Is it worth learning a classical language for reading the earliest in Western canon?
Where does one start and with which texts?
Something like latin enriches the languages you already know and any further ones you'll learn.
>>7596778
Can you expand on this, please?
>>7596830
Not him but learning Latin is a bit of an intellectual rite of passage, or used to be, because aside from initiating you into the GREAT WORKS of Cicero and so on (which you may or may not value, and remember this was also inertia from an age where translations where much, much rarer, whereas nowadays you can build a career in academia by translating the obscurest shit you can find), learning a classical language teaches you rigorously and "cleanly" how to learn a language.
Living languages have a lot of distractions and infinite points at which you can go take your partial knowledge and apply it to more-or-less workable conversation with living people and living culture. Go talk to half the professors of foreign extraction in some university department, and their English will be quirky and shitty even after decades, because fundamentally it's fine to speak quirky and shitty English. Their reading is probably slightly more serviceable and they can get along.
But if you want to be able to read and enjoy Mallarme or fucking Heidegger or something, you need to know German to the same degree that people used to know Latin. Learning Latin will make you realize how vital and useful it is to apply the same strategy to a modern language, and so to avoid all those distractions.
