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

41–50 of 199 posts

Re: In Defense of Latin

#41

Post by bonoboTP »

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…

As others have written, many languages are like this.

My native Hungarian is also very powerful for poetry. It distinguishes between long and short vowels, allowing for close emulation of Greek and Roman poetry. Being agglutinative, it's also quite free in word order. Well, free is not the right word, because depending on the context and emphasis, only some orders are applicable. The point is, the word order carries higher level meaning, like intention and pragmatics instead of syntax.

There's also a huge amount of poetry written mostly in the 18th-20th centuries, but nobody except Hungarians can understand it so it's essentially unknown outside of Hungary.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#42

Post by ARandomerDude »

btilly wrote: post #35
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 key phrase is "I know". Latin is not the only one. As much as you may like this feature, being inflected marks marks Latin as a primitive language, not a sophisticated one. The reason is that it is easy for a language to lose grammatical rules, but very hard to gain them. By this measure French is more modern than Latin because it is no longer inflected, and Eng…

> being inflected marks marks Latin as a primitive language, not a sophisticated one

> it is easy for a language to lose grammatical rules, but very hard to gain them

You're assuming loss of grammar over time is a mark of sophistication, but it's hard to see how. I think you have it backwards.

Literary, classical Greek and Latin absolutely destroy English in their sophistication.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#43

Post by JackFr »

WorldMaker wrote: post #30
notahacker wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I am unfamiliar with objective. Are you referring collectively to the accusative and dative?

Re: In Defense of Latin

#44

Post by School-Cotton »

ARandomerDude wrote: post #42
btilly wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Latin is the most powerful natural language I know. The key phrase is "I know". Latin is not the only one. As much as you may like this feature, being inflected marks marks Latin as a primitive language, not a sophisticated one. The reason is that it is easy for a language to lose grammatical rules, but very hard to gain them. By this measure French is more modern than Latin because it is no longer inflected, and Eng…

> being inflected marks marks Latin as a primitive language, not a sophisticated one > it is easy for a language to lose grammatical rules, but very hard to gain them You're assuming loss of grammar over time is a mark of sophistication, but it's hard to see how. I think you have it backwards. Literary, classical Greek and Latin absolutely destroy English in their sophistication.

What is the scientific or objective way of measuring "sophistication" of a language that you are using to make this claim?

Re: In Defense of Latin

#45

Post by JackFr »

School-Cotton wrote: post #28
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.

> If not, this is totally unfalsifiable and unscientific.

I don't think that's a particularly good standard to judge recalling an observation made by Belloc.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#46

Post by Koshkin »

guiraldelli wrote: post #23
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 thi…

Actually, Lithuanian is the most archaic language in Europe, which is what makes it so good.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#47

Post by School-Cotton »

btilly wrote: post #35
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 key phrase is "I know". Latin is not the only one. As much as you may like this feature, being inflected marks marks Latin as a primitive language, not a sophisticated one. The reason is that it is easy for a language to lose grammatical rules, but very hard to gain them. By this measure French is more modern than Latin because it is no longer inflected, and Eng…

> it is easy for a language to lose grammatical rules, but very hard to gain them.

Do you have any citations for this? As far as I know (though I'm not an expert), academic linguists disagree.

https://www.reddit.com/r/asklinguistics/comments/abiphn/has_...

Romance languages have gained inflections that Latin didn't have (from the above link: the future tense conjugations are an innovation in the Romance languages that didn't exist in Latin).

Funnily enough given your example, Chinese languages have gained morphology too: Mandarin has the aspect-marking suffix 了, whereas Classical Chinese didn't.

We can't reconstruct the history of language any further back than Proto-Indo-European, so there's no way to know whether it developed from some less-inflected language.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#48

Post by skissane »

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

It isn't really arbitrary. There is a standard order. You can use non-standard orders, but that changes the emphasis of the sentence. If you don't want to emphasise some part of the sentence, you stick to the standard order. If you are going to emphasise some part of the sentence, that emphasis ought to make sense in the context. (Imagine if I wrote in English "The CAT sat on the mat" – my emphasis on the word "cat" needs to make sense in the broader context in which I am using that sentence, or else I'm using the language in an eccentric way.)

(An exception to this is poetry, where non-standard word order can be used for reasons of metre rather than emphasis alone. But, having somewhat different rules for poetry isn't unique to Latin, the same is true for many other languages, English included.)

Re: In Defense of Latin

#49

Post by bonoboTP »

btilly wrote: post #35
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 key phrase is "I know". Latin is not the only one. As much as you may like this feature, being inflected marks marks Latin as a primitive language, not a sophisticated one. The reason is that it is easy for a language to lose grammatical rules, but very hard to gain them. By this measure French is more modern than Latin because it is no longer inflected, and Eng…

> being inflected marks marks Latin as a primitive language, not a sophisticated one.

This doesn't sound right to me. Primitive and sophisticated isn't really how modern linguistics understands languages (for like at least like half or a full century). There's no straight path of progress for all languages. Note how it can also be reversed by a proponent (or native speaker) of an inflected language: English is so crude and primitive with its robotic Tarzan-like chaining of bare words, as opposed to the sophisticated, properly inflected forms that perfectly blend into the sentence according to their roles. (Which by the way would also be bogus.)

> The reason is that it is easy for a language to lose grammatical rules, but very hard to gain them.

Word order is also "grammatical rules", as it includes syntax too, not just morphology. English has tons of grammatical rules despite having very simple morphology.

Also, in Hungarian many suffixes were originally postpositions but became fused with the words and took on vowel harmony. E.g. "utu rea" (road + onto) from the first surviving written Hungarian text became útra in modern Hungarian, with the -ra/-re suffix meaning "onto".

Re: In Defense of Latin

#50

Post by School-Cotton »

Koshkin wrote: post #46
guiraldelli wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 thi…

Actually, Lithuanian is the most archaic language in Europe, which is what makes it so good.

> Lithuanian is the most archaic language in Europe

By what metric?

> which is what makes it so good

By what metric?

Post reply on HN