Ancient Language

[Rooks57]

If you could learn any ancient language to speak and write in fluently, what would it be?  I grew up wanting to speak Gaelic but recently, I've kind of liked the idea of learning ancient Classic Chinese.  I kind of like the idea of reading all the old texts in their original language instead of translations.  Or maybe one of the ancient Mayan languages like Quiche or Tzeltal would also be a fun one to know.  What about you?  Any lost ancient language that you would like to learn just for fun?

[sidney]

Aramaic would be nice to learn, because that's the language that Jesus spoke. I'm a Roman Catholic, so naturally I would be curious to see for myself what kind of language the people in Jesus' era were speaking that time.

[John Snort]

The ancient language I would like to learn is probably Akkadian. It's one of the earliest Semitic languages so I suppose if you know it, learning other Semitic languages might be easier. It's just an assumption I'm making but I'm a history buff so there's much I could learn about Mesopotamia if I could read the language the spoke back then.

[Baburra]

I would study Latin, probably. It's the most familiar to me and I think it would be the best for me because of that. I honestly don't know much about it but I've always been sort of curious and interested since I read some Latin phrases when I was younger so I guess that's mostly how my interest in it started. 

[Lingua Franca]

That is a tough one, there are so many interesting languages. I don't know if anyone could ever learn how to speak it fluently though since there aren't any audio recordings of them. I think that I probably would choose ancient Egyptian. It would be great to actually be able to read hieroglyphs.

[Mereloshn]

Vulgar Latin would be very interesting to learn since it was that which evolved and branched off into the Romance languages, which are all modern versions of Vulgar Latin. 

[abonnen]

Hmm I use to want to learn this really rare language as a child, but for the life of me I can not remember the name of it.. anyways I am really interested in Ancient Egypt and would love to learn the Ancient Egyptian Language. 

[GearZ]

I would have to say Koine Greek.  It is the language the New Testament was written in and said text has had a profound impact on western civilization.  It also would make a good springboard to other languages.

[darkchild]

I'm not familiar with ancient languages as such but I would like to take one in the Chinese/Japanese line. I fancy the way they speak in those very old movies and it would be thrilling to embark on it.

[babelle]

I've actually started learning Classical Latin, though not for fun. It was for a project that required me to collate Latin conversational phrases. I enjoyed the task and I started to study on my own. I was amazed at the many resources on the internet about Latin, and learning it is feasible so if there's an ancient language I'd like to be fluent at, this would be it.

[Lingua Franca]

3 hours ago, babelle said:

I've actually started learning Classical Latin, though not for fun. It was for a project that required me to collate Latin conversational phrases. I enjoyed the task and I started to study on my own. I was amazed at the many resources on the internet about Latin, and learning it is feasible so if there's an ancient language I'd like to be fluent at, this would be it.

Latin is still alive, even though there aren't  a lot of people that speak it as a first language, I don't know if there are any to be exact. Latin was the language of science a short time ago so there are still plenty of resources out there to learn it.

[lingvo]

To say that Latin is dead, though in some sense true, is not a particularly helpful observation when it comes to education. Plato and Cicero and Shakespeare and George Washington and the rest of the Founding Fathers are also dead, but we still study them because they have important things to say about human nature and have shaped our civilization.

[Victor Leigh]

I am not sure if Arabic would count as an ancient language. However, I have been told something very interesting about the language. Apparently, the grammar has not changed since the time of Prophet Muhamed. I was told that the grammar of the Arabic language cannot be changed because to do so would mean that the meaning of the Quran would change as well.

[LeesaJohnson]

I would like to learn the Chinese language.