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In Defense of Latin

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Re: In Defense of Latin

#131

Post by tsimionescu »

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 would be interesting to know how much this was a feature of everyday Latin versus how much it may have been essentially a constructed language used only by highly-educated people.

Would a Roman farmer in the field even understand that sentence? Would it sound natural to them? Would they ever speak it?

The disconnect between literary language and everyday language is sometimes relatively high even in today's world of mass education, where every child is forced to learn the literary language of their country regardless of the actual language spoken in their region. In societies where this wasn't the norm, the literary language may have been significantly more divorced from the natural language which it derives from, allowing much more complex rules to be invented for it...

Re: In Defense of Latin

#132

Post by schoen »

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.

> Shakespearean English always reminds me of German grammar.

One of the strongest phenomena that produces this resemblance is that in Early Modern English, there was no restriction¹ on forming questions by putting the verb before the subject noun phrase (optionally with a question word before both). In modern German, there's still no restriction on forming questions this way.

  Essen Sie Fleisch?
  eat   you meat?

  Sprechen Sie Französich?
  speak    you French?

  Kommt Ihr aus  Russland?
  come  you from Russia?

  Glaubt   er an Gott?
  believes he in God?

  Wohin   geht sie?
  whither goes she?

  Wie macht er das?
  how does  he that?

  Wir sind hier - wann kommt Ihr?  [a travel ad slogan]
  we  are  here - when come  you?
In modern English, there is a new restriction that the verb that gets moved to the front can only be a form of "do"², "be", or an auxiliary verb (e.g. "can", "may", "should", "must", "might", "will", or "have"³, among others). When the main verb is not one of these, the sentence must be turned into a paraphrase (almost always using "do") before forming the question, like "I do speak Portuguese" → "Do you speak Portuguese?" or "I did have a pet lizard" → "Did you have a pet lizard?".

I have a German colleague who doesn't seem to have learned this restriction and continues producing German-style, or Shakespearean-style, questions in writing like "What contains that file?", "What message produced that command?" or "Updated you the configuration recently?".

In one of my college linguistics classes, I tried to deny that this change was real because I could still easily understand the Shakespearean questions. The trouble is that they nonetheless sounded archaic to me and I wouldn't actually have produced them myself in speech. So really, I should have admitted that there was a practical difference between comprehensibility and acceptability (and that difference with regard to a historic form is exactly what "sounding archaic" refers to).

¹ I'm not totally sure that there was no restriction at all; it may have begun to appear already but just not been complete.

² Though not as a main verb! Shakespeare has "wherefore did you so?" in Macbeth and "wherefore didst thou so?" in King John, which in modern English would have to be "why did you do so?" or "why did you do that?" rather than "why did you so?" or "why did you that?".

³ In some varieties of English "have" can be used this way in both the possessive and auxiliary senses ("have you any wool?" / "have you eaten?"), but in other varieties only in the auxiliary sense (in which case the paraphrase with "do you have..." is required when asking about possession). I'm not sure whether this still works in the past tense, or only in the present tense.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#133

Post by zvrba »

smcl wrote: post #27
greydius wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain how your first two examples mean the same thing?

Shameless plug, I wrote about this here: https://blog.mclemon.io/cases-are-hard-who-punched-who - I used a slightly more one-sided example (Petr punches Pavel) to start things off ... but I talked a bit more about other cases to explain how it all fits together and why they're important. Basically though, in the specific example in the GP comment we know who loves whom by the order of words in the sentence - "${subje…

> ${object.nominative()} loves ${subject.accusative()}

You mixed it up, it should be "${object.accusative()} loves ${subject.nominative()}".

Or, I guess, how you define "object" and "subject" for "loves" :P But grammatically, for transitive verbs, "subject" is the doer of an action, "object" is the target of an action.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#134

Post by zvrba »

btilly wrote: post #29
schoen wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume "Janu" is the accusative form of "Jana", indicating that Jana is the recipient rather than the source of the love in each sentence.

That assumption is correct. You see the same conjugation form in other Slavic languages, including Russian.

Nouns/names/numbers have declensions. Verbs have conjugations.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#135

Post by ivanhoe »

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…

That is thanks to Latin having declension, which many other languages have too. I don't speak it, but I've read that Finnish has 15 cases (compared to 5 in Latin). Nice thing with Latin is that it manages to be both powerful and very clean, with fairly simple rules that always apply, phonetic alphabet, etc. Latin is probably the language with the best balance between power and simplicity. For instance my native tongue Serbian/Croatian has phonetic alphabet and distinguishes cases, number and gender, so it gives you a lot of power to play with words, to make very long sentences that are still easy to understand and to be able to understand the meaning even when some letters or words are missing...but it's much more complicated to learn than Latin because of a lot of additional rules in play.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#136

Post by blaesus »

Latin is "dead" and that's its advantage.

English is well "alive", and living implies mutation. In 500 years, our children would be reading our English as we read Shakespeare (that is, with difficulty); and in 1000 years, our English would become what Beowulf looks like today (that is, you can't recognize a word).

Latin doesn't change. Caesar's Latin is Vulgate's Latin, which is Newton's Latin, which is the Pope's Latin, which is the Latin used in Harrius Potter et Philosophi Lapis and Winnie ille Pu.

What is dead may never die. The "English" as we know it will die. Latin will not.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#137

Post by voldacar »

blaesus wrote: post #136

Latin is "dead" and that's its advantage. English is well "alive", and living implies mutation. In 500 years, our children would be reading our English as we read Shakespeare (that is, with difficulty); and in 1000 years, our English would become what Beowulf looks like today (that is, you can't recognize a word). Latin doesn't change. Caesar's Latin is Vulgate's Latin, which is Newton's Latin, which is the Pope's La…

>Caesar's Latin is Vulgate's Latin, which is Newton's Latin, which is the Pope's Latin

Not really. There are significant differences between classical and medieval latin, since during the medieval period Latin was a living language in use by the clergy and educated. The differences wouldn't have been nearly enough to render classical and medieval latin unintelligble to one another of course, but Virgil probably would have scratched his head at some of Thomas Aquinas' grammar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Latin#Changes_in_voca...

Re: In Defense of Latin

#138

Post by LessDmesg »

ivanhoe wrote: post #135
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…

That is thanks to Latin having declension, which many other languages have too. I don't speak it, but I've read that Finnish has 15 cases (compared to 5 in Latin). Nice thing with Latin is that it manages to be both powerful and very clean, with fairly simple rules that always apply, phonetic alphabet, etc. Latin is probably the language with the best balance between power and simplicity. For instance my native tongu…

Classical Latin didn't have a phonetical alphabet, though. Long and short vowels were not distinguished, letter "u" didn't exist, and Greek borrowings were written non-phonetically (e.g. the "ph").

Re: In Defense of Latin

#139

Post by blaesus »

School-Cotton wrote: post #115
yarg wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Indeed, about 29% of English vocabulary came from French; yet another 29% are directly from Latin[0].

Take your comment as example: excluding the Anglo-Saxon words, 5 are directly from Latin and 2 from French:

Latin words: Latin, Latinus vocabulary, vocabulum directly, directus via, via erudite, eruditus

French words: French useful

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_language_influences_in...

Re: In Defense of Latin

#140

Post by iguy »

eru wrote: post #99
btilly wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fir…

I don't know about Chinese, but I thought that one argument about languages getting simplified involved lots of 2nd-language speakers. Different rules of evolution would apply to the language of an empire (like new-world Spanish, or Urdu) compared to a closed group.
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