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In Defense of Latin

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Re: In Defense of Latin

#121

Post by aemreunal »

eru wrote: post #97
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 y…

It would be more correct to say that Turkish language doesn't have 'genders' in the way that English and German has them. Turkish refers to a 'being' instead of 'he/she/they/it'. I love that aspect of the Turkish language :)

Re: In Defense of Latin

#122

Post by kazinator »

> I won’t enter into a discussion on the meaning of “utility,” a concept with variations and stratifications that are centuries in the making, and which itself merits an entire book

late 14c., "fact of being useful," from Old French utilite "usefulness" (13c., Modern French + utilité), earlier utilitet (12c.), from Latin utilitatem (nominative utilitas) "usefulness, serviceableness, profit," from utilis "usable," from uti "make use of, profit by, take advantage of" (see use (v.)).

https://www.etymonline.com/word/utility

Re: In Defense of Latin

#123

Post by tsimionescu »

bdowling wrote: post #114
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.

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 with…

You can do it with surnames as well:

Peter does give his love to Jana.

To Jana does Peter give his love.

Give his love to Jana, does Peter.

It sounds pretty unnatural, but it is understandable I believe. Not sure if the Czech versions would sound natural to a Czech or not.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#124

Post by toolslive »

Latin by it self is utterly useless (I had it for 6 years in secondary school sometimes even 12 hours a week, so I'm a bit biased). However, it's difficult, and needs constant work and attention, and there are not many things in school that are like that, so this has value. You could replace Latin with chess, or violin or whatever other difficult thing that needs constant deliberate effort to get any level and achieve the same pedagogical effect but with more fun.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#125

Post by kazinator »

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…

Moreover, case decensions are very difficult to learn for people from non-case languages. They often exist in addition to verb conjugation for person/number/gender and tense. They have their own divisions into various groups, and irregularities.

Moreover, there are other ways to achieve flexibility in word order, such as particles which agglutinate without tweaking the target word in any way:

Japanese:

PetrがJanaを好きだ。(Petr-ga Jana-o suki da)

JanaをPetrが好きだ。(Jana-o Petr-ga suki da)

Petrが好きだ...Janaを。(Petr-ga suki da, ... Jana o.)

Re: In Defense of Latin

#126

Post by tsimionescu »

ARandomerDude wrote: post #75
School-Cotton wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

Comparing English to Latin is not like comparing the Sistine Chapel with a sketch. It's more like comparing the Sistine Chapel with a modernist painting.

Is the Sistine Chapel objectively more beautiful than Mondrian's Broadway Boogie-Woogie?

Re: In Defense of Latin

#127

Post by schoen »

School-Cotton wrote: post #113
asveikau wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Also and have merged in a lot of versions of Spanish. The is postclassical but represents /w/. A minimal pair for these in Latin is bis 'twice' and vis 'force'. (Well, not quite, because of different vowel lengths... let's try bilis 'bile' and vilis 'vile'.)

Re: In Defense of Latin

#128

Post by anton96 »

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.

I want to see that commented code

Re: In Defense of Latin

#129

Post by schoen »

tsimionescu wrote: post #123
bdowling wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 with…

You can do it with surnames as well: Peter does give his love to Jana. To Jana does Peter give his love. Give his love to Jana, does Peter. It sounds pretty unnatural, but it is understandable I believe. Not sure if the Czech versions would sound natural to a Czech or not.

You've gotten a benefit from having an indirect object expressed with a preposition, but presumably a lot of verbs don't take an indirect object and don't have a synonym that can.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#130

Post by schoen »

bdowling wrote: post #114
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.

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 with…

> attorneys general, tacos supreme, Optimus Prime

Apparently "Prime" is a title or rank among the Transformers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Primes_and_Matrix_hold...

In that case, it's probably not best analyzed as an adjective, unless we want to analyze "Senator" as an adjective in "Senator Wyden" or "Mister" as an adjective in "Mister Rogers".

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