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 interea Creten longumque perosus
exilium tactusque loci natalis amore
Here, exilium (= "exile") logically belongs to the first verse. The
flexible word order has allowed the author to arrange it so that this
word appears in isolation (i.e., "in exile") from the verse it belongs to, while still fitting the metre
(hexameter), thus matching what is being described with the form that
is used to describe it. The suffix "-que" that can be attached to Latin words to mean "and" makes "longumque" also quite long as a word, stressing how long the exile is.
Especially in the Metamorphoses, this strategy is extremely common and applied masterfully: If
something is being described that is hard to do, then the sentence
is structured in such a way that it is comparatively hard to
understand, by using an unusual word order etc. If things are far apart, the words are themselves far apart etc. For quick things, words are omitted that cannot be omitted in other languages etc.
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 in other languages. If expressive inflection and flexible word-order are your thing, you have lots of languages with millions of living speakers that fulfill that requirement.
Latin is not magical. It's just another language. I'm happy that the author enjoys it (language, any language, makes a great hobby!), but I wish we could skip the hyperbole around Latin's alleged virtues just because the Romans happened to use it.
The real answer is that all European languages used to be this way, and western Europe at some point* started relying more heavily on fixed word orders and prepositions instead of suffices, but further east in Europe they did not have this trend.
* in romance languages my understanding is that the big deal was that consonants at the end of words and sometimes syllables were no longer pronounced, therefore it was impossible to distinguish a bunch of suffices. eg. final -m nasalized the vowel before it and then later was dropped entirely. Or you could no longer distinguish between -us and -um because they were both -u (later -o).
The creole languages I'm familiar with tend to be at least as analytic as the most analytic of its parent languages, and possibly more analytic than any of them.
Haitian creole is the most analytic language I'm familiar with. I gather it's about on par with languages like Ewe, but I know next to nothing about Ewe, so I'm not sure on that. I don't think it absorbed a single inflection from French, though.
Modern English, arguably descended from a creole of Old English and Norman French, is less inflected as either of those parent languages. For example, both Old English and French have grammatical gender, but middle and modern English retain it only for third person singular pronouns.
I don't know much about the history of the development of the Romance languages, but I had always guessed that they are at least somewhat a result of creolization of Latin with local language groups, and, if my speculation (it's not even a hypothesis) is at all correct, that would imply that they all would tend to lose inflection, including agglutination, in the process.
So, all that said: Perhaps the reason eastern European languages are more like Latin in this respect is, ironically, because they were less influenced by Latin?
Well, there was something called "Vulgar Latin" which varied by region, and I do think the biggest change was that differing pronunciations forced grammar changes as you could no longer differentiate with "silent" letters.
The loss of inflection due to final consonants no longer being pronounced explains quite a bit of things I found mysterious when learning romance languages without much Latin knowledge.
Some examples using Spanish:
* Spanish lost most neuter forms, but why does it distinguish este and esto [both meaning "this"]? Well, in Latin it was iste and istud respectively, so dropping final consonants still preserves distinct forms: iste and istu. Contrast that with most masculine/neuter contrasts: bonus and bonum both become bonu. (Hence, only one bueno in Spanish.)
* When I learned the language I was always confused why imperfect or present subjunctive first person singular is indistinguishable from third person. (eg. yo amaba, el amaba, I loved, he loved) Well, in Latin, those differed by a final consonant: ego amabam vs. amabat for third person.
I think we are talking about differing times in evolving languages. All the letters of Latin are most certainly not pronounced in Spanish. That is why a bunch of words end in -o instead of -us or why no verb conjugation ends in -m or -t anymore.
At some point people in Spain stopped writing Latin and started writing Spanish, at which point spelling matched pronunciation. But that was not today's Spanish. There were big pronunciation and spelling changes around the 15th century IIRC - see this article for some hints of how it used to look and sound. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Spanish_language
The current "spelling matches pronunciation" thing only occurred because the spelling was updated when pronunciation changed. It is kind of a time capsule, needs to be periodically "maintained", not innate to the language.
Also important to note that there are places where not every letter is pronounced in modern Spanish. Eg. Many accents aspirate or omit S in some positions. Some people omit D between vowels.
1) z and s, or ce and se, are pronounced the same everywhere except some parts of Spain. I guess not an example of silent letters but still, an example of a distinction that existed historically/etymologically but that no longer does in the spoken language for the vast majority of speakers.
2) The h is silent in every dialect despite having usually represented a real sound in Latin
> z and s, or ce and se, are pronounced the same everywhere except some parts of Spain.
I didn't cite that because I'm already blabbing too much about this topic, and I didn't want to overwhelm people, but yes. Also, as cited by the sibling comment, the merger of /b/ and /v/. Also, in many accents, but not all, Y and LL are the same. Also, consonants like /b/ or /g/ are sometimes swallowed when followed by /w/.
Also <b> and <v> have merged in a lot of versions of Spanish. The <v> is postclassical but represents /w/. A minimal pair for these in Latin is bis 'twice' and vis 'force'. (Well, not quite, because of different vowel lengths... let's try bilis 'bile' and vilis 'vile'.)
So, I can't speak to Spanish, but I can speak to French. There, the suffixes that are silent in Metropolitan French are still pronounced in some regional dialects, but the grammar doesn't really change (that I've noticed).
That leads me to think that it could just as easily be that grammar changes render the agglutination superfluous, and it subsequently withers away like a vestigial organ.
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 than virtually all modern languages, some of which don't even have a past perfect tense or more than one conjunctive form.
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
It means that every conjugation of an active verb has a corresponding passive form, as in your link: esąs - buvęs - būsįas versus esamas - būtas - būsimas . But that's underselling it a bit, because 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. To compare with your link, I notice Lithuanian seems to lack passive participles ("while being beaten" is the corresponding example), while keeping some of the circumstantial conjugations (frequency, intent, necessity, conjunct phrases) that older languages did have, but Latin did away with.
In more analytical languages, most of these constructs have been replaced with auxiliary verbs (as in English: I see versus I'm seen, I'm watching versus I'm being watched). With full conjugations, entire sentences can change in tense or action without affecting word order. This may not seem that special if your native language is like that, but as the OP started out saying, it allows for much more expressiveness in (predominantly written) language.
If I got it right, Lithuanian does have passive participle (neveikiamasis dalyvis). In the case of "while being eaten" it would be "valgomas". "While being beaten" -> "mušamas". He was silent while being beaten -> Mušamas jis tylėjo.
To quote Wikipedia:
the Lithuanian language is unique for having fourteen different
participial forms of the verb, which can be grouped into five
when accounting for inflection by tense. Some of these are also
inflected by gender and case. For example, the verb eiti ("to
go, to walk") has the active participle forms einąs/einantis
("going, walking", present tense), ėjęs (past tense), eisiąs
(future tense), eidavęs (past frequentative tense), the passive
participle forms einamas ("being walked", present tense), eitas
(“walked” past tense), eisimas (future tense), the adverbial
participles einant ("while [he, different subject] is walking"
present tense), ėjus (past tense), eisiant (future tense),
eidavus (past frequentative tense), the semi-participle eidamas
("while [he, the same subject] is going, walking") and the
participle of necessity eitinas ("that which needs to be
walked"). The active, passive, and the semi-participles are
inflected by gender, and the active, passive, and necessity
ones are inflected by case.
The definition you provide here does not apply to 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.
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).
Moreover, case decensions are very difficult to learn for people from non-case languages. They often exist in addition to verb conjugation for person/number/gender and tense. They have their own divisions into various groups, and irregularities.
Moreover, there are other ways to achieve flexibility in word order, such as particles which agglutinate without tweaking the target word in any way:
The grammar here isn't standard. Usually you'd mark the subject doing the liking with は and the object being liked with が. Both generally function as topic markers in other circumstances, so context is important. You can even occasionally use は to mark the object being liked if you're pointing out one particularly liked thing. Using を to mark a subject of affection is pretty rare and regarded as incorrect/usually just a tongue slip.
Oftentimes in conversation, particles will be completely dropped in a 好き statement. So getting something like "俺、これ好き" (I, this like) isn't uncommon. In that situation, it's the pause marking the subject doing the liking. If the order is reverse, usually the object marker is used, though as in "これすき、俺は" (this like, I).
Japanese grammar is a complex mess. It uses particles and can be orderless, or it can drop many particles (sometimes all) and have everything marked by pauses and timing.
Your example works because English pronouns are the only nouns in English which still have different forms for parts of speech (e.g., nominative I, possessive my, objective me; he, his, him; they, their, them). In other languages all nouns have different forms for different parts of speech.
In languages like Latin, adjectives also have different forms which match the nouns they modify, making word order flexible without being ambiguous. In English, adjectives usually must preceed the nouns they are attached to, save a few exceptions (attorneys general, tacos supreme, Optimus Prime).
You've gotten a benefit from having an indirect object expressed with a preposition, but presumably a lot of verbs don't take an indirect object and don't have a synonym that can.
In that case, it's probably not best analyzed as an adjective, unless we want to analyze "Senator" as an adjective in "Senator Wyden" or "Mister" as an adjective in "Mister Rogers".
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.
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?"
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 - "${subject} loves ${object}" which is different from "${object} loves ${subject}". We know this because the word order in English tells us this.
But in Czech and Latin this isn't how it works - the word order doesn't have the same significance or meaning as it does in English [1]. You indicate who does what by making a little modification to the words. In this example it's one of the simpler cases - a simple verb with a subject and an object. The subject is the "nominative" case (like the dictionary/default form of a word) and the object should be in the "accusative" case. So it's actually something like "${object.nominative()} loves ${subject.accusative()}".
And just to confuse you further - it's not just "who does what" - there are other cases that denote doing something with or to or in :-) I give some examples in the above link
[1] = that's not to say word order doesn't have a role, it's just not the same role as in English
Regarding the linked blog page: It's a nice introduction to the idea of cases, but it's not entirely accurate: the usual dative/locative form of Pavel is Pavlovi. Pavlu would be used only when there's a surname present. Thus "o Pavlovi" but "o Pavlu Novákovi".
You mixed it up, it should be "${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.
> The reason is that the grammar is so developed that the word order is essentially arbitrary
It isn't really arbitrary. There is a standard order. You can use non-standard orders, but that changes the emphasis of the sentence. If you don't want to emphasise some part of the sentence, you stick to the standard order. If you are going to emphasise some part of the sentence, that emphasis ought to make sense in the context. (Imagine if I wrote in English "The CAT sat on the mat" – my emphasis on the word "cat" needs to make sense in the broader context in which I am using that sentence, or else I'm using the language in an eccentric way.)
(An exception to this is poetry, where non-standard word order can be used for reasons of metre rather than emphasis alone. But, having somewhat different rules for poetry isn't unique to Latin, the same is true for many other languages, English included.)
Arbitrary word order doesn't make a natural language more 'powerful'. German has more flexible word order than English, but anything you can say in one, you can say in the other.
It's just a trade off between marking the roles of your words in a sentence either with position or by decorating your words. Very similar to positional vs keyword arguments in programming languages.
(Interestingly, just like Python allows you to mix and match keyword arguments and positional arguments subject to certain rules, Turkish usually goes for the decoration-approach via suffixes but allows you to drop some of the grammatical markings if it's clear from context. Eg if you provide an explicit number, you don't have to mark your plurals.)
While on the topic: grammatical gender is often seen as arbitrary, especially in language like German were potatoes are female and girls are neutral. The programming perspective on the use of grammatical gender is that they are essentially 'registers' that allow you to quickly refer to terms you just used. Having more than one register is useful, and a somewhat random hashing of terms to registers is fine for that purpose.
(Btw, Turkish has only one gender.)
I do agree that flexible word order is useful for poetry. But then: poetry like all artistic endeavors thrives on limitations. Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo
It would be more correct to say that Turkish language doesn't have 'genders' in the way that English and German has them. Turkish refers to a 'being' instead of 'he/she/they/it'. I love that aspect of the Turkish language :)
I took 6 years of Latin classes in school (12 yo -> 18 yo).
The first day I learned the order "didn't matter", I was so happy. I thought it would make it so easy to study.
Then after 6 years, I was still terrible at Latin.
Instead of "The soldier yield the sword at the ennemy", I would always end up with "The sword yield the ennemy at the soldier" (you get the point).
I think the order is so important to make the language easy. For me in certainly didn't help studying Latin (even coming from French). Maybe it was my math spirit or so, I don't know.
But your point is totally valid. Authors (I studied Cicero a lot during the last year) basically use that to enrich their style constantly.
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...
I think there certainly would have been a distinction, since even vulgar English, with its much more limited grammar, has education/class distinctions in how grammar is applied.
In many English communities, using the subjunctive case would mark the speaker as being "posh," as would using I/me/my "correctly" ("me and me gran had supper").
I think the average uneducated citizen would similarly note someone as "posh" if they heard them using the pluperfect subjunctive, and, unlike a modern English speaker who has been immersed in "correct" English through the ever-present media of today, they might not actually understand the sense correctly.
In the past the divide between the educated and the illiterate was indeed extreme, and so was the difference between the written and the generally spoken ("vulgar") language, let alone local dialects.
The flexible word order is shared with some other highly inflected languages, including Russian and ancient Greek. (I haven't studied Russian, so I don't know exactly how flexible the word order is.)
In Latin the arbitrariness of the word order doesn't usually extend to prepositions (that's why they're called prae-positiones), which should usually immediately precede, and almost never follow, the words they govern. There are interesting exceptions to this (for example ADJ PREP NOUN, like "magna cum laude", or somewhat or completely fixed forms involving personal pronouns, like "te propter" or "nobiscum"), but it's generally a pretty strong restriction.
You might also find flexible word order in any ancient Indo-European language
> 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 this feature, it doesn't have grammatical cases, which I assume it is the feature you describe as "grammar is so developed".
On the other hand, Lithuanian has grammatical cases and other grammatical features (e.g., prefix verbs with prepositions) which, as yourself put it, allow texts to be much more expressive than the ones in other languages I can read.
In fact, I am astonished by how compactly and accurately one is possible to expresses oneself in that language!
Is it a case for all languages with grammatical case? Are most of the Europeans (languages) [2] so expressive? Is it possible that more incredible writers than Shakespeare or Cervantes are hidden from the general global public because of the complexity to translate their works?
I have a lot of those speculative questions in my mind, which I expect to find an answer someday.
Lithuanian is very conservative in some aspects, and very progressive in others. For example, it has lost the neutral gender and it has innovated some cases that didn't exist in PIE. There is no scientific, consistent way to call it as a whole more archaic than any other 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.
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! :)
I will have my comments in Lithuanian, I think you will be able to understand them just fine.
1. „mokytis lietuvių kalbą“ -> „mokytis lietuvių kalbos“ [0].
2. „todėl šeimos priežasčių“ keisčiau į „dėl šeimyininių aplinkybių“. „Todėl“ čia netinka: jis prasmiškai artimesnis angliškam „thus“, o anglišką „for/because of“ atitinka „dėl“. Pavyzdžiui: „automobilis sugedo, todėl pavėlavau į darbą“ ir „Į darbą pavėlavau dėl automobilio gedimo“.
3. „viena iš gražaisių kalbų pasaulyje“ — beveik idealu, tik „gražaisių“ turi būti „gražiausių“.
4. „kaip tai gražiai garsa“ — turbūt norėta pasakyti „kaip tai gražiai skamba“. "a sound" (noun) -> „garsas“. "to sound" (verb) -> „skambėti“. Stilistiškai vietoj tai „tai“ geriau tiktų „ji“.
5.„koks ekspressiva lietuvių kalba yra“ -> „kokia išraiškinga lietuvių kalba yra“ arba šiek tiek geriau stilistiškai: „kokia išraiškinga yra lietuvių kalba“. „Kalba“ — moteriškos giminės, todėl „kokia“, ne „koks“.
6. „įdomios knygos parašytos lietuviškai“ — nors atskirai paėmus ši frazė gramatiškai teisinga, bet šiame kontekste (su „kiek“) taisyklingiau būtų „kiek įdomių knygų parašyta lietuviškai“.
Nepaisant kelių klaidų, dar kartą noriu pasidžiaugti, kad yra žmonių, kuriems ši kalba patinka ir kurie jos mokosi. Kuo didžiausios sėkmės!
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 its own alphabet; besides the obvious advantage, this allows to avoid issues arising from the sharing of an alphabet between completely different languages (like "literal" carrying over personal names etc. without taking their pronunciation into account; this issue even exists in regard to Chinese, where names spelled in pinyin are carried over into English leaving them unpronounceable for a native English reader; but forget pinyin: here is a last name - Chrzaszcz - you'll have a hard time even remembering how to pronounce it a while after you have been told how).
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.
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 English is more modern than French because it has lost gender.
In a real sense, Chinese is the direction that all languages are heading. In English we still conjugate differently depending on how many, past/present/future, and so on. These are all vestiges of an inflected past. Chinese doesn't do that.
> being inflected marks marks Latin as a primitive language, not a sophisticated one.
This doesn't sound right to me. Primitive and sophisticated isn't really how modern linguistics understands languages (for like at least like half or a full century). There's no straight path of progress for all languages. Note how it can also be reversed by a proponent (or native speaker) of an inflected language: English is so crude and primitive with its robotic Tarzan-like chaining of bare words, as opposed to the sophisticated, properly inflected forms that perfectly blend into the sentence according to their roles. (Which by the way would also be bogus.)
> The reason is that it is easy for a language to lose grammatical rules, but very hard to gain them.
Word order is also "grammatical rules", as it includes syntax too, not just morphology. English has tons of grammatical rules despite having very simple morphology.
Also, in Hungarian many suffixes were originally postpositions but became fused with the words and took on vowel harmony. E.g. "utu rea" (road + onto) from the first surviving written Hungarian text became útra in modern Hungarian, with the -ra/-re suffix meaning "onto".
Romance languages have gained inflections that Latin didn't have (from the above link: the future tense conjugations are an innovation in the Romance languages that didn't exist in Latin).
Funnily enough given your example, Chinese languages have gained morphology too: Mandarin has the aspect-marking suffix 了, whereas Classical Chinese didn't.
We can't reconstruct the history of language any further back than Proto-Indo-European, so there's no way to know whether it developed from some less-inflected language.
Things moving in one direction wouldn’t preclude the existence of cycles.
For example: a language has noun cases -> phonological changes cause the endings to merge together, requiring prepositions to disambiguate -> prepositions become more tightly bound to the words they modify and are eventually reanalyzed as case markings. Now we’re back with cases even if languages can only take each step in the given direction.
> Incidentally Chinese did not evolve from Proto-Indo-European.
You’re right, but I meant to imply that PIE is the oldest language whose grammar we know a lot about, not that it’s the ancestor of every modern language.
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 examples are very compelling.
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.
> 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 first place?
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.
Primitive means, relating to, denoting, or preserving the character of an early stage in the evolutionary or historical development of something.
Being inflected is a mark of a language that hasn't yet become positional. It is therefore an objective mark of primitiveness in the language.
Sophistication, on the other hand, is in the eye of the beholder. Which is more sophisticated, flowery descriptive speech or very simple speech that communicates complicated ideas? Arguments can be made for or against Jane Austen or Terence Tao as being more sophisticated.
Latin allows one to say little at great length while sounding very smart. Which a classical education teaches us to value. But when we say things simply we can think and express more complicated things. Which is more sophisticated?
Primitive is like prototype, they clearly communicate that it is meant to be improved.
> Being inflected is a mark of a language that hasn't yet become positional. It is therefore an objective mark of primitiveness in the language.
This assumes that positional languages work better or are more efficient, but that is not clear to me.
"flowery descriptive speech" a la Jane Austen communicates complex ideas. It is just that different subject have different concept of what constitute useful complexity.
Both Terry Tao and Jane Austen could have written their works in almost any language with little impediments.
In particular here one of the scientific advantages of English is not its simple morphology but its permissive lexicon, where creating new word for new concept is a common occurrence.
If by historical accident we happened to speak Latin to this day it is likely that the major loss (compared to English) would be puns.
Well I don't agree with the modernist/empiricist worldview that question stems from.
I think some things are qualitative, and other things are quantitative. The Sistine Chapel is beautiful, but my sketches aren't. If I were to design an experiment, I might learn what molecules are moving or how many people agree with me, but that wouldn't change what I know about the elegance of the paintings (or languages).
Latin is the same way. Having spent a fair amount of time in it, I can see its beauty and sophistication.
Modern English is great. I love it, especially the size of the vocabulary. But it's a comparatively clumsy language, and it frequently abuses prepositions. Its over-dependence on word order also makes it easier to construct grammatically ambiguous statements, leading to misunderstandings. I don't struggle with those in Latin. The language is elegant. It doesn't take Cicero to communicate clearly because of the grammar. But in the hands of Cicero it's like fine art.
I think that's a romaniticized view of Latin, probably helped by the fact that real Latin speakers are long dead.
For every Cicero and Virgil, there were a thousand who had said "Fuck I got shitfaced at that whorehouse and I'm fucking sure that bitch took my purse, if mom finds out I'm dead LOL FML," or something like that, except in impeccable classical Latin.
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 misunderstandings.
Now this, on the other hand, is an objective, quantifiable statement that regardless of taste is either true or false. Incidentally, I strongly suspect that it is not in fact true, and that you only believe English sentences are more likely to be ambiguous than Latin ones is because you speak and write English better than Latin and so are more intuitively aware of its weirdness.
> 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 beauty is unreal. It's only real if you can measure it. I disagree.
Objectively. I think you're wrong and I suspect you think I'm wrong. And that means there is an objective philosophical truth even though we can't measure it.
ETA: not all truth is immeasurable, of course. There are plenty of measurable truths (for example, how many comments are on this thread, or the boiling point of water at standard pressure). But some truth cannot be measured in a laboratory, and that doesn't make it false or unreal.
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).
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.
I don't remember enough Latin to find the passage, but I recall reading the Aeneid in college and being amazed by the scene where Laocoön is killed by the serpents. Virgil weaves the description of the serpents and the struggling man together, so the words pertaining to the snakes are constricting those pertaining to the man.
Laocoonta petunt; et primum parua duorum
corpora natorum serpens amplexus uterque
implicat et miseros morsu depascitur artus; 215
post ipsum auxilio subeuntem ac tela ferentem
corripiunt spirisque ligant ingentibus; et iam
bis medium amplexi, bis collo squamea circum
terga dati superant capite et ceruicibus altis.
As others have written, many languages are like this.
My native Hungarian is also very powerful for poetry. It distinguishes between long and short vowels, allowing for close emulation of Greek and Roman poetry. Being agglutinative, it's also quite free in word order. Well, free is not the right word, because depending on the context and emphasis, only some orders are applicable. The point is, the word order carries higher level meaning, like intention and pragmatics instead of syntax.
There's also a huge amount of poetry written mostly in the 18th-20th centuries, but nobody except Hungarians can understand it so it's essentially unknown outside of Hungary.
Back when I was learning Hungarian I was frustrated when trying to figure out what the proper word order was. Then I learned that most combinations of subject,object,verb were just fine and the difference between them was emphasis. It became a lot easier once I had figured that out.
Hungarian was really great for allowing me to see language from a different perspective. I also liked the gender-neutral third-person pronoun, where the same pronoun meant he/she/it. That made things simpler.
I got far enough to have simple conversations, and I traveled around Hungary for about 6 weeks one summer practicing the language and seeing the different parts of the country.
> Then I learned that most combinations of subject,object,verb were just fine and the difference between them was emphasis.
That's true, but the options are often more limited than what one might think based on the above. While the same sentence could theoretically be reshuffled in many orders and yield potentially correct variants for specific, often very contrived contexts, when you have one particular context, you often have to pick one order so that you sound natural.
I would say Hungarian word order is fairly rigid, but it expresses not the syntax of the sentence but the pragmatics. Arguably Hungarian is a topic-prominent language [1], but historically scholars have described Hungarian grammar in terms of concepts from the highly-regarded European languages, like Latin and Greek and everything that doesn't fit that schematic was/is regarded as "fluff", "arbitrary" and "free". There's a lot of structured complexity in there, but it's not in popular grammars (e.g. those used in Hungarian elementary/secondary schools and books for foreigners) and Hungarians themselves won't be able to say why one version "sounds better" than another, because we never learn it ourselves. You're just supposed to pick it up, or if you're so inclined, dig up some academic papers from more recent years.
> I also liked the gender-neutral third-person pronoun, where the same pronoun meant he/she/it. That made things simpler.
Yep, good to be outside of all the gender pronoun drama.
Yes, and it is a key characteristic of a skillful translator that such features are kept in the translation.
This translation is very nice, but notice for example that the word "long" is itself now no longer long in the translation ("longumque" is longer, both syntactically and also when spoken, and that is made possible in Latin by the suffix "-que" that can be attached to words to mean "and").
Also, many passages cannot be translated so nicely, for example because the translation would become too long to fit the metre, or because too erratic the word order would in English become.
I just tried a quick translation now looking up the latin dictionary. My native tongue is Portuguese so maybe I'm more used to uncommonly ordered sentences.
My English vocabulary is limited, I had to lookup a better synonym for "long":
Daedalus, meanwhile, on Crete's lingering detested
exile, longing for his birthplace
I’m not familiar with Portuguese, but for what it’s worth, Spanish has much freer word order than French.
Random example: “I can’t do it” in Spanish can either be no lo puedo hacer or no puedo hacerlo. In colloquial French, j’peux pas l’faire is the only option (or, if you prefer the more standard/formal register: je ne peux pas le faire). This despite “le” and “lo” being direct cognates.
I studied Latin in high school, but I don't know much about its evolution.
When you say it's the "most powerful natural language" that you know, is that some late, cleaned-up version used by the best-educated? Or does that include earlier / common-use (vulgate?) forms as well?
I mean that Latin is the only language I know which provides this extreme flexibility of form, to match what you want to describe by means of the structure and features of the sentence itself.
This flexbility is available in various degrees in other languages too, but, at least in my experience, never quite to such extreme extent.
One thing is definitely true: The most powerful Latin poetry only occurs in dedicated works of art, and realistically, nobody would have been able to pull this off in realtime. And further, even the most educated Latin poets were quite differently skilled in the application of this technique.
Personally, the complete mastery of this technique is one of the reasons why I enjoy reading Ovid before all others: Ovid not only applies this technique in almost each individual verse, but even throughout entire books, for example by structuring them in such a way that the most central message occurs in the center of the book, that metamorphoses that take a long time appear many pages apart etc.
I've studied Latin in school (and plan to do it again in the future, I'd like to be able to read it semi-fluently eventually). I really enjoy the language but I'd be extremely wary of using qualifiers like "powerful" for languages. That generally leads us towards extremely bad linguistics. Being more synthetic doesn't mean that you're more powerful per-se. You haven't said that exactly of course but I encounter this sentiment a lot in English-speaking circles, with people saying things like English is "dumbed down" or simpler because it prefers analytic constructs to synthetic ones. I also remember a Brazilian fellow saying that Brazilian Portuguese was worsening because people favored the analytic future "vou comer" over the synthetic "comerei" (which is amusing because this synthetic future comes from an analytic construct "comer hei", it's not the Latin future tense).
As a sibling comment points out, these features exist in may other languages, for instance Slavic languages such as Russian or Polish. Besides, even though this flexibility is theoretically achievable, in practice the day-to-day language is filled with more calcified idioms and ways of speech. You could, in English, say "to you this book I give" instead of "I give this book to you" but I'm sure most agree that's rather slanted even though I believe this is perfectly grammatical. A poet could write the former, but if you say something like that in colloquial speech people are going to wonder if you're having a stroke.
Judging the "power" and flexibility of Latin through the verses of Ovid is like judging English through Milton's Paradise Lost. Only educated speakers would come even close to even understand properly that level of language, let alone construct it.
Of course that's just speculation on my part but given that modern Romance lost the case system almost entirely it seems like there wasn't a lot of friction here. If common Vulgar Latin speakers really valued word shuffling surely they'd have found a way to maintain the cases I'm sure. I could also point out that in Russian (a language I've been studying a lot lately) it's very easy to build a sentence that seems grammatically right but sounds off to a native speaker. For instance Russian speakers tend to prefer to put locative expressions at the beginning on the sentence, so they say "on the table is the fork" instead of "the fork is on the table" which may sound slanted or putting emphasis on a different part of the sentence.
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.
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").
"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."
> If something is being described that is hard to do, then the sentence is structured in such a way that it is comparatively hard to understand, by using an unusual word order etc. If things are far apart, the words are themselves far apart etc. For quick things, words are omitted that cannot be omitted in other languages etc.
University required one year of Latin, or two years of French, German, or Spanish. I opted to go for the 'easy' route... and took Latin. Fast forward when our company was expanding into EMEA, and had a coding gig in France. I spoke no French, the guy I was working with spoke no English, but both of us could do parsable Latin. The code comments as we worked together were priceless when the next wave of folks came in.
Studying Latin and Ancient Greek in high school unlocked so much knowledge and intuition for me:
* Easy to grok how Romance languages work (French, Italian, etc), you can make up a lot of vocabulary on the spot, knowing Latin, and still be right
* Borrowed words from Latin in whatever language (English, German) are intelligible, you don't have to learn their meaning because it's a composite of something Latin
* THis immediately affects your expression in writing as well as speech positively
* Fantastic literature in original script readily accessible
* Many good hours spent with improving the translations of especially tricky passages, analyzing sentences and grammatical structures had great overlap with how I approached thinking deeply about my other passions, Math and Astronomy so I got better at both groking and structuring information as well as patterns of thought when it comes to analyzing interesting problems. Honestly, at the end of high school I hadn't cared had I become a classical philologist if not for the earning prospects of that path.
In contrast, how English was taught as a foreign language never came close. It was a totally uninspiring experience.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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?
(I have also used Latin to communicate with a priest with whom I didn't share any other language, although it was less surprising because it was at a spoken Latin event.)
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.
I suppose one could argue that the people who come to English as a world language are not that great at the language, and thus they are not capable of helping it improve. (this is however belied by evidence that often those authors who have most helped English develop have been at the periphery of the culture)
I often see something that could inspire this argument when I travel, people have made a native and English version of a sign or some sort of text. The English is riddled with laughable errors - why? Because everyone knows English and why would you ever hire a translator, just get Jules down in accounting to do it, he's great! (only it turns out Jules is not great)
I will now, at the end of my explanation of how I think someone might want to make the argument, explain that I myself am not a supporter of the argument (nor do I know if this is indeed what Belloc supposed) and hope not to get one of those responses telling me how wrong I am in believing what I do not have a particular belief in.
I'm inclined to suggest the blame lies the other way around: some of the more stupid, ugly and arbitrary grammatical quirks which ought to be dropped from the English language or made optional and context sensitive persist only because they act as a means to identify the writer is a native speaker and/or sufficiently highly educated.
The interesting part of that to me, too, is how many of them roundabout derive from eras where erudite and highly educated English speakers were forced to learn Latin as well, and in so doing apply Latin grammar rules to English that don't apply to natural English. The most obvious example being "never end a sentence with a preposition", which is a very clear grammar violation in Latin, but natural English has ended sentences with prepositions for a very long time.
To a lesser extent I think it is also Latin education's fault why the "objective" case continues to linger in English, despite being so mostly dead, as it acts as an education marker. `Whom` is a zombie only insisted upon by certain educations and should just be buried and put out of its misery. The confusion around `me` versus `I` and which scenarios to use which probably will only get worse.
"never end a sentence with a preposition" is not a grammatical feature of English (from a scientific perspective where "English" is what we observe as being spoken by the community of native speakers, as opposed to something grammar books invented), and does not serve to distinguish native from non-native English speakers, at all.
I don't think this was the sort of thing GP was thinking of.
Edit: I didn't even intend for the previous sentence to be an example of a native English speaker producing sentences that end with prepositions, but by happy coincidence it is.
There are still teachers today that teach "never end a sentence with a preposition" in a long chain game to some early English grammarians that tried to reapply the rule from Latin back onto English (to every native speaker's chagrin). It still impacts the way that many people write. Much of English "formal writing" still tends to soft require the rule and definitely in writing it can be used to distinguish someone that learned English writing rules in a formal educational setting versus those that did not. It very rarely filters into a way to distinguish someone's speech, but it's still a very living distinguishing characteristic in writing.
> it can be used to distinguish someone that learned English writing rules in a formal educational setting versus those that did not.
Sure, this might be true, and I'm aware that it's what you meant, but it's not the same as being a way to distinguish native from non-native speakers (or even writers).
Many, many non-native speakers got to quite advanced levels of formal English writing via formal schooling, especially in places like Northern Europe. I suspect people like that are actually more likely to avoid ending sentences with propositions than native speakers are.
I think what the person who started this sub-thread was referring to is stuff that really is intuitive for every cognitively normal native speaker, like the difference in meaning between "the dog bit the man" and "a dog bit the man". Practically every native speaker, including illiterates, would agree on whether "the", "a"/"an", or no article at all is correct in any given situation, whereas it's very difficult for many even highly educated non-native learners.
English merged accusative and dative centuries ago as it dropped most other cases, and this merged almost-a-case is generally called the "objective case" by English grammarians. Though the more accurate from the point of view of Latin grammarians name for the case is that English has an "oblique case".
English doesn't have an accusative or dative case. There are a few different names for the two different cases of English pronouns; "nominative" (I/he/she) vs. "oblique" (me/him/her) and "subjective" vs. "objective" are both reasonably common.
From Wikipedia:
> An objective case is marked on the English personal pronouns and as such serves the role of the accusative and dative cases that other Indo-European languages employ.
I suspect that every language has just as many weird quirks as English, and you're only aware of English's because it's the language you speak/write best.
Many years ago there was an article in the Economist about the global ubiquity of English. Apart from the political history of the British Empire and American hegemony, one of the broad reasons for its success was that no one really cares if you speak it poorly.
Surely people care, but people are able to understand you or will try their darndest.
This ability to understand is completely missing from Danish, for example, because (I believe) of the many different vowel sounds and other pronunciation quirks - the result is if you do not speak Danish well most Danes will shut down trying to understand you. Thank God for English in that circumstance.
Indeed my teacher used to joke that the most common phrase in Danish is "Hvad siger du" (what are you saying) because it is so difficult for Danes to even correctly understand each other - a funny Norwegian video on this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-mOy8VUEBk
Words which for usually fairly arbitrary reasons have the same plural and singular form are a particular irritant of mine, not least because of how awkward I feel having to correct them on colleagues' client proposals and presentations when I'd really rather be suggesting more useful changes. We've got a number of other nonstandard pluralizations and conjugations from ancient Germanic and modern loanwords alike, which wouldn't be missed if they were um... losed
But taken further down the path of how the language could evolve to remove grammatical forms not actually conveying anything useful, I think we could happily make articles optional and preferred only when an a/the distinction actually matters; many ESL speakers communicate perfectly lucidly without them at all. Normally if don't include article in sentence it's not problem; except if I write business email like this people think I'm foreigner.
Before English was a global language [and before the printing press tbf] Middle English managed to lose an entire set of grammatical gender markers affecting nearly every word, after the printing press we lost the thee/thou distinction [outside Shakespeare, the KJV and a few regional dialects], and yet we've still got grammar guides insistent on preserving 'whom' and claiming that despite how people actually speak the language one shouldn't really use 'you' as generic third party pronoun
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 to learn, especially by non-westerners and a culture of not allowing "incorrect" grammar (notwithstanding the fact that ancient Romans frequently were 'creative' in that respect)
But yes, global English is much simplified. I consider myself fairly fluent in that dialect yet I have British friends who are able to converse in a vocabulary that makes me incapable of following their discussion. I guess that would be like me using old French and aged expressions.
Let me be more clear: I suspect that regardless of whether Belloc believed it, the assertion is either false or meaningless. The correct way to judge whether I'm write or Belloc is involves pinning down what we mean in a scientific way.
In my 50-year career in IT, I have noticed a positive correlation between success and skill at analysis, and training in Latin.
I was forced to study Latin for six years (plus two years of classical Greek τα ζωα τρεχει). I was not interested at the time, and did not fully benefit from the discipline that was imposed on me. I wish I had paid more attention.
Gardini's book sounds like fun, but I want to put in a plug for an older one that might be of more interest to this crowd: Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin and the World It Created by Nicholas Ostler.
This is a general-reader history of the Latin language that goes from its origin up until its use in the present day (too bad the book was written before the current obsession with the phrase "quid pro quo" in the US!).
Anyway, it really is a riveting tale, and it makes Gardini's argument for him: Latin really was the "language of the West" for the better part of 1500 years, and its ghost lingers on.
I had Latin in high school. While I liked reading the stories and deciphering the verbs and case systems, I didn't see what the point of it was. I was assured I'd understand later, with some spiel about how it's a great literary language, how in medicine everything is (was) in Latin, how it is part of our history etc...
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.
If I understand the argument advanced by the article correctly (trivial though it may be), it is as follows: things may be worth investing your time into not just because they are useful, but because they are somehow emotionally satisfying.
While I completely agree with this argument (precisely because it is so trivial), I find it essentially pointless. While "usefulness" of an occupation can be somehow quantified and used to convince other people that a particular occupation is worth doing, emotional satisfaction is subjective and not comparable between different individuals. While someone gets a kick out of reading Latin, another may find pleasure in playing sports or gaming. One pastime in no way seems better than the other.
She toys with this question by asking why not study German, Russian, Arabic, or Chinese instead, and I think completely drops the ball with the answer.
The article can convince only those who share the author's aesthetic values.
> I won’t enter into a discussion on the meaning of “utility,” a concept with variations and stratifications that are centuries in the making, and which itself merits an entire book
late 14c., "fact of being useful," from Old French utilite "usefulness" (13c., Modern French + utilité), earlier utilitet (12c.), from Latin utilitatem (nominative utilitas) "usefulness, serviceableness, profit," from utilis "usable," from uti "make use of, profit by, take advantage of" (see use (v.)).
Latin by it self is utterly useless (I had it for 6 years in secondary school sometimes even 12 hours a week, so I'm a bit biased). However, it's difficult, and needs constant work and attention, and there are not many things in school that are like that, so this has value.
You could replace Latin with chess, or violin or whatever other difficult thing that needs constant deliberate effort to get any level and achieve the same pedagogical effect but with more fun.
The biggest value of Latin in today's world is the existence of what are called Latin roots in English.
Latin (and Greek also) roots are building blocks which are 'clicked' together to form many, many English words. We don't have to learn the meaning of several hundred separate words, when we can learn a handful or so roots and discern what an unknown word, new to us, means by disassembling it into its component roots.
Using these roots we can make up words like 'microscope', 'equivocal', 'auditorium', etc, etc.
So if we come across some new word like 'television' and break that down to the Greek 'far' and the Latin 'see', we can work out that a television is something that lets you see something that is far away. The word 'telescope' does the same thing using Greek-only roots and also lets you see something far away in a different manner.
In the past, it was considered bad-form to mix both Greek and Latin roots in the one word, but since the arrival of 'television', it seems we aren't as fussed about that any more.
Actually, your examples just showed how useless roots are to make up words. I wouldn't be able to guess the meaning of any of the words you mentioned just by knowing their roots. So maybe they're easier to memorize than random syllables, but that's about it.
A 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.
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.
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. I think the reason for the large-scale freedom is mostly that in programming languages you are usually defining named entities (subroutines, methods, classes, variables, constants, inference rules, predicates, rewrite rules, and whatnot) that the rest of the program interacts with by mentioning their names.
Languages with named arguments allow you to reorder named argument lists freely. My own Bicicleta takes that to somewhat of an extreme and also allows it within "subroutines", depending on dataflow dependencies to drive sequencing.
"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.
You still have the same thing in computer language, at a different level.
Your imperative programs are free up to dataflow.
----
Absent contextual clues, natural languages syntax is also only usually flexible up to recursion. That is, your case markings can only distinguish only so many roles, and relative clauses in relative clauses need to be distinguished by position.
For example, in logic programming languages like Prolog and Mercury, you can write the goals of a rule, and also the clauses of a predicate, in any order you like while preserving the logical meaning of the code.
This is not correct. Clauses of a predicate are evaluated in order, which can be significant if, for example, you want to do in-order vs pre-order vs post-order traversal of a binary tree.
When you say "evaluated", then this is a procedural aspect that depends on the concrete evaluation strategy that is being used. For example, we can evaluate logic programs top down, bottom up, using various forms of resolution etc. Mercury will reorder goals automatically to satisfy certain mode constraints etc. Importantly, the actual meaning of a logic program in the sense of solutions it describes are not influenced by different evaluation strategies, although some may be more effective or efficient than others.
As to the examples using not/1: This is an extra-logical predicate where this flexibility indeed does not apply, since its meaning depends on the evaluation strategy.
However, for this concrete case, we can use the purely logical predicate memberd_t/3 to retain desirable logical properties such as commutativity of conjunction:
?- memberd_t(X, [a,b,c], true), X = f.
false.
?- X = f, memberd_t(X, [a,b,c], true).
false.
memberd_t/3 is available in library(reif) for various Prolog systems.
The way I see it, a key attraction of Prolog and logic programming languages in general is that different evaluation strategies are possible, and in fact also starting to be implemented in several systems to various degrees.
For example, an increasing number of Prolog systems provide, in addition to SLDNF resolution (which is the the default evaluation strategy), also SLG resolution (tabling) as an evaluation strategy with different termination and performance characteristics.
These different strategies are very useful in practical programs, and it would be limiting if one were to prevent them by using extra-logical predicates.
I'm an Italian Software Engineer raised in Rome and I did studied Latin in High School.
This is a topic that I care about deeply.
LATIN IS BOTH DEAD AND USELESS.
Unfortunately most of italians strongly disagree on these two points like the author of the article and my father.
Latin is spoken by very few people and it has very little utility.
Latin is much less usefull and much less spoken than all modern Latin derived languages.
If you learn Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian or Romanian you will be much better off.
The whole argument of Latin being useful to learn later on another Latin language is pointless.
If you learn Spanish you will likely learn any other Latin derived language much faster than if you knew Latin.
Latin is no more. Don't cling to the past. Move on.
English, Spanish and Chinese are the new Latin today.
> 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 achievements of the Romans were, by contrast, as pitiful as their military conquests were amazing. Even the Roman Empire eventually switched to Greek, which is why the oldest surviving copies of many Christian texts are in Greek, not Latin. (Perhaps the originals were even written in Greek.) When the lost knowledge of the ancient philosophers was translated from Arabic into a Western language, that language was, in large part, Greek; Μανουήλ Βρυέννιος and Θεόδωρος Μετοχίτης, to which we can trace the mathematical genealogy of Gauss and Euler, lived in Constantinople (the capital of the Roman Empire) and spoke Greek.
And of course if we're interested in fecundity
> Dante would never have composed his Divine Comedy without the model of the Aeneid, nor Milton his Paradise Lost
obviously the Greek Homer sang in is considerably more fecund, because the Aeneid is explicitly a fanfic of the Iliad; and Livy was explicitly imitating Herodotus, and Cicero the Athenian rhetors.
More generally, the Renaissance Gardini wishes to flatter owes at least as much directly to Greek texts, both from ancient Athens and from Byzantium, as it does to Latin texts. Gardini's attribution of the Renaissance to a revival of exclusively Latin culture is simply wrong. His complete omission of the importance of Classical Greek influence in the Renaissance is so glaring as to call his integrity into question.
So why, then, was Latin an important academic language 400 years after Μανουήλ Βρυέννιος? Because of the Roman Catholic Church, which was the only refuge of learning remaining in the violent, brutal, ignorant society of medieval Western Europe until the Reformation; and because, after the fall of the Caliphate, the Islamic world, which had been such a light of knowledge throughout that darkest of ages, also succumbed to persecution of scholars and extinguishment of wisdom. China and India had their own remarkable advancements, but they were too far away to correspond much with European scholars.
So Latin filled the role in Europe that Classical Chinese filled throughout the East, being the language of scholarship and culture, permitting the invisible college to transcend the pathetic national borders of the petty thugs that call themselves princes and nobles. The great universities of Europe mostly arose as seminaries, and for centuries all theses were published in Latin. This continued to some extent up to the 20th century: a couple of months ago, I was reading an anthropology paper published around 1910 about folktales of the Native American Ute tribe, and at the point where Coyote and Lizard start having sex, the paper abruptly switches from English to Latin for a couple of pages, perhaps to evade the Comstock Act prohibition on distributing obscene materials through the mails.
I think studying Latin is worthwhile in order to understand that history, and there's a lot of it. But it's not because Western Civilization was built by Rome; on the contrary, Western Civilization barely survived being conquered by Rome, largely thanks to the Muslims.
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 for something.
Also I don't understand your point about Western Civilization barely surviving Roman conquest – surely much worse things could have befallen the Greek heritage?
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 soldiers) didn't have to wait until the 18th century, where there was never a Diocletian to condemn the peasantry of half a continent to serfdom for a millennium and a half, where perhaps we could read the literature of Carthage, where Egyptian hieroglyphics were never forgotten, where the Antikythera Mechanism wasn't a dead end but simply an early stage in a long line of calculating mechanisms that continued to develop for centuries.
We could imagine Europe without a Dark Age, and we could imagine a world where the progress of European science did not end even before the Dark Age began. What would that world look like? I don't mean to suggest that it would be a matter of sweetness and light — Athens, too, had its share of slavery, wars of aggression, and political persecution, to say nothing of damned Lacedaemon — but what if intellectual and cultural progress in Europe hadn't halted and even gone backwards for more than a millennium?
Too, Ancient Greek's heyday was not a mere century. Basilios Bessarion, who taught Johannes Argyropoulos in Padova, lived in the 15th century, around the time of the fall of Constantinople. The wrestler Plato was born around 428 BC; his Academy survived until Sulla chopped it down in 84 BCE. Ptolemy didn't live until the second century CE. From Plato's birth to the fall of Constantinople was almost 1900 years. I think that's substantially more than 100 years of really important stuff.
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.
I had a business professor who would ask the class for the origins of various words. I would respond with the Greek word and meaning.
Every single time his response was "No, it's Latin". He never contented that the meaning was wrong, but he never realized that his "Latin" word was first found in Greek.
It made me aware of this weird "Latin vs Greek" cultural thing, which I'm assuming for Americans is religious in origin.
Obviously as an extract the quote can only single out certain aspects of the thing. Here Latin has arbitrary order, history, beautiful etc. Also should have said it is the common root of or at least strong influence to European language.
But still why today learn it depend upon the key question. If I do not learn it what is the impact. Not sure. That is my answer.
Learning Hebrew for bible reading. If forced German for philosophical work. Latin? Not sure.
Latin was the common international language of Western Europe for more than a thousand years after the Roman Empire collapsed. Even until the 19th century there are some (admittedly by then a bit rare) examples of major treatises composed in Latin rather than in a national language.
There is a gigantic body of literature, science, history, philosophy, and so on, all written in Latin.
If civilization survives long enough, people will probably still be studying English thousands of years from now for similar reasons, even if there are no more native speakers.
As people put more and more effort into making the past accessible, the value of learning older languages decreases. It used to be that the raw source works were often all people had access to. Now you can find annotated translations of amazing quality.
And for the most part, that's a great outcome. There was a tremendous cost to teaching everyone Greek and Latin.
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?
Perhaps not, but my rudimentary understanding of Latin - learnt only in passing - has on many occasion allowed me to correctly derive and interpret words I'd never seen or heard before.
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.
The book “Lingua Latina per se illustrata” is well-reviewed. It’s a reader that starts with simple stories and gradually increases in difficulty.
You can use it regardless of your native language, as it’s written entirely in Latin, with no English at all (even the copyright page is in Latin). But it doesn’t presuppose any knowledge.
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.
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:
Here, exilium (= "exile") logically belongs to the first verse. The flexible word order has allowed the author to arrange it so that this word appears in isolation (i.e., "in exile") from the verse it belongs to, while still fitting the metre (hexameter), thus matching what is being described with the form that is used to describe it. The suffix "-que" that can be attached to Latin words to mean "and" makes "longumque" also quite long as a word, stressing how long the exile is.Especially in the Metamorphoses, this strategy is extremely common and applied masterfully: If something is being described that is hard to do, then the sentence is structured in such a way that it is comparatively hard to understand, by using an unusual word order etc. If things are far apart, the words are themselves far apart etc. For quick things, words are omitted that cannot be omitted in other languages etc.