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In Defense of Latin

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Re: In Defense of Latin

#111

Post by jhanschoo »

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.

You still have the same thing in computer language, at a different level.

Your imperative programs are free up to dataflow.

----

Absent contextual clues, natural languages syntax is also only usually flexible up to recursion. That is, your case markings can only distinguish only so many roles, and relative clauses in relative clauses need to be distinguished by position.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#112

Post by kragen »

Zamicol wrote: post #95
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 or…

There are many cognates in Latin and Greek, but usually when the word is exactly the same, it's because the Romans copied the word from Greek.

Nicola Gardini isn't American. He's Italian.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#113

Post by School-Cotton »

asveikau wrote: post #102
jobigoud wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

A few more examples:

1) z and s, or ce and se, are pronounced the same everywhere except some parts of Spain. I guess not an example of silent letters but still, an example of a distinction that existed historically/etymologically but that no longer does in the spoken language for the vast majority of speakers.

2) The h is silent in every dialect despite having usually represented a real sound in Latin

Re: In Defense of Latin

#114

Post by bdowling »

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.

Your example works because English pronouns are the only nouns in English which still have different forms for parts of speech (e.g., nominative I, possessive my, objective me; he, his, him; they, their, them). In other languages all nouns have different forms for different parts of speech.

In languages like Latin, adjectives also have different forms which match the nouns they modify, making word order flexible without being ambiguous. In English, adjectives usually must preceed the nouns they are attached to, save a few exceptions (attorneys general, tacos supreme, Optimus Prime).

Re: In Defense of Latin

#115

Post by School-Cotton »

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.

Most of our Latin-based vocabulary came to English not directly, but via French. So wouldn’t learning French be more useful as a means to building erudite English vocabulary?

Re: In Defense of Latin

#117

Post by School-Cotton »

ngcc_hk wrote: post #62

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 f…

Latin was the common international language of Western Europe for more than a thousand years after the Roman Empire collapsed. Even until the 19th century there are some (admittedly by then a bit rare) examples of major treatises composed in Latin rather than in a national language.

There is a gigantic body of literature, science, history, philosophy, and so on, all written in Latin.

If civilization survives long enough, people will probably still be studying English thousands of years from now for similar reasons, even if there are no more native speakers.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#118

Post by vonnik »

I happen to love this quote:

'If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin, they would never have found the time to conquer the world.' -Heinrich Heine

Re: In Defense of Latin

#119

Post by bryanrasmussen »

JackFr wrote: post #37
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.

Many years ago there was an article in the Economist about the global ubiquity of English. Apart from the political history of the British Empire and American hegemony, one of the broad reasons for its success was that no one really cares if you speak it poorly.

Surely people care, but people are able to understand you or will try their darndest.

This ability to understand is completely missing from Danish, for example, because (I believe) of the many different vowel sounds and other pronunciation quirks - the result is if you do not speak Danish well most Danes will shut down trying to understand you. Thank God for English in that circumstance.

Indeed my teacher used to joke that the most common phrase in Danish is "Hvad siger du" (what are you saying) because it is so difficult for Danes to even correctly understand each other - a funny Norwegian video on this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-mOy8VUEBk

Re: In Defense of Latin

#120

Post by LessDmesg »

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…

You're not quite right. Classical Latin had a lot of things that virtually no modern language has: a fully developed passive conjugation, a fully developed conjunctive, and - the cherry on the cake - a rigorously expressed separation between phases (consecutio temporum). Latin is quite magical, and even if it was actually more crude than some of its contemporaries like Ancient Greek and Sanskrit, it's still sweeter than virtually all modern languages, some of which don't even have a past perfect tense or more than one conjunctive form.
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