I want to learn a difficult dead language What's the most

>>1880546
German

>>1880546
Sumerian probably. Maybe Sanskrit if you want something a bit broader and probably with more learning materials. Also PIE if you want to be the special kind of autist who learns a reconstructed language.

>>1880546
Akkadian

>>1880546
Voynich Manuscript.

>>1880546
Ancient Hebrew desu

>>1880546
Old greek

>>1880546
Soghdian, it's pretty niche.

>>1880546
If you want it to be the most difficult learn something else, but if you want access to the best ancient texts, there is literally no debate, it is Hellenic and Attic Greek

>>1880546
Esperanto

Learn enochian

File: smug esperantist pepe.png (57KB, 225x225px) Image search: [Google]

57KB, 225x225px

>>1881149
>implicas, ke esperanto estas morta lingvo
Ĝi kreskas ĉiutage, amiko

>>1881073
That or Egyptian.

>>1880546
Sanskrit will anally rape you with no lubricant and zero love.

It's hard.

t. Sanskrit scholar.

>>1881331
Elaborate

>>1881276
>Filename not in esperanto

Kio falsaĵo...

>>1881346
Not that it even fucking matters if it's just gonna be something like "smuga esperantista pepeo"

Sometimes I wonder why the language even exists it its just english relexified.

>>1880684
Reading up on PIE would make learning ancient IE languages much easier, especially Ancient Greek and Sanskrit which are basically PIE with some sound changes and innovated grammatical forms.

>>1881335
- Three genders.
- About 15 noun declensions, with as many exceptions to those declensions as there are declensions.
- First, second, and third dual persons.
- About 12 tenses for each: present, imperfect, benedictive, conditional, first aorist, second aorist, first perfect, periphrastic perfect, first pluperfect, second pluperfect, imperative, optative, two future tenses. Including participles for each tense, gerunds, and infinitives.
- 10 verb conjugations, which each differ completely from the base noun in the present, future, and perfect for some reason.
- Desiderative, frequentative, and intensive derivative verbs.
- An Arabic-like derivative root system.
- Topped off with sandhi - a system of modifying the first and last letters of words depending on its neighbours, removing the spaces between words, and running whole paragraphs into one word.

It's horrifying.

shatrurvidyayaavidyaitiraamo'vadat.
Rama said that the enemy of knowledge is ignorance.

>>1881409
Sanskrit has a lot of non-IE influence from the surrounding Dravidian languages.

And Ancient Greek is quite removed from IE; Latin is closer than Ancient Greek.

>>1881416
First two apply for German and that's not overly crazy to get your head around

All the rest of it sounds cool as fuck

>>1881431
What was etruscan language like? It wasn't PIE.

Was Rome taking over the Peninsula sort of seen as like a foreign invasion or were they pretty much together and nobody cared about language differences? What was Europe like transitioning from whatever it was before to PIE people?

>>1881431
>Sanskrit has a lot of non-IE influence from the surrounding Dravidian languages.
Mostly just in phonology, e.g. the development of retroflex consonants.

>And Ancient Greek is quite removed from IE; Latin is closer than Ancient Greek.
Explain. I've always been under the impression Latin was one of the more innovative and streamlined branches, like Germanic.

Ancient Greek has the closest vowel system to PIE, it pretty much preserves the entire cowgill-rix system, and also preserves ablaut best in nouns.

>>1881416
And I forgot - it's also written in Devanagari script.

>>1881452
The gender part of Sanskrit isn't too bad. Much like Russian, noun gender is indicated (sometimes) by the endings of the words themselves.

bala - boy (short 'a', masculine)
balá - girl (long 'á', feminine)
phalam - fruit ('am', neuter)

There is obviously natural gender too.

pitr - father (masc.) (compare with Lat. pater; Grk patér)
mátr - mother (fem.) (mater, métér)
bhratr - brother (masc.) (frater, adelphos)
svasr - sister (fem.) (soror, adelphé)

>>1881469
I don't think anyone knows what Etruscan was really like. Except for very few loans into Latin, there's very little evidence for it. ('Autumnus', from which we get 'autumn' is thought to be Etruscan, the 'mn' being quite weird in Latin.)

>>1881481
Yeah, the retroflex stops. I think there may be some morphological stuff from Dravidian too - can't remember.

You're right about Greek vowels (Sanskrit got rid of 99% of them), but I think stuff like the disappeared digamma and initial breathings for 's' made Greek words noticeably different from PIE. Dunno.

>>1881346
Pardonu min
>>1881380
While Esperanto does have a lot of word derived from English, the vast majority isn't, and the grammar is radically different. The words are also extra familiar because English has so many loan words from other languages.

>>1881571
>phalam
is this the word famalam is derived from.

>>1881644
phalam - fruit
familia - family
famalam - fruit of family (close family, close friend)

>>1881644
'ph' is pronounced like the 'ph' in 'hophouse'.

From the same PIE root 'to enjoy', like Latin 'fructus' = 'thing enjoyed'.

>>1881686
So famalam is incest?

>>1880546
Latin or ancient Greek.

>>1880546
Definitely Sanskrit for the whole body of Hindu and Mahayana texts. Theravada canon is written in Pali.
Greek for philosophy and the New Testament in the original language.
Latin for all other knowledge from Europe.
Chinese for Taoist and Confucian stuff although classical Chinese is so complicated and cryptic even experts have a hard time deciphering it.
Hebrew and Arabic are mainly relevant to the study of their associated faiths.
No sense in learning a language which may only have a few texts when a translation would do.