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In Defense of Latin

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Re: In Defense of Latin

#91

Post by Iv »

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.

Latin has been the language of erudite and priests but most of middle age had different languages used as trade linguo.

The common latin root of many probably helped though.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#92

Post by simonbw »

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…

Heck, you can do that in English sometimes if you pause correctly and don’t mind sounding Shakespearean.

> I love you.

> You, I love.

> You, love I.

> Love you, I do.

> Love I, you.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#93

Post by Iv »

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.

Wherever there are catholic priests, you'll find latin speakers. That's certainly a plus, though I really think that English surpassed its spread in so many ways.

The global English we, non-native, use is a simplified one. It is its main appeal: an easy-to-learn language, a simple alphabet, many words of the modern world already phonetically transcribed in many languages.

Latin is too rigid to still be used. Too hard to learn, especially by non-westerners and a culture of not allowing "incorrect" grammar (notwithstanding the fact that ancient Romans frequently were 'creative' in that respect)

But yes, global English is much simplified. I consider myself fairly fluent in that dialect yet I have British friends who are able to converse in a vocabulary that makes me incapable of following their discussion. I guess that would be like me using old French and aged expressions.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#94

Post by nitwit005 »

As people put more and more effort into making the past accessible, the value of learning older languages decreases. It used to be that the raw source works were often all people had access to. Now you can find annotated translations of amazing quality.

And for the most part, that's a great outcome. There was a tremendous cost to teaching everyone Greek and Latin.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#95

Post by Zamicol »

kragen wrote: post #40

> When we study Latin, we must study it for one fundamental reason: because it is the language of a civilization; because the Western world was created on its back. I think Greek fits this bill much better. Archimedes spoke Greek; Marcellus spoke Latin. Plato and the scholarchs spoke Greek; Sulla, who burned the Academy, spoke Latin. Euclid, Ptolemy, Chyrippus, and Eratosthenes spoke Greek. The intellectual achieveme…

I had a business professor who would ask the class for the origins of various words. I would respond with the Greek word and meaning.

Every single time his response was "No, it's Latin". He never contented that the meaning was wrong, but he never realized that his "Latin" word was first found in Greek.

It made me aware of this weird "Latin vs Greek" cultural thing, which I'm assuming for Americans is religious in origin.

I personally find Greek beautiful and useful.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#96

Post by yarg »

nitwit005 wrote: post #94

As people put more and more effort into making the past accessible, the value of learning older languages decreases. It used to be that the raw source works were often all people had access to. Now you can find annotated translations of amazing quality. And for the most part, that's a great outcome. There was a tremendous cost to teaching everyone Greek and Latin.

There's a huge value in understanding Latin, or at least some parts of it - it allows you to derive a vast dictionary of words that have been subsumed into the English language.

Sure there's derivability of terms in English, but the depth to which that is true doesn't really compare.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#97

Post by eru »

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…

Arbitrary word order doesn't make a natural language more 'powerful'. German has more flexible word order than English, but anything you can say in one, you can say in the other.

It's just a trade off between marking the roles of your words in a sentence either with position or by decorating your words. Very similar to positional vs keyword arguments in programming languages.

(Interestingly, just like Python allows you to mix and match keyword arguments and positional arguments subject to certain rules, Turkish usually goes for the decoration-approach via suffixes but allows you to drop some of the grammatical markings if it's clear from context. Eg if you provide an explicit number, you don't have to mark your plurals.)

While on the topic: grammatical gender is often seen as arbitrary, especially in language like German were potatoes are female and girls are neutral. The programming perspective on the use of grammatical gender is that they are essentially 'registers' that allow you to quickly refer to terms you just used. Having more than one register is useful, and a somewhat random hashing of terms to registers is fine for that purpose.

(Btw, Turkish has only one gender.)

I do agree that flexible word order is useful for poetry. But then: poetry like all artistic endeavors thrives on limitations. Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo

Re: In Defense of Latin

#98

Post by eru »

simonbw wrote: post #92
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…

Heck, you can do that in English sometimes if you pause correctly and don’t mind sounding Shakespearean. > I love you. > You, I love. > You, love I. > Love you, I do. > Love I, you.

> [...] and don’t mind sounding Shakespearean.

Yes, exactly. When Shakespeare was around, English still had more of these features, and is gradually losing them over time. Shakespearean English always reminds me of German grammar.

The benefit in communication is that the remaining basic form is unambiguous even without proper pausing.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#99

Post by eru »

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…

> In a real sense, Chinese is the direction that all languages are heading.

In recent history, it seems. We don't know whether the trend will continue, do we? Do we even know why languages used to be less analytic?

The argument you suggested "The reason is that it is easy for a language to lose grammatical rules, but very hard to gain them." would not explain why a lot of languages used to have inflections in the first place?

Re: In Defense of Latin

#100

Post by voldacar »

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…

> It allows you to express the content in such a way that the way you express it matches the content.

Which makes Latin poetry both intricately beautiful, but sometimes nearly impossible for students to read and make sense of ;)

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