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In Defense of Latin

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Re: In Defense of Latin

#71

Post by hackyhacky »

triska wrote: post #69
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.

This is not correct. Clauses of a predicate are evaluated in order, which can be significant if, for example, you want to do in-order vs pre-order vs post-order traversal of a binary tree.

  inorderTraversal(t(V, L, R), Z) :- inorderTraversal(L, Z).
  inorderTraversal(t(V, L, R), V).
  inorderTraversal(t(V, L, R), Z) :- inorderTraversal(R, Z).
Also, the meaning of ordering of goals with a rule may be significant:

  ?- not(member(X,[a,b,c])), X=f.
  false.
  
  ?- X=f, not(member(X,[a,b,c])). 
  X = f.
Although Prolog aspires to represent logic, it is still really just a logic-flavored programming language.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#72

Post by 2ion »

Studying Latin and Ancient Greek in high school unlocked so much knowledge and intuition for me:

* Easy to grok how Romance languages work (French, Italian, etc), you can make up a lot of vocabulary on the spot, knowing Latin, and still be right

* Borrowed words from Latin in whatever language (English, German) are intelligible, you don't have to learn their meaning because it's a composite of something Latin

* THis immediately affects your expression in writing as well as speech positively

* Fantastic literature in original script readily accessible

* Many good hours spent with improving the translations of especially tricky passages, analyzing sentences and grammatical structures had great overlap with how I approached thinking deeply about my other passions, Math and Astronomy so I got better at both groking and structuring information as well as patterns of thought when it comes to analyzing interesting problems. Honestly, at the end of high school I hadn't cared had I become a classical philologist if not for the earning prospects of that path.

In contrast, how English was taught as a foreign language never came close. It was a totally uninspiring experience.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#73

Post by asveikau »

mumblemumble wrote: post #68
asveikau wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Engli…

Well, there was something called "Vulgar Latin" which varied by region, and I do think the biggest change was that differing pronunciations forced grammar changes as you could no longer differentiate with "silent" letters.

The loss of inflection due to final consonants no longer being pronounced explains quite a bit of things I found mysterious when learning romance languages without much Latin knowledge.

Some examples using Spanish:

* Spanish lost most neuter forms, but why does it distinguish este and esto [both meaning "this"]? Well, in Latin it was iste and istud respectively, so dropping final consonants still preserves distinct forms: iste and istu. Contrast that with most masculine/neuter contrasts: bonus and bonum both become bonu. (Hence, only one bueno in Spanish.)

* When I learned the language I was always confused why imperfect or present subjunctive first person singular is indistinguishable from third person. (eg. yo amaba, el amaba, I loved, he loved) Well, in Latin, those differed by a final consonant: ego amabam vs. amabat for third person.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#74

Post by triska »

hackyhacky wrote: post #71
triska wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is not correct. Clauses of a predicate are evaluated in order, which can be significant if, for example, you want to do in-order vs pre-order vs post-order traversal of a binary tree. inorderTraversal(t(V, L, R), Z) :- inorderTraversal(L, Z). inorderTraversal(t(V, L, R), V). inorderTraversal(t(V, L, R), Z) :- inorderTraversal(R, Z). Also, the meaning of ordering of goals with a rule may be significant: ?- not(me…

When you say "evaluated", then this is a procedural aspect that depends on the concrete evaluation strategy that is being used. For example, we can evaluate logic programs top down, bottom up, using various forms of resolution etc. Mercury will reorder goals automatically to satisfy certain mode constraints etc. Importantly, the actual meaning of a logic program in the sense of solutions it describes are not influenced by different evaluation strategies, although some may be more effective or efficient than others.

As to the examples using not/1: This is an extra-logical predicate where this flexibility indeed does not apply, since its meaning depends on the evaluation strategy.

However, for this concrete case, we can use the purely logical predicate memberd_t/3 to retain desirable logical properties such as commutativity of conjunction:

    ?- memberd_t(X, [a,b,c], true), X = f.
    false.

    ?- X = f, memberd_t(X, [a,b,c], true).
    false.
memberd_t/3 is available in library(reif) for various Prolog systems.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#75

Post by ARandomerDude »

School-Cotton wrote: post #59
ARandomerDude wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> if your aesthetic preference is such that you find languages...But if we're just talking about personal taste...it's arbitrary

Again, I don't agree with your worldview. The reason I referred to the Sistine Chapel was to provide an analogy: it doesn't merely fit my preferences better than my sketch. It is objectively better. There is something in the painting that is real. The beauty is real.

But on your view, the beauty is unreal. It's only real if you can measure it. I disagree. Objectively. I think you're wrong and I suspect you think I'm wrong. And that means there is an objective philosophical truth even though we can't measure it.

ETA: not all truth is immeasurable, of course. There are plenty of measurable truths (for example, how many comments are on this thread, or the boiling point of water at standard pressure). But some truth cannot be measured in a laboratory, and that doesn't make it false or unreal.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#76

Post by notahacker »

Loughla wrote: post #24
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.

Can I have examples of what you mean by this?

Words which for usually fairly arbitrary reasons have the same plural and singular form are a particular irritant of mine, not least because of how awkward I feel having to correct them on colleagues' client proposals and presentations when I'd really rather be suggesting more useful changes. We've got a number of other nonstandard pluralizations and conjugations from ancient Germanic and modern loanwords alike, which wouldn't be missed if they were um... losed

But taken further down the path of how the language could evolve to remove grammatical forms not actually conveying anything useful, I think we could happily make articles optional and preferred only when an a/the distinction actually matters; many ESL speakers communicate perfectly lucidly without them at all. Normally if don't include article in sentence it's not problem; except if I write business email like this people think I'm foreigner.

Before English was a global language [and before the printing press tbf] Middle English managed to lose an entire set of grammatical gender markers affecting nearly every word, after the printing press we lost the thee/thou distinction [outside Shakespeare, the KJV and a few regional dialects], and yet we've still got grammar guides insistent on preserving 'whom' and claiming that despite how people actually speak the language one shouldn't really use 'you' as generic third party pronoun

Re: In Defense of Latin

#77

Post by School-Cotton »

btilly wrote: post #70
School-Cotton wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Things moving in one direction wouldn’t preclude the existence of cycles.

For example: a language has noun cases -> phonological changes cause the endings to merge together, requiring prepositions to disambiguate -> prepositions become more tightly bound to the words they modify and are eventually reanalyzed as case markings. Now we’re back with cases even if languages can only take each step in the given direction.

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

You’re right, but I meant to imply that PIE is the oldest language whose grammar we know a lot about, not that it’s the ancestor of every modern language.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#78

Post by School-Cotton »

Koshkin wrote: post #52
hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I’m not familiar with Portuguese, but for what it’s worth, Spanish has much freer word order than French.

Random example: “I can’t do it” in Spanish can either be no lo puedo hacer or no puedo hacerlo. In colloquial French, j’peux pas l’faire is the only option (or, if you prefer the more standard/formal register: je ne peux pas le faire). This despite “le” and “lo” being direct cognates.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#79

Post by bonoboTP »

Maultasche wrote: post #66
bonoboTP wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pr…

> Then I learned that most combinations of subject,object,verb were just fine and the difference between them was emphasis.

That's true, but the options are often more limited than what one might think based on the above. While the same sentence could theoretically be reshuffled in many orders and yield potentially correct variants for specific, often very contrived contexts, when you have one particular context, you often have to pick one order so that you sound natural.

I would say Hungarian word order is fairly rigid, but it expresses not the syntax of the sentence but the pragmatics. Arguably Hungarian is a topic-prominent language [1], but historically scholars have described Hungarian grammar in terms of concepts from the highly-regarded European languages, like Latin and Greek and everything that doesn't fit that schematic was/is regarded as "fluff", "arbitrary" and "free". There's a lot of structured complexity in there, but it's not in popular grammars (e.g. those used in Hungarian elementary/secondary schools and books for foreigners) and Hungarians themselves won't be able to say why one version "sounds better" than another, because we never learn it ourselves. You're just supposed to pick it up, or if you're so inclined, dig up some academic papers from more recent years.

> I also liked the gender-neutral third-person pronoun, where the same pronoun meant he/she/it. That made things simpler.

Yep, good to be outside of all the gender pronoun drama.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic-prominent_language

Re: In Defense of Latin

#80

Post by kragen »

triska wrote: post #74
hackyhacky wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not correct. Clauses of a predicate are evaluated in order, which can be significant if, for example, you want to do in-order vs pre-order vs post-order traversal of a binary tree. inorderTraversal(t(V, L, R), Z) :- inorderTraversal(L, Z). inorderTraversal(t(V, L, R), V). inorderTraversal(t(V, L, R), Z) :- inorderTraversal(R, Z). Also, the meaning of ordering of goals with a rule may be significant: ?- not(me…

When you say "evaluated", then this is a procedural aspect that depends on the concrete evaluation strategy that is being used. For example, we can evaluate logic programs top down, bottom up, using various forms of resolution etc. Mercury will reorder goals automatically to satisfy certain mode constraints etc. Importantly, the actual meaning of a logic program in the sense of solutions it describes are not influenc…

> then this is a procedural aspect that depends on the concrete evaluation strategy that is being used.

Yes, but Prolog specifies a particular concrete evaluation strategy, and you have to rely on it to write practical programs.

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