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In Defense of Latin

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Re: In Defense of Latin

#61

Post by btilly »

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.

Primitive means, relating to, denoting, or preserving the character of an early stage in the evolutionary or historical development of something.

Being inflected is a mark of a language that hasn't yet become positional. It is therefore an objective mark of primitiveness in the language.

Sophistication, on the other hand, is in the eye of the beholder. Which is more sophisticated, flowery descriptive speech or very simple speech that communicates complicated ideas? Arguments can be made for or against Jane Austen or Terence Tao as being more sophisticated.

Latin allows one to say little at great length while sounding very smart. Which a classical education teaches us to value. But when we say things simply we can think and express more complicated things. Which is more sophisticated?

Please put me on the side of Terrence Tao.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#62

Post by ngcc_hk »

Obviously as an extract the quote can only single out certain aspects of the thing. Here Latin has arbitrary order, history, beautiful etc. Also should have said it is the common root of or at least strong influence to European language.

But still why today learn it depend upon the key question. If I do not learn it what is the impact. Not sure. That is my answer.

Learning Hebrew for bible reading. If forced German for philosophical work. Latin? Not sure.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#64

Post by School-Cotton »

WorldMaker wrote: post #58
School-Cotton wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 t…

> it can be used to distinguish someone that learned English writing rules in a formal educational setting versus those that did not.

Sure, this might be true, and I'm aware that it's what you meant, but it's not the same as being a way to distinguish native from non-native speakers (or even writers).

Many, many non-native speakers got to quite advanced levels of formal English writing via formal schooling, especially in places like Northern Europe. I suspect people like that are actually more likely to avoid ending sentences with propositions than native speakers are.

I think what the person who started this sub-thread was referring to is stuff that really is intuitive for every cognitively normal native speaker, like the difference in meaning between "the dog bit the man" and "a dog bit the man". Practically every native speaker, including illiterates, would agree on whether "the", "a"/"an", or no article at all is correct in any given situation, whereas it's very difficult for many even highly educated non-native learners.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#65

Post by smcl »

hackyhacky wrote: post #60
smcl wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Oops, thanks! Fixed - these nuances still kinda escape me :-O

Re: In Defense of Latin

#66

Post by Maultasche »

bonoboTP wrote: post #41
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…

Back when I was learning Hungarian I was frustrated when trying to figure out what the proper word order was. Then I learned that most combinations of subject,object,verb were just fine and the difference between them was emphasis. It became a lot easier once I had figured that out.

Hungarian was really great for allowing me to see language from a different perspective. I also liked the gender-neutral third-person pronoun, where the same pronoun meant he/she/it. That made things simpler.

I got far enough to have simple conversations, and I traveled around Hungary for about 6 weeks one summer practicing the language and seeing the different parts of the country.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#67

Post by ngcc_hk »

A totally different comment: any one know if arbitrary word order so important feature of Latin as a language, why no such thing in computer language.

Lisp is Most flexible I suppose but basically it is fixed form (verb x). Whatever verb is it governs how x is interpret. Also you cannot eliminate (). Hence the basic and simple structure is fixed.

Not sure any use of arbitrary word order.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#68

Post by mumblemumble »

asveikau wrote: post #21
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…

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 impo…

The creole languages I'm familiar with tend to be at least as analytic as the most analytic of its parent languages, and possibly more analytic than any of them.

Haitian creole is the most analytic language I'm familiar with. I gather it's about on par with languages like Ewe, but I know next to nothing about Ewe, so I'm not sure on that. I don't think it absorbed a single inflection from French, though.

Modern English, arguably descended from a creole of Old English and Norman French, is less inflected as either of those parent languages. For example, both Old English and French have grammatical gender, but middle and modern English retain it only for third person singular pronouns.

I don't know much about the history of the development of the Romance languages, but I had always guessed that they are at least somewhat a result of creolization of Latin with local language groups, and, if my speculation (it's not even a hypothesis) is at all correct, that would imply that they all would tend to lose inflection, including agglutination, in the process.

So, all that said: Perhaps the reason eastern European languages are more like Latin in this respect is, ironically, because they were less influenced by Latin?

Re: In Defense of Latin

#69

Post by triska »

ngcc_hk wrote: post #67

A totally different comment: any one know if arbitrary word order so important feature of Latin as a language, why no such thing in computer language. Lisp is Most flexible I suppose but basically it is fixed form (verb x). Whatever verb is it governs how x is interpret. Also you cannot eliminate (). Hence the basic and simple structure is fixed. Not sure any use of arbitrary word order.

For example, in logic programming languages like Prolog and Mercury, you can write the goals of a rule, and also the clauses of a predicate, in any order you like while preserving the logical meaning of the code.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#70

Post by btilly »

School-Cotton wrote: post #47
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…

> 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 tha…

I have read articles on the topic but am too lazy to dig them up. However https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidirectionality_hypothesis indicates that there is indeed a preferred direction for language to evolve.

Incidentally Chinese did not evolve from Proto-Indo-European.

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