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In Defense of Latin

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Re: In Defense of Latin

#101

Post by jobigoud »

asveikau wrote: post #73
mumblemumble wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 exampl…

But in Spanish, unlike French for example, all letters are still pronounced. So I'm not sure this reasonning holds.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#102

Post by asveikau »

jobigoud wrote: post #101
asveikau wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 exampl…

But in Spanish, unlike French for example, all letters are still pronounced. So I'm not sure this reasonning holds.

I think we are talking about differing times in evolving languages. All the letters of Latin are most certainly not pronounced in Spanish. That is why a bunch of words end in -o instead of -us or why no verb conjugation ends in -m or -t anymore.

At some point people in Spain stopped writing Latin and started writing Spanish, at which point spelling matched pronunciation. But that was not today's Spanish. There were big pronunciation and spelling changes around the 15th century IIRC - see this article for some hints of how it used to look and sound. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Spanish_language

The current "spelling matches pronunciation" thing only occurred because the spelling was updated when pronunciation changed. It is kind of a time capsule, needs to be periodically "maintained", not innate to the language.

Also important to note that there are places where not every letter is pronounced in modern Spanish. Eg. Many accents aspirate or omit S in some positions. Some people omit D between vowels.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#103

Post by nitwit005 »

yarg wrote: post #96
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.

You can learn living languages and still derive that benefit. Learning French taught me about a number of English words.

I can't say that alone would justify the effort to learn a language though.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#104

Post by heelix »

University required one year of Latin, or two years of French, German, or Spanish. I opted to go for the 'easy' route... and took Latin. Fast forward when our company was expanding into EMEA, and had a coding gig in France. I spoke no French, the guy I was working with spoke no English, but both of us could do parsable Latin. The code comments as we worked together were priceless when the next wave of folks came in.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#105

Post by yongjik »

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…

I think that's a romaniticized view of Latin, probably helped by the fact that real Latin speakers are long dead.

For every Cicero and Virgil, there were a thousand who had said "Fuck I got shitfaced at that whorehouse and I'm fucking sure that bitch took my purse, if mom finds out I'm dead LOL FML," or something like that, except in impeccable classical Latin.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#106

Post by mc3 »

heelix wrote: post #104

University required one year of Latin, or two years of French, German, or Spanish. I opted to go for the 'easy' route... and took Latin. Fast forward when our company was expanding into EMEA, and had a coding gig in France. I spoke no French, the guy I was working with spoke no English, but both of us could do parsable Latin. The code comments as we worked together were priceless when the next wave of folks came in.

    // quae est infernum

Re: In Defense of Latin

#107

Post by tasogare »

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.

Mind blowing paper: Chang, T. T.(1988). Indo-European vocabulary in Old Chinese: A new thesis on the emergence of Chinese language and civilization in the Late Neolithic Age. In Sino-Platonic Papers eds Mair, V. http://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp007_old_chinese.pdf

I'm don't know enough about Indo-European reconstructions to make my own opinions on what's exposed on the this side and the paper is a bit dated but examples are very compelling.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#108

Post by saalweachter »

eru wrote: post #98
simonbw wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also note that poetic forms and loosened syntax go and in hand.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#109

Post by mc3 »

eru wrote: post #98
simonbw wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ok, perfect excuse for me to wheel out the Buffalo! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffal....

Re: In Defense of Latin

#110

Post by jhanschoo »

heelix wrote: post #104

University required one year of Latin, or two years of French, German, or Spanish. I opted to go for the 'easy' route... and took Latin. Fast forward when our company was expanding into EMEA, and had a coding gig in France. I spoke no French, the guy I was working with spoke no English, but both of us could do parsable Latin. The code comments as we worked together were priceless when the next wave of folks came in.

This sounds like a story for both you and that guy!
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