Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

In Defense of Latin

lithub.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 199 posts

Re: In Defense of Latin

#21

Post by asveikau »

hackyhacky wrote: post #12
triska wrote: post #2

Latin 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…

The reason is that the grammar is so developed that the word order is essentially arbitrary Lots of languages are like this. Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Polish, etc. And those are just the ones that I know. Janu miluje Petr. -- PETR loves Jana. Petr miluje Janu. -- Petr loves JANA. Petr Janu miluje. -- Petr LOVES Jana. etc etc The only people who say that Latin is uniquely flexible are those people with no experience i…

The real answer is that all European languages used to be this way, and western Europe at some point* started relying more heavily on fixed word orders and prepositions instead of suffices, but further east in Europe they did not have this trend.

* in romance languages my understanding is that the big deal was that consonants at the end of words and sometimes syllables were no longer pronounced, therefore it was impossible to distinguish a bunch of suffices. eg. final -m nasalized the vowel before it and then later was dropped entirely. Or you could no longer distinguish between -us and -um because they were both -u (later -o).

Re: In Defense of Latin

#23

Post by guiraldelli »

triska wrote: post #2

Latin 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…

> Latin 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 gives rise to a method I have not seen so fully realized in any other language:

I have the pleasure to experience this freedom on word order in my native language (Portuguese) and the one I am currently learning (Lithuanian). [1]

Although Portuguese presents this feature, it doesn't have grammatical cases, which I assume it is the feature you describe as "grammar is so developed".

On the other hand, Lithuanian has grammatical cases and other grammatical features (e.g., prefix verbs with prepositions) which, as yourself put it, allow texts to be much more expressive than the ones in other languages I can read. In fact, I am astonished by how compactly and accurately one is possible to expresses oneself in that language!

Is it a case for all languages with grammatical case? Are most of the Europeans (languages) [2] so expressive? Is it possible that more incredible writers than Shakespeare or Cervantes are hidden from the general global public because of the complexity to translate their works?

I have a lot of those speculative questions in my mind, which I expect to find an answer someday.

And thank you for your nice comment.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_order#Pragmatic_word_or...

[2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_case

Re: In Defense of Latin

#24

Post by Loughla »

notahacker wrote: post #19
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose one could argue that the people who come to English as a world language are not that great at the language, and thus they are not capable of helping it improve. (this is however belied by evidence that often those authors who have most helped English develop have been at the periphery of the culture) I often see something that could inspire this argument when I travel, people have made a native and English…

I'm inclined to suggest the blame lies the other way around: some of the more stupid, ugly and arbitrary grammatical quirks which ought to be dropped from the English language or made optional and context sensitive persist only because they act as a means to identify the writer is a native speaker and/or sufficiently highly educated.

Can I have examples of what you mean by this?

Re: In Defense of Latin

#25

Post by schoen »

triska wrote: post #6
vearwhershuh wrote: post #3

Hillaire 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?"

Primo Levi managed to use Latin to communicate with a Polish priest with whom he didn't have any other language in common.

> After World War II the Italian writer and Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi was walking back to Italy from Poland. Tired and starving, he met a priest, who spoke neither French, or German, or Italian. Ubi est mensa pauperorum? Levi asked. Where is the table for paupers?

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jul-21-bk-chamb...

(I have also used Latin to communicate with a priest with whom I didn't share any other language, although it was less surprising because it was at a spoken Latin event.)

Re: In Defense of Latin

#26

Post by School-Cotton »

notahacker wrote: post #19
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose one could argue that the people who come to English as a world language are not that great at the language, and thus they are not capable of helping it improve. (this is however belied by evidence that often those authors who have most helped English develop have been at the periphery of the culture) I often see something that could inspire this argument when I travel, people have made a native and English…

I'm inclined to suggest the blame lies the other way around: some of the more stupid, ugly and arbitrary grammatical quirks which ought to be dropped from the English language or made optional and context sensitive persist only because they act as a means to identify the writer is a native speaker and/or sufficiently highly educated.

I suspect that every language has just as many weird quirks as English, and you're only aware of English's because it's the language you speak/write best.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#27

Post by smcl »

greydius wrote: post #17
hackyhacky wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason is that the grammar is so developed that the word order is essentially arbitrary Lots of languages are like this. Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Polish, etc. And those are just the ones that I know. Janu miluje Petr. -- PETR loves Jana. Petr miluje Janu. -- Petr loves JANA. Petr Janu miluje. -- Petr LOVES Jana. etc etc The only people who say that Latin is uniquely flexible are those people with no experience i…

Can you explain how your first two examples mean the same thing?

Shameless plug, I wrote about this here: https://blog.mclemon.io/cases-are-hard-who-punched-who - I used a slightly more one-sided example (Petr punches Pavel) to start things off ... but I talked a bit more about other cases to explain how it all fits together and why they're important.

Basically though, in the specific example in the GP comment we know who loves whom by the order of words in the sentence - "${subject} loves ${object}" which is different from "${object} loves ${subject}". We know this because the word order in English tells us this.

But in Czech and Latin this isn't how it works - the word order doesn't have the same significance or meaning as it does in English [1]. You indicate who does what by making a little modification to the words. In this example it's one of the simpler cases - a simple verb with a subject and an object. The subject is the "nominative" case (like the dictionary/default form of a word) and the object should be in the "accusative" case. So it's actually something like "${object.nominative()} loves ${subject.accusative()}".

And just to confuse you further - it's not just "who does what" - there are other cases that denote doing something with or to or in :-) I give some examples in the above link

[1] = that's not to say word order doesn't have a role, it's just not the same role as in English

Re: In Defense of Latin

#28

Post by School-Cotton »

vearwhershuh wrote: post #3

Hillaire 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.

Do you have examples of languages that didn't "develop freely"? If not, this is totally unfalsifiable and unscientific.

(In fact, what does it even mean for a language to "develop"?)

There are many languages around the world that have followed their national evolution despite no contact with Latin, or even with literacy at all.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#29

Post by btilly »

schoen wrote: post #20
greydius wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain how your first two examples mean the same thing?

I assume "Janu" is the accusative form of "Jana", indicating that Jana is the recipient rather than the source of the love in each sentence.

That assumption is correct. You see the same conjugation form in other Slavic languages, including Russian.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#30

Post by WorldMaker »

notahacker wrote: post #19
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose one could argue that the people who come to English as a world language are not that great at the language, and thus they are not capable of helping it improve. (this is however belied by evidence that often those authors who have most helped English develop have been at the periphery of the culture) I often see something that could inspire this argument when I travel, people have made a native and English…

I'm inclined to suggest the blame lies the other way around: some of the more stupid, ugly and arbitrary grammatical quirks which ought to be dropped from the English language or made optional and context sensitive persist only because they act as a means to identify the writer is a native speaker and/or sufficiently highly educated.

The interesting part of that to me, too, is how many of them roundabout derive from eras where erudite and highly educated English speakers were forced to learn Latin as well, and in so doing apply Latin grammar rules to English that don't apply to natural English. The most obvious example being "never end a sentence with a preposition", which is a very clear grammar violation in Latin, but natural English has ended sentences with prepositions for a very long time.

To a lesser extent I think it is also Latin education's fault why the "objective" case continues to linger in English, despite being so mostly dead, as it acts as an education marker. `Whom` is a zombie only insisted upon by certain educations and should just be buried and put out of its misery. The confusion around `me` versus `I` and which scenarios to use which probably will only get worse.

Post reply on HN