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In Defense of Latin

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Re: In Defense of Latin

#51

Post by School-Cotton »

JackFr wrote: post #43
WorldMaker wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

English doesn't have an accusative or dative case. There are a few different names for the two different cases of English pronouns; "nominative" (I/he/she) vs. "oblique" (me/him/her) and "subjective" vs. "objective" are both reasonably common.

From Wikipedia:

> An objective case is marked on the English personal pronouns and as such serves the role of the accusative and dative cases that other Indo-European languages employ.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#52

Post by Koshkin »

hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #15
triska wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

I just tried a quick translation now looking up the latin dictionary. My native tongue is Portuguese so maybe I'm more used to uncommonly ordered sentences. My English vocabulary is limited, I had to lookup a better synonym for "long": Daedalus, meanwhile, on Crete's lingering detested exile, longing for his birthplace

How's Portuguese any different in that regard from other Romance languages like Spanish or French?

Re: In Defense of Latin

#53

Post by School-Cotton »

JackFr wrote: post #45
School-Cotton wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Let me be more clear: I suspect that regardless of whether Belloc believed it, the assertion is either false or meaningless. The correct way to judge whether I'm write or Belloc is involves pinning down what we mean in a scientific way.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#54

Post by WorldMaker »

JackFr wrote: post #43
WorldMaker wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

English merged accusative and dative centuries ago as it dropped most other cases, and this merged almost-a-case is generally called the "objective case" by English grammarians. Though the more accurate from the point of view of Latin grammarians name for the case is that English has an "oblique case".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_case

Re: In Defense of Latin

#55

Post by yaccz »

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…

> 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.

But why?

Re: In Defense of Latin

#56

Post by ARandomerDude »

School-Cotton wrote: post #44
ARandomerDude wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Well I don't agree with the modernist/empiricist worldview that question stems from.

I think some things are qualitative, and other things are quantitative. The Sistine Chapel is beautiful, but my sketches aren't. If I were to design an experiment, I might learn what molecules are moving or how many people agree with me, but that wouldn't change what I know about the elegance of the paintings (or languages).

Latin is the same way. Having spent a fair amount of time in it, I can see its beauty and sophistication.

Modern English is great. I love it, especially the size of the vocabulary. But it's a comparatively clumsy language, and it frequently abuses prepositions. Its over-dependence on word order also makes it easier to construct grammatically ambiguous statements, leading to misunderstandings. I don't struggle with those in Latin. The language is elegant. It doesn't take Cicero to communicate clearly because of the grammar. But in the hands of Cicero it's like fine art.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#57

Post by Koshkin »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #4
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.

How has English suffered from becoming the world language? I don't see it.

Greek did, that's for sure...

Re: In Defense of Latin

#58

Post by WorldMaker »

School-Cotton wrote: post #33
WorldMaker wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"never end a sentence with a preposition" is not a grammatical feature of English (from a scientific perspective where "English" is what we observe as being spoken by the community of native speakers, as opposed to something grammar books invented), and does not serve to distinguish native from non-native English speakers, at all. I don't think this was the sort of thing GP was thinking of. Edit: I didn't even intend…

There are still teachers today that teach "never end a sentence with a preposition" in a long chain game to some early English grammarians that tried to reapply the rule from Latin back onto English (to every native speaker's chagrin). It still impacts the way that many people write. Much of English "formal writing" still tends to soft require the rule and definitely in writing it can be used to distinguish someone that learned English writing rules in a formal educational setting versus those that did not. It very rarely filters into a way to distinguish someone's speech, but it's still a very living distinguishing characteristic in writing.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#59

Post by School-Cotton »

ARandomerDude wrote: post #56
School-Cotton wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well I don't agree with the modernist/empiricist worldview that question stems from. I think some things are qualitative, and other things are quantitative. The Sistine Chapel is beautiful, but my sketches aren't. If I were to design an experiment, I might learn what molecules are moving or how many people agree with me, but that wouldn't change what I know about the elegance of the paintings (or languages). Latin is…

OK, if your aesthetic preference is such that you find languages with complicated noun morphology more beautiful than those with complicated word-order constraints, that's fine.

But if we're just talking about personal taste, there's no real reason to debate it with other people, since it's arbitrary.

> Its over-dependence on word order also makes it easier to construct grammatically ambiguous statements, leading to misunderstandings.

Now this, on the other hand, is an objective, quantifiable statement that regardless of taste is either true or false. Incidentally, I strongly suspect that it is not in fact true, and that you only believe English sentences are more likely to be ambiguous than Latin ones is because you speak and write English better than Latin and so are more intuitively aware of its weirdness.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#60

Post by hackyhacky »

smcl wrote: post #27
greydius wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 - "${subje…

Regarding the linked blog page: It's a nice introduction to the idea of cases, but it's not entirely accurate: the usual dative/locative form of Pavel is Pavlovi. Pavlu would be used only when there's a surname present. Thus "o Pavlovi" but "o Pavlu Novákovi".
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