb: "capio, cepi, captum--take, seize, grasp." Hint: A couple of them are heavily used in Oist writings.

......

*forms of the same word -- classify, classifying, classified, classification (verb, gerund, adjective, noun form)-- will not be allowed and will be strictly punished.

I would add skeptic to your spectacle list. It comes from the Greek variation of the root, which shows metathesis, a reordering of the consonants. As for your four wordps from the cap- root, do you want them all to be reflexes (developments from) of the Latin, or will you also accept Germanic cognates like "hawk"? I can think of three very important Latin reflexes for Objectivists right off the bat.

Edited by Ted Keer
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Ted, I know the answers -- common words in English which developed from the Latin root -- so if you immediately answer them, then I won't be able to get others to rack their brains. Let's at least give them till tomorrow morning to have noticed this post.

(I particularly want to see if site members know the Oist words...please don't give it away yet!)

Edited by Philip Coates
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Oh, shit, well...if no one answers by late evening go ahead .... I give you my Papal dispensation,,,,

dis + pens +...oh never mind.... ;)

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Concept, percept, reception, inception. The first two are presumably the common Objectivist ones you meant.

Somewhat related question:

In For the New Intellectual Rand says that Aristotle influenced the structure of our language. Does anyone have any idea what she was talking about?

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Capital, concept, capture, encompass, capsule, comprehend, capitulate

Guessing. I like the subject but know nothing about it. But I won't keep reading if you're going to take days to make a point Phil. Need input.

How could creating an entire method of scientific thinking NOT influence the structure of language?

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Concept, percept, reception, inception. The first two are presumably the common Objectivist ones you meant.

Somewhat related question:

In For the New Intellectual Rand says that Aristotle influenced the structure of our language. Does anyone have any idea what she was talking about?

Is caput part of the same group?

That would account for one very important word there.

(Crossposting with Mikee)

It depends on what you mean by structure. In the literal sense, it's not really possible--the basic groundplan of the Germanic languages was already in place before any Teuton heard of Hellas.

However, in its development, I suppose you could say, more as metaphor than anything else, that English has a sort of Aristotelian attitude--simplifying grammatical structures more completely than other cognate languages (compare for instance our developments of gender and verb tenses to parallel developments in other Germanic languages) and extremely adaptable in naturalizing foreign vocabulary and adopting neologisms.

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Capital, concept, capture, encompass, capsule, comprehend, capitulate

Guessing. I like the subject but know nothing about it. But I won't keep reading if you're going to take days to make a point Phil. Need input.

How could creating an entire method of scientific thinking NOT influence the structure of language?

Is "comprehend" derived from 'capere'? It thought it was from "comprehendere"?

I'm also not sure whether 'encompass' is derived from 'capere'. (?)

Capable, contraception, receive, accept.

Edited by Xray
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The root *kap- "to grasp, hold, seize" is separate from *kom- which means "together" and from *kaput- whence "head, haupt," and the borrowed from Latin "Kopf."

I don't remember Rand's saying annything about Aristotle influencing English or any other language. He did coin certain concepts. He didn't do anything that affected any rules of grammar or the like. It would have been highly inaccurate to imply any such thing. At the time of Aristotle, the Germanic language would have been spoken in the area of Denmark and the North Sea coast and would just have split into three branches which would develop later into (1) Gothic (now extinct, (2) Norse and (3) West Germanic which would later split into English, Dutch, High German, Low German, Frisian and some other dialects beginning in about the Fifth Century AD.

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Unfortunately I chose a root appearing in English words which can come from either of two Latin concepts. There are two Latin roots from which English words containing 'cap' can come i) the one i listed -cap or cep - which means take, seize, or grasp, and ii) 'caput' for head...[ or as Ted puts it: "The root *kap- "to grasp, hold, seize" is separate from *kom- which means "together" and from *kaput- whence "head". ]

<>Mikee said capital, concept, capture, encompass, capsule, comprehand, capitulate. Yes for concept, capture, capitulate -- those come from take, seize, or grasp. I'm not sure about capsule. No for encompass and comprehend (for the reason Ted gave).

<>Jeffrey asked about caput. That's from head (if you say something is 'kaput' it means as if it had lost its head....other words from head include capitol, captain, capitalism, a capital crime...you lose your head...and hundreds more!)

<>Xray said capable, contraception, receive, accept. Yes for all four. For receive, the spelling changed a bit through the ages as it went through french re+cipere, with the later being an altered spelling of capere...we have many words with the ceive - perceive, conceive, receive], accept.

<>Reidy said concept, percept, reception, inception. Yes for all four. And, yes, the two key Objectivist ideas I was thinking of -were- concept and percept!

WINNERS: There is a tie between Xray and Reidy. In my benevolence, EACH wins a complete edition of Phil's Greatest Posts or the right to search for them all tonight by going to Members on the main page.

,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

Here's what occurs to me when I see that concept = con (together) + cept (take or grasp). That is one of the beauties of a really simple language like Latin. The Romans were simple, practical-minded, down to earth, unsophisticated people. Once I see from Latin roots that a concept is a lot of things *taken together* in some sense, that is much simpler to hold and recall than Rand's longer and more exact definition: "A concept is a mental integration of two or more units which are isolated by a process of abstraction and united by a specific definition." The units are taken together or fused or grasped together in a certain sense.

Both are true. But taking it back to its origin in Latin really makes the idea of a concept come down to earth. That's the simplest way, the simplest shorthand to remember what a concept is. Yay!

(Mikee said: "I won't keep reading if you're going to take days to make a point Phil." I understand, but sometimes people don't see a thread for 24 hours and I don't want to write at all if I don't allow time for / or get / feedback. )

Edited by Philip Coates
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The root *kap- "to grasp, hold, seize" is separate from *kom- which means "together" and from *kaput- whence "head, haupt," and the borrowed from Latin "Kopf."

I don't remember Rand's saying annything about Aristotle influencing English or any other language. He did coin certain concepts. He didn't do anything that affected any rules of grammar or the like. It would have been highly inaccurate to imply any such thing. At the time of Aristotle, the Germanic language would have been spoken in the area of Denmark and the North Sea coast and would just have split into three branches which would develop later into (1) Gothic (now extinct, (2) Norse and (3) West Germanic which would later split into English, Dutch, High German, Low German, Frisian and some other dialects beginning in about the Fifth Century AD.

Red shows exansion of the Proto-germans to 1 AD, three centuries after Aristotle

Germanic_tribes_%28750BC-1AD%29.png

Edited by Ted Keer
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Here's another quiz:

Who can translate the slogan Ted puts at the bottom of his posts? Extra credit if you can do it -without- any aids - like web tools or a Latin dictionary: "Homo sum, mihi nihil humani alienum puto."

HINT, for those who have forgotten or didn't have Latin: Use the lesson on what we've just done: Taking a Latin root and trying to think of English words that come from it -- working backwards in order to guess what its Latin meaning must have been. (There's only one word out of the seven I don't immediately see how you can do that with.)

(Imagine how good you are going to feel if you can translate Latin without knowing any - instant self-esteem booster and hard-on inducer...okay, I've had toomuchtodrink.)

Edited by Philip Coates
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