In Defense of Latin

> every conjugation of an active verb has a corresponding passive form

If we're talking about individual verbs, this does not and cannot apply to any language; there are always verbs that for semantic or syntactic reasons cannot take passive forms. (Examples in Latin: "esse" [to be] has no passive because the passive form of "to be" doesn't exist even conceptually; "sequi" [to follow] has no passive because sequi is, from a strictly syntactic perspective, already inflected as if it were a passive verb.)

If you're talking at a more general level about whether the language offers the possibility of a passive form for every active form a verb might possess, that still isn't true for Latin -- and in fact, the very example you give is quite badly wrong.

> Latin actually had a full 3-dimensional matrix of conjugations: time-based tense (past, present, future), goal-based tense (completed or ongoing), and action (active or passive), with accompanying participles for each case.

Side note: in the traditional analysis, a Latin verb is inflected in five dimensions ("tense", "voice", "mood", "person", "number"). What you call "goal-based tense" is traditionally just called "tense", though I agree with you that it is a separate dimension and shouldn't be conflated with actual tense. In linguistics, this dimension is called "aspect".

Latin participles do not inflect for person or number. Despite what you say here, they also don't inflect for aspect. They do inflect for tense and voice, but of the six possibilities (past / present / future) x (active / passive), only four are possible in Latin -- the present passive and past active forms do not exist for any verb. [1]

(It's possible to make the argument that Latin participles do inflect for aspect, in that some participial forms (the present and the future passive) use the imperfect verb stem and others (the perfect and the future active) use the perfect verb stem. That makes the argument you're making here weaker -- instead of Latin offering four out of six participial forms, it would be offering four out of twelve.)

[1] But remember how "sequi" couldn't have a passive form because it's already formally passive? This opens up a possibility for the perfect participle: secutus can mean "having been followed", the normal perfect passive sense, but it can also mean "having followed", in an otherwise impossible perfect active interpretation of the participle. The "passive form, active meaning" state of the verb can be carried through to its participle.

More than a decade later, I'm convinced, without bitterness, that it's a waste of time. Sure, it's not completely useless. The stories and culture were interesting (most of it taught in my native language of course, nobody ever learns to read it fluently, let alone speak it), and I'm sure learning to read Latin developed me in some sense, but not nearly in a way that it was worth that many hours per week, years on end. Time that could have been spent on useful skills or leisure, and almost all of the supposed benefits of Latin could have been gotten from learning a language that is still alive. Here in the north of Belgium most of us get French, German and English anyway. Maybe a non-European language would have been way more enriching.

Developing a passion for linguistics further cemented that view, because it taught me a lot of the mythos around Latin is plain wrong, "bad linguistics". Latin is not special, not better, not more logical or free or sophisticated or expressive or anything else compared to other languages. Of course it's beautiful and special, but every language is beautiful and fascinating and has its own unique interesting features. And of course some of the literature or poetry is unique and hard to express in other languages, but the same can be said for Japanese or Dutch. Nor did Latin lie at the root of other non-Romance European languages, Dutch and Russian and Greek are sisters and any similarities are simply retained from some common ancestor (or from language contact, which went both ways). Truth is, Latin is an unremarkable language from an unremarkable branch of Proto-Indo-European. I'm not saying that as a bad thing, the same holds for most other European languages, it's just that the only thing that made it special was that its speakers took over the world. Had history gone any different, we'd all revere Old Albanian, Common Slavic, Proto-Germanic, Proto-Mongolic etc...

I'm open to having my mind changed on this (as long as it doesn't involve bad linguistics), and of course, if people feel it personally enriches, I believe them and I'm happy for it.

That's probably part of the problem. Learning a language is no fun if you can't actually use it.

However, the rudimentary nature of my understanding has caused me on occasion to derive etymologically invalid words - such as enthnosupremacist - but fuck it, it's English - why can't I mix my etymologies?

(although in this case, I'd probably hyphenate it).

And to an extent far more versatile than anything on the English side of my understanding of language.