 So it's been a couple weeks since I've done a video. So I figured I'd splash back on the scene doing a video that literally no one asked for. But someone's gonna want it because you know, it's you know, it's one of these topics that you you don't know. But you don't even know that you don't know. So you're definitely gonna learn something from it. But I will say that it is about grammar. Grammar, but of course not in the way that you understand it. So I'll go ahead and start it by saying saying it this way. So we have modern notions of what grammar is. And these are totally different from what the ancients thought about it. And I don't even mean the ancients. I mean like people, you know, in the 1500s. You know, the word grammar has totally changed in meaning over the past couple hundred years. And it means something very, like it has nothing to do with grade school grammar or the stuff that like generative linguists talk about nowadays. But anyway, so what do I mean by this? Okay. I was thinking about this because I was reading and I was actually writing a commentary to Dante Alighieri, the guy who wrote the Divine Comedy, you know, Inferno and all that kind of stuff. He wrote a book called De Volgare Elocuencia, okay? And this book is, it's in Latin, it's on vernacular dialects. But one of the things that it illustrates really strongly is that people of that time period, and this is gonna be, you know, for people nowadays, I'll say. There's generally the understanding that there are these Romance languages, there's Italian, there's French, there's Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, you know, all these languages and they all descend from Latin, okay? Latin was spoken in the Roman Empire and you know, the language has gradually changed in different regions to give us the Romance languages we have today, okay? So it's important to realize that that is a modern notion, the idea that these languages descend from Latin. Back when Dante was writing, the understanding was, first off, they didn't really have a word for Latin. You did go to school and you learned Latin, but it was referred to as grammar. That is, you took grammar classes and when you took a grammar class, it was basically the same as what we would now teach as a Latin class. And the percept back then was not that Latin was an anterior language to a lot of these other vernacular languages, but the idea was, and Dante illustrates this in his own writing, I mean, it's not like he argues this, it's just like something implicit. You know, Latin is viewed as a kind of synthetic language that the goal of which is to create an unchanging standard for all the people in the Roman, you know, Roman region. And of course, even modern linguists who are really big-brained, they actually have a notion similar to this. And that is, if you want to be really anal about it, French and Romanian and all those languages, they don't really descend from Latin. They really descend from vernacular languages, you know, proto-romance, which are basically reconstructed languages because they're not based on the grammar of Latin. They're based on, you know, what we can actually ascertain that people actually spoke based on these different languages and the actual attestations of like real-life speech. And it's very different from Latin. I mean, it's not total, I mean, they have the same words. They just often have different forms. They don't have the same grammatical categories. But the percept that people had at this period was the grammar, what we would call Latin in this context, but, you know, grammar was an abstraction. And the thing, you know, for those of you who are familiar with Latin or another, these older Indo-European languages, you know, they're different from modern languages in that they have a lot more, you know, inflected categories. They have more grammatical cases. They have more, you know, verb tenses and stuff like that. And the percept was when you learn one of these languages, you're learning sort of an advanced, like a state of language that's more representative of how humans are actually thinking. You learn all these new distinctions when you learn, let's say you knew French and you start learning, you know, grammar, aka Latin. You learn all these distinctions that don't exist in French, but do exist sort of at the subtle level. Like the French doesn't have an overt distinction between, you know, dative and ablative, but Latin does. And you realize, oh, there actually is sort of, you know, some semantics behind all these kind of distinctions. Now, so that's the distinct, and keep in mind, this is actually, this isn't just something that happened in Western Europe. This is, the Greeks were the same way. Greeks often thought of, you know, Greeks, of course, have many different dialects at the period. I mean, Greek is a little more standardized nowadays. But, you know, Greeks had very un-dialects and they, when they looked at, you know, what we call classical Greek, they viewed it as some kind of grammatical abstraction, which people might not have necessarily spoken as a real language. But, you know, just this kind of standard for people to abide by. And the same thing, it's actually constant across other Indo-European languages as well. In India, people had the same view of Sanskrit. Modern linguists will now look at Sanskrit, you know, and call it the Latin of India, because their view is, you know, most of the North Indian languages, most of the Indo-Aryan languages, descend from Sanskrit. But there, the perception of Indian grammarians was not that Sanskrit was necessarily changing. But that Sanskrit was a perfected speech. It wasn't original, it was actually invented. And actually, you know, speakers of Latin had the same idea. Latin wasn't something original, it was something invented, it was something perfected. In fact, the word Sanskrit, some skirtam, or whatever it is, that's actually what that means, more or less, refined speech. So, in mind you, you probably heard, I mean, if you know anything about Indo-European studies, you know, you probably hear that annoying quote by, what is it, William Jones or whatever, about, you know, how Sanskrit's the most ideal Indo-European languages and has, like, all these conservative categories. But one interesting thing is, even at that period, when Europeans went to India, they saw that Sanskrit was manifestly similar to Latin and Greek and Gothic and all these languages. But they looked at Indian languages, like Hindi and Bengali, that we now think of as being descended from Sanskrit, of course. But they looked at them and they were like, oh, these are something totally different. They don't look like Sanskrit at all. I mean, they borrow some words and stuff, but it looks like they're just totally different languages. And that was actually a common view at the time, that, you know, Sanskrit was this, you know, Sanskrit was the only Indo-Aryan language, and a lot of these other ones were just sort of, you know, copying from Sanskrit. Actually, another fun fact, which isn't as relevant. So there's this language that, in the literature, is referred to as Zend, and it's sort of a Persian, well, it's really Avestan, right? That's the old word for Avestan, Zend, and it just comes from the word for language. But in European scholarship, back in the mid-1800s, I want to say, there was actually a debate as to whether Zend was actually a real language, because there are some people who argued that it was just like degenerate Persians who, the heck is that? Degenerate Persians who just wanted to imitate Sanskrit. So they basically borrowed, because Zend, Avestan, and Sanskrit are actually very, very similar. They're very close in their form. And the idea in European scholarship was sort of, these languages are just too similar. Like it's probably just Persians are just copying from Indians. That was their idea. But anyway, so the point I'm getting at is that the idea of classical grammar, or the idea that Latin was a, as we know it, it was a spoken language, or something from which other languages descend, that wasn't so much the idea of people. And grammar, as they called it, or Latin, or Sanskrit, or anything else, was important not because of something historical. It's important because it's something ahistorical. On one side is a standard, a kind of social standard to which you can, people of different cultures can write, you know, French people, Spanish people, Italians, they can all write in Latin and communicate in a standard that isn't just a standard at one point in time. It's also a standard over the centuries. So you can read things written by, you know, Cicero or whatever. And at the same time, this kind of grammar was viewed as something that is a little bit deeper. It tells you a little bit more about, you know, what we would now call human cognition, the way that people look at events or stuff like that. Or the, or the, you know, people looked at, you analyze language to analyze, you know, how people think about things. And a grammar or Latin is a better representation in their idea of something like that. And of course, there are also religious, I should say there are also like religious connotations to a lot of the stuff, particularly in Sanskrit. Now, of course, you know, Europeans, especially after Christianization, you know, Latin and Greek were important, but they weren't like as religiously important. They were used in liturgy, but there was nothing about the Latin language that was like holy. You know, Europeans at the time usually were sort of Hebrew centered, because they thought that Hebrew was like the first language or whatever. And they sort of thought that it was, you know, the one unchanged language from the tower, tower of Babel or whatever. But Sanskrit does have a religious importance, because, you know, in order to pray properly, you have to say it in this liturgical language totally properly. And for those who don't know anything about, you know, the, I guess, a Paninian school of linguistics or whatever, you know, one of the reasons that Indian grammarians, which, you know, basically invented linguistics way back in the day, you know, even before Greeks were talking about it, they had an Indian linguist's had like a really few, a really full view of linguistics, we'll just say that. But back in the day, one of their motivations was to ensure that they had, you know, they knew everything about how the mouth produces languages. They know about voicing and, you know, all these kind of linguistic categories. That was something really religiously important, because you have to be able to pronounce prayers and stuff like that. So anyway, that's about all I wanted to talk about. That was all I wanted to talk about in this video and maybe a little bit more. But this is just one of those things where, like, and by the way, I mentioned a couple, you know, I mentioned, like, Divalgaria, Laquencia and stuff like that. Don't read translations of these things. Like this is the other thing, because, you know, if you need to read something in Latin, read it in Latin. Don't read a translation, because what often happens is the translators, you know, in the case of, you know, Dante's work, for example, translators will see the word grammar and they'll translate that as Latin, because that's the correspondence of the idea. But that hides the fact that people are just thinking differently about what these words mean. So anyway, but that's basically all I wanted to say. So that's it. See you guys next time.