Clifford Truesdale (1919-2000), arguably the best American Thermodynamicist after Gibbs, insisted on writing his papers in Latin and opened his own journal just for that purpose.
He also wrote his papers with a quilt.
In Defense of Latin
171–180 of 199 posts
Re: In Defense of Latin
#172A 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.
Surprisingly nobody has mentioned Perligata yet. Latin's (or Ancient Greek's, or Hungarian's) ability to reorder words because of inflectional endings is not absolute; you still have things like subordinate clauses and prepositional phrases, even though they're not as ubiquitous as in Romance languages or English. You can reorder things locally, but not over long distances, and some things have to move together. Inte…
"Interestingly, lots of programming languages have the freedom to reorder big chunks over long distances without altering the meaning, while I've never used a natural language that had that feature"
wouldn't that be a cognitive burden that would hit our brains quicker than a computer, namely short term memory?
Far off re-ordering would be like trying to do mental math in your head that requires memorizing very many results.
Re: In Defense of Latin
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and the one I am currently learning (Lithuanian). Smagu matyti, kai nelietuviai mokosi lietuvių kalbos. Sėkmės!
Ačiū! Aš pradėjau mokytis lietuvių kalbą todėl šeimos priežasčių. Dabar, aš mokausi todėl, kad tai man yra viena iš gražaisių kalbų pasaulyje: kaip tai gražiai garsa, koks ekspressiva lietuvių kalba yra ir kiek įdomios knygos parašytos lietuviškai! :) Oh, feel free to correct my mistakes! :D
Sometimes it feels like Lithuanian (as well as a number of other languages like Vietnamese) could benefit from having its own alphabet.
Re: In Defense of Latin
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Surprisingly nobody has mentioned Perligata yet. Latin's (or Ancient Greek's, or Hungarian's) ability to reorder words because of inflectional endings is not absolute; you still have things like subordinate clauses and prepositional phrases, even though they're not as ubiquitous as in Romance languages or English. You can reorder things locally, but not over long distances, and some things have to move together. Inte…
"Interestingly, lots of programming languages have the freedom to reorder big chunks over long distances without altering the meaning, while I've never used a natural language that had that feature" wouldn't that be a cognitive burden that would hit our brains quicker than a computer, namely short term memory? Far off re-ordering would be like trying to do mental math in your head that requires memorizing very many r…
Maybe, but this applies equally well to programming languages!
Re: In Defense of Latin
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
But you gave English translations for all of those examples. So they don’t actually show that Lithuanian is more expressive than English.
Re: In Defense of Latin
#176Latin 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…
Latin is not dead, it is alive and its modern dialects are called Portuguese, French, Catalan, Spanish, ....
The relationship between Latin and e.g. Spanish is exactly the same as between Beowulf-era English and the English we’re speaking now. So I don’t understand your argument that Latin is unchanging whereas English isn’t.
Re: In Defense of Latin
#177Earlier 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…
By the same objective measure by which a statue of Venus is more beautiful than a cube made of concrete (despite of the latter possessing more symmetry). The measure could be: the number of people saying so; the shape of the distribution of color in a brain scan of an observer, etc.
A statue of Venus took creativity and skill to create that a cube of concrete didn’t. There’s no meaningfully similar statement you could make about Latin vs. English.
Re: In Defense of Latin
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
That’s still a bit dubious IMO as it implies that Latin is the way it is because it reflects an older, “classical” style.
Which is not true at all (ask any historical linguist) and only appears to be true if you restrict yourself to looking at Western European language.
But in reality, there are ancient analytic/isolating languages (e.g., Classical Chinese), and contemporary highly fusional ones (e.g. Finnish, Navajo).
Re: In Defense of Latin
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, people like St Augustine, Erasmus, Newton, Leibniz, Descartes, Gauss and so on also kinda matter, and even if there is no disputing that Ancient Greece was intellectually far more important than Ancient Rome, the fact that Ancient Greek has probably less of 100 years worth of really important stuff (ignoring Homer) whilst Latin was used by the world's foremost minds for centuries (as you note) also must count f…
Indeed, we can imagine a past where Greece's learning was as lost as the Maya codices. But we could also imagine a past in which the Academy wasn't chopped down, where the Library at Alexandria wasn't burned but survived until the present day, where Chrysippus's works on logic weren't lost, where Archimedes's invention of the calculus (and whatever else he would have discovered if he hadn't been murdered by Roman sol…
Also, Plato also didn't come into existence in a void. The exact creation date of the Iliad isn't known, but it's assumed to be around the 8th or 9th century BC. That means that Greece had a culturally stable society for some 500 years before Plato was born, even though it was mostly composed of interdependent city states rather than central rule. The first time that was achieved was under Alexander the Great, so well after Plato.
Re: In Defense of Latin
#180Latin 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…
Janu miluje Petr. -- PETR loves Jana.
Petr miluje Janu. -- Petr loves JANA.