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In Defense of Latin

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Re: In Defense of Latin

#141

Post by Accacin »

jadyoyster wrote: post #81
School-Cotton wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lithuanian is the most archaic language in Europe By what metric? > which is what makes it so good By what metric?

By most archaic language they are probably referring to Lithuanian being considered closest to Proto-Indo-European in terms of language features: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithuanian_language

I’ve heard this and also heard it’s mostly complete rubbish. It might technically be the closest but that is still not close at all, simplifying like this doesn’t really help anything.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#142

Post by knolax »

tasogare wrote: post #107
btilly wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

I'm not convinced at all by that paper, he gives only by my count ~180 examples to relate two language families that by themselves have 10s of thousands morphemes. Especially since the reconstructed Indo-European rootwords and Ancient Chinese pronounciations are themselves dubious. I suspect you could probably get correlation of this level with pretty much any two language families taken at random.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#143

Post by smcl »

zvrba wrote: post #133
smcl wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Damn I rewrote that comment about 2 times and must have mangled it in the process!

Re: In Defense of Latin

#145

Post by rimliu »

LessDmesg wrote: post #120
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…

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 t…

I have no idea what "fully developed passive conjugation" is, but my language is very old and I imagine very difficult for English speaker to learn. There is an example how fun it can be: http://www.lituanus.org/1987/87_1_04.htm

Re: In Defense of Latin

#146

Post by rimliu »

guiraldelli wrote: post #23
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 reason is that the grammar is so developed that the word order is essentially arbitrary, and that gives rise to a method I have not seen so fully realized in any other language: I have the pleasure to experience this freedom on word order in my native language (Portuguese) and the one I am currently learning (Lithuanian). [1] Although Portuguese presents thi…

   > and the one I am currently learning (Lithuanian).
Smagu matyti, kai nelietuviai mokosi lietuvių kalbos. Sėkmės!

Re: In Defense of Latin

#147

Post by rimliu »

School-Cotton wrote: post #31
guiraldelli wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 gives rise to a method I have not seen so fully realized in any other language: I have the pleasure to experience this freedom on word order in my native language (Portuguese) and the one I am currently learning (Lithuanian). [1] Although Portuguese presents thi…

Is there any scientific or objective way to measure how "expressive" a language is?

To provide just a glimpse of how expressive Lithuanian can be, just a some derivations from the verb valgyti (to eat):

valgąs — present active participle

valgęs — past active participle

valgydavęs — frequentative past active participle

valgysiąs — future active participle

valgomas — present passive participle

valgytas — past passive participle

valgysimas — future passive participle

valgant — adverbial present active participle

valgius — adverbial past active participle

valgydavus — adverbial frequentative past active participle

valgysiant — adverbial future active participle

valgydamas — special adverbial present active participle

valgytinas — participle of necessity

The approximate meanings:

valgąs — 'the one who is eating'

valgęs — 'the one who ate; has eaten; was eating'

valgydavęs — 'the one who used to eat'

valgysiąs — 'the one who will be eating'

valgomas — 'something that is being eaten'

valgytas — 'something that has been eaten'

valgysimas — 'something which will be eaten'

valgant — 'while eating'

valgius — 'after having eaten'

valgydavus — 'after having eaten repeatedly'

valgysiant — 'having to eat'

valgydamas — 'eating'

valgytinas — 'something to be eaten'

Taken from http://www.lituanus.org/1984_3/84_3_05.htm

Re: In Defense of Latin

#148

Post by voldacar »

Iv wrote: post #93
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…

Latin is easier to learn than English. A lot fewer edge cases and ad-hoc grammatical constructions

Re: In Defense of Latin

#149

Post by lou1306 »

schoen wrote: post #25
triska wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In school, one of our teachers was also a priest, and he told us that his job once required him to travel to the (former) Soviet Union. His Russian colleague did not speak German, and he did not speak Russian. Latin was the only language in which they could communicate, and the first question by the Russian priest was: re publica missus? i.e., "[Were you] sent by the state?"

Primo Levi managed to use Latin to communicate with a Polish priest with whom he didn't have any other language in common. > After World War II the Italian writer and Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi was walking back to Italy from Poland. Tired and starving, he met a priest, who spoke neither French, or German, or Italian. Ubi est mensa pauperorum? Levi asked. Where is the table for paupers? https://www.latimes.com/arch…

Recently Liliana Segre, an Italian Auschwitz survivor and senator for life, was heavily criticized by (some) Italian politicians for proposing that the Parliament should set up a committee to investigate racism, anti-semitism and hate speech.

Since some critics were saying that she did not "love her country" (or something to that effect), she replied by recalling a brief conversation she had at Auschwitz with a prisoner from Eastern Europe. Both were teenagers and they were only able to communicate thanks to Latin. Patria mia pulchra est; Familia mea dulcis est; Cor meum et anima mea tristes sunt. (My motherland is beautiful; My family is sweet; My heart and soul are sad). She was still attached to the same country that sent her there.

(Full text in italian: https://www.corriere.it/politica/19_novembre_01/io-non-amere...)

Re: In Defense of Latin

#150

Post by eru »

schoen wrote: post #132
eru wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [...] 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…

Excellent write-up!

Btw, in modern spoken German we mostly only have two tenses left: present and perfect. Present is used for the present and the future. Perfect (formed with 'haben') is used for past events.

(Yes, we also still use other tenses. But they are much rarer in spoken German.)

And especially in spoken questions about things people did or didn't do, an auxiliary verb (like "haben" or "sein") is almost mandatory.

"Gingst Du nach Hause?" vs "Bist Du nach Hause gegangen?"

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