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If I am ever going to translate "Deutsche Sagen" ("German Legends") by the Brothers Grimm, I will probably have to re-learn #Latin - they used too many Latin-language sources for this work.

I suppose my Latin teachers from back in school will have had the last laugh then after all.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche…

in reply to Jürgen Hubert

I'm faced with a similar problem doing my deep dives into Chinese folklore. Classical Chinese is a real problem to decode!
in reply to 🇨🇦🇩🇪🇨🇳张殿李🇨🇳🇩🇪🇨🇦

That sounds... tricky.

At least Latin _is_ covered by many online translation tools, although I am not sure how accurate they are.

in reply to Jürgen Hubert

Classical Chinese (or more anal retentively Literary Chinese) is a really difficult language for a variety of reasons.

1. It is essentially a written-only form of language. It uses the fact that two syllables with the same pronunciation but different meanings can be determined by looking at the character. In vernacular Chinese you can't do this. If you say "shu3" which one do you mean? So an extra disambiguating syllable is added like "lao3shu3" for "mouse".

🧵 ▶️