In Defense of Latin
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In Defense of Latin
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Re: In Defense of Latin
#2Latin is the most powerful natural language I know.
The reason is that the grammar is so developed that the word order is essentially arbitrary, and that, together with other grammatical features, gives rise to a method I have not seen so fully realized in any other language:
It allows you to express the content in such a way that the way you express it matches the content.
For example, consider the verses:
Daedalus interea Creten longumque perosus
exilium tactusque loci natalis amore
Especially in the Metamorphoses, this strategy is extremely common and applied masterfully: If something is being described that is hard to do, then the sentence is structured in such a way that it is comparatively hard to understand, by using an unusual word order etc. If things are far apart, the words are themselves far apart etc. For quick things, words are omitted that cannot be omitted in other languages etc.
Re: In Defense of Latin
#3Hillaire Belloc made the interesting claim that it was thanks to Latin that the various European languages were able to develop so freely: you could always communicate in Latin when you traveled.
He also noted that the various lingua francas since Latin was lost have tended to suffer from becoming the world language. Looking at English today one is hard pressed to disagree.
Re: In Defense of Latin
#4Hillaire Belloc made the interesting claim that it was thanks to Latin that the various European languages were able to develop so freely: you could always communicate in Latin when you traveled. He also noted that the various lingua francas since Latin was lost have tended to suffer from becoming the world language. Looking at English today one is hard pressed to disagree.
How has English suffered from becoming the world language? I don't see it.
Re: In Defense of Latin
#5Latin is the most powerful natural language I know. The reason is that the grammar is so developed that the word order is essentially arbitrary, and that, together with other grammatical features, gives rise to a method I have not seen so fully realized in any other language: It allows you to express the content in such a way that the way you express it matches the content. For example, consider the verses: Daedalus…
I studied Latin in high school, but I don't know much about its evolution.
When you say it's the "most powerful natural language" that you know, is that some late, cleaned-up version used by the best-educated? Or does that include earlier / common-use (vulgate?) forms as well?
Re: In Defense of Latin
#6Hillaire Belloc made the interesting claim that it was thanks to Latin that the various European languages were able to develop so freely: you could always communicate in Latin when you traveled. He also noted that the various lingua francas since Latin was lost have tended to suffer from becoming the world language. Looking at English today one is hard pressed to disagree.
In school, one of our teachers was also a priest, and he told us that his job once required him to travel to the (former) Soviet Union.
His Russian colleague did not speak German, and he did not speak Russian. Latin was the only language in which they could communicate, and the first question by the Russian priest was:
re publica missus?
i.e., "[Were you] sent by the state?"
Re: In Defense of Latin
#7Latin is the most powerful natural language I know. The reason is that the grammar is so developed that the word order is essentially arbitrary, and that, together with other grammatical features, gives rise to a method I have not seen so fully realized in any other language: It allows you to express the content in such a way that the way you express it matches the content. For example, consider the verses: Daedalus…
Yes the order is essentially arbitrary.
I took 6 years of Latin classes in school (12 yo -> 18 yo). The first day I learned the order "didn't matter", I was so happy. I thought it would make it so easy to study.
Then after 6 years, I was still terrible at Latin. Instead of "The soldier yield the sword at the ennemy", I would always end up with "The sword yield the ennemy at the soldier" (you get the point).
I think the order is so important to make the language easy. For me in certainly didn't help studying Latin (even coming from French). Maybe it was my math spirit or so, I don't know.
But your point is totally valid. Authors (I studied Cicero a lot during the last year) basically use that to enrich their style constantly.
Re: In Defense of Latin
#8Latin is the most powerful natural language I know. The reason is that the grammar is so developed that the word order is essentially arbitrary, and that, together with other grammatical features, gives rise to a method I have not seen so fully realized in any other language: It allows you to express the content in such a way that the way you express it matches the content. For example, consider the verses: Daedalus…
I studied Latin in high school, but I don't know much about its evolution. When you say it's the "most powerful natural language" that you know, is that some late, cleaned-up version used by the best-educated? Or does that include earlier / common-use (vulgate?) forms as well?
I mean that Latin is the only language I know which provides this extreme flexibility of form, to match what you want to describe by means of the structure and features of the sentence itself.
This flexbility is available in various degrees in other languages too, but, at least in my experience, never quite to such extreme extent.
One thing is definitely true: The most powerful Latin poetry only occurs in dedicated works of art, and realistically, nobody would have been able to pull this off in realtime. And further, even the most educated Latin poets were quite differently skilled in the application of this technique.
Personally, the complete mastery of this technique is one of the reasons why I enjoy reading Ovid before all others: Ovid not only applies this technique in almost each individual verse, but even throughout entire books, for example by structuring them in such a way that the most central message occurs in the center of the book, that metamorphoses that take a long time appear many pages apart etc.
Re: In Defense of Latin
#9Latin is the most powerful natural language I know. The reason is that the grammar is so developed that the word order is essentially arbitrary, and that, together with other grammatical features, gives rise to a method I have not seen so fully realized in any other language: It allows you to express the content in such a way that the way you express it matches the content. For example, consider the verses: Daedalus…
But we can shuffle the order in other languages too, we just rely on explicit punctuation, right?
Daedalus, meanwhile, on Crete's long detested
exile, longing for his birthplaceRe: In Defense of Latin
#10Latin is the most powerful natural language I know. The reason is that the grammar is so developed that the word order is essentially arbitrary, and that, together with other grammatical features, gives rise to a method I have not seen so fully realized in any other language: It allows you to express the content in such a way that the way you express it matches the content. For example, consider the verses: Daedalus…
But we can shuffle the order in other languages too, we just rely on explicit punctuation, right? Daedalus, meanwhile, on Crete's long detested exile, longing for his birthplace
Yes, and it is a key characteristic of a skillful translator that such features are kept in the translation.
This translation is very nice, but notice for example that the word "long" is itself now no longer long in the translation ("longumque" is longer, both syntactically and also when spoken, and that is made possible in Latin by the suffix "-que" that can be attached to words to mean "and").
Also, many passages cannot be translated so nicely, for example because the translation would become too long to fit the metre, or because too erratic the word order would in English become.