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In Defense of Latin

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Re: In Defense of Latin

#191

Post by afiori »

School-Cotton wrote: post #176
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…

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.

Well, the Beowulf-era English is not changing either.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#192

Post by blaesus »

classified wrote: post #155
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 would rotate vomiting in his grave if he knew you're comparing even his simple ways of using the language to the medieval barbarians. And he didn't speak the same Latin as the founders of Rome either.

Caesar is dead; Romans are no more. Their opinions matter not; what matters is whether we and the future generation consider these authors to have spoken in the same tongue.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#193

Post by blaesus »

School-Cotton wrote: post #176
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…

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.

French and Castilian and friends are standardized against some spoken variant. And spoken languages inevitably change over time.

Latin is standardized against the writings of the classical authors, and to a lesser degree, the medieval authors. These authors, being dead, can't change.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#194

Post by kragen »

kragen wrote: post #40

> When we study Latin, we must study it for one fundamental reason: because it is the language of a civilization; because the Western world was created on its back. I think Greek fits this bill much better. Archimedes spoke Greek; Marcellus spoke Latin. Plato and the scholarchs spoke Greek; Sulla, who burned the Academy, spoke Latin. Euclid, Ptolemy, Chyrippus, and Eratosthenes spoke Greek. The intellectual achieveme…

Chrysippus (Χρυσιππος), not "Chyrippus".

Re: In Defense of Latin

#195

Post by schoen »

zvrba wrote: post #134
btilly wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

I think the coverall term that btilly wanted was "inflections".

Re: In Defense of Latin

#196

Post by rimliu »

Koshkin wrote: post #186
rimliu wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, we do have it. Of course, it is Latin based, but still.

The reason, in this case, is mostly historical (religious affiliation). At the same time, Latin alphabet is phonetic and as such it is not really a good single base for many languages that have more sounds than Latin (even there some letters represent two different sounds). Excessive use of diacritics is not a good solution. Some languages address this by mixing several base alphabets, but ideally, each should have i…

Lithuanian is mostly phonetic. And "mostly" here is just a precaution to take some edge cases into account. Some diacritics just modify the length of the base sound (Ą, Ę, Į, Ų, Ū). I would not say that case Ė, Č, Š and Ž warrant having a completely new alphabet. If that was a case pretty much any language that has Latin-based alphabet should get a new one, because pretty much all of them have their own additions.

Re: In Defense of Latin

#197

Post by alerighi »

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…

Italian borrowed all these features from Latin, since it is a directive descendant, tough in Italian these are less strict rules, and nowadays a lot of people doesn't know them and get them wrong (including a lot of politicians, that always get conjunctives wrong).

Re: In Defense of Latin

#198

Post by ciconia »

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…

"On les peut mettre premièrement comme vous avez dit : "Belle Marquise, vos beaux yeux me font mourir d’amour". Ou bien : "D’amour mourir me font, belle Marquise, vos beaux yeux". Ou bien : "Vos yeux beaux d’amour me font, belle Marquise, mourir". Ou bien : "Mourir vos beaux yeux, belle Marquise, d’amour me font". Ou bien : "Me font vos yeux beaux mourir, belle Marquise, d’amour."

Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Molière

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