38 ms·

In Defense of Latin

150 points by portobello 7y ago

triska 7y ago
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.
- DoofusOfDeath 7y ago
  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?
  - triska 7y ago
    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.
- the_svd_doctor 7y ago
  Yes the order is essentially arbitrary. 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.
- hcarvalhoalves 7y ago
  But we can shuffle the order in other languages too, we just rely on explicit punctuation, right? Daedalus, meanwhile, on Crete's long detested exile, longing for his birthplace
  - triska 7y ago
    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.
    - pdonis 7y ago
      > too erratic the word order would in English become But perhaps helped with that Yoda has. :-)
    - hcarvalhoalves 7y ago
      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
      - josinalvo 7y ago
        lingering brings other ideas besides "long". something like "fading but still there". does not seem appropriate for the text
        hcarvalhoalves 7y ago
        Doesn't "lingering" have a connotation of "lasting longer than it should" when associated with a negative aspect? E.g. "lingering pain", "lingering stench".
- hackyhacky 7y ago
  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.
  - greydius 7y ago
    Can you explain how your first two examples mean the same thing?
    - schoen 7y ago
      I assume "Janu" is the accusative form of "Jana", indicating that Jana is the recipient rather than the source of the love in each sentence.
      - btilly 7y ago
        That assumption is correct. You see the same conjugation form in other Slavic languages, including Russian.
        zvrba 7y ago
        Nouns/names/numbers have declensions. Verbs have conjugations.
        schoen 7y ago
        I think the coverall term that btilly wanted was "inflections".
- jetrink 7y ago
  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.
  - harshreality 7y ago
    Book 2 around line 215. https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0055%3Abook%3D2%3Acard%3D195 https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext... 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.
- Koshkin 7y ago
  Classical Greek is arguably more powerful. In fact, many Romans looked at Greek as the language of the educated and left Latin to soldiers.
- schoen 7y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflection#Indo-European_languages_(fusional) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflection#Indo-European_langu... I think Sanskrit is another example.
  - kranner 7y ago
    Yes, Sanskrit also has flexible or variable word order (but to an extent.) http://sanskrit.uohyd.ac.in/faculty/amba/PUBLICATIONS/papers/sktsynOffprintAKulkarnietal.pdf http://sanskrit.uohyd.ac.in/faculty/amba/PUBLICATIONS/papers...
- guiraldelli 7y ago
  > 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. And thank you for your nice comment. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_order#Pragmatic_word_order https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_order#Pragmatic_word_or... [2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_case https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_case
  - umanwizard 7y ago
    Is there any scientific or objective way to measure how "expressive" a language is?
    - rimliu 7y ago
      To provide just a glimpse of how expressive Lithuanian can be, just a some derivations from the verb valgyti (to eat): valgąs — present active participle valgęs — past active participle valgydavęs — frequentative past active participle valgysiąs — future active participle valgomas — present passive participle valgytas — past passive participle valgysimas — future passive participle valgant — adverbial present active participle valgius — adverbial past active participle valgydavus — adverbial frequentative past active participle valgysiant — adverbial future active participle valgydamas — special adverbial present active participle valgytinas — participle of necessity The approximate meanings: valgąs — 'the one who is eating' valgęs — 'the one who ate; has eaten; was eating' valgydavęs — 'the one who used to eat' valgysiąs — 'the one who will be eating' valgomas — 'something that is being eaten' valgytas — 'something that has been eaten' valgysimas — 'something which will be eaten' valgant — 'while eating' valgius — 'after having eaten' valgydavus — 'after having eaten repeatedly' valgysiant — 'having to eat' valgydamas — 'eating' valgytinas — 'something to be eaten' Taken from http://www.lituanus.org/1984_3/84_3_05.htm http://www.lituanus.org/1984_3/84_3_05.htm
- btilly 7y ago
  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.
  - ARandomerDude 7y ago
    > being inflected marks marks Latin as a primitive language, not a sophisticated one > it is easy for a language to lose grammatical rules, but very hard to gain them You're assuming loss of grammar over time is a mark of sophistication, but it's hard to see how. I think you have it backwards. Literary, classical Greek and Latin absolutely destroy English in their sophistication.
    - umanwizard 7y ago
      What is the scientific or objective way of measuring "sophistication" of a language that you are using to make this claim?
      - ARandomerDude 7y ago
        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.
- bonoboTP 7y ago
  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.
  - Maultasche 7y ago
    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.
    - bonoboTP 7y ago
      > 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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic-prominent_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic-prominent_language
- skissane 7y ago
  > 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.)
- yaccz 7y ago
  > 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. But why?
- eru 7y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo
  - aemreunal 7y ago
    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 :)
    - eru 7y ago
      Are you referring to the possibility to drop the pronoun when it's clear from context? That's different from questions about gender.
- voldacar 7y ago
  > It allows you to express the content in such a way that the way you express it matches the content. Which makes Latin poetry both intricately beautiful, but sometimes nearly impossible for students to read and make sense of ;)
- tsimionescu 7y ago
  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...
  - Koshkin 7y ago
    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.
  - SamBam 7y ago
    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.
- ivanhoe 7y ago
  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.
  - LessDmesg 7y ago
    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").
- simias 7y ago
  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.
- ciconia 7y ago
  "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
vearwhershuh 7y ago
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.
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  How has English suffered from becoming the world language? I don't see it.
  - bryanrasmussen 7y ago
    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.
    - notahacker 7y ago
      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.
ziftface 7y ago
This article reads like a fever dream for me
GnarfGnarf 7y ago
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.
kragen 7y ago
> 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.
ngcc_hk 7y ago
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.
- umanwizard 7y ago
  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.
essenauta 7y ago
Before you tackle any of those I’d suggest you work on English
- umanwizard 7y ago
  In case the person you’re insulting reads this, I’d like to chime in and say that I understood their comment perfectly easily.
- knolax 7y ago
  Says the person who didn't punctuate their sentence.
ngcc_hk 7y ago
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. Not sure any use of arbitrary word order.
- jhanschoo 7y ago
  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.
- triska 7y ago
  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.
  - hackyhacky 7y ago
    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. inorderTraversal(t(V, L, R), Z) :- inorderTraversal(L, Z). inorderTraversal(t(V, L, R), V). inorderTraversal(t(V, L, R), Z) :- inorderTraversal(R, Z). Also, the meaning of ordering of goals with a rule may be significant: ?- not(member(X,[a,b,c])), X=f. false. ?- X=f, not(member(X,[a,b,c])). X = f. Although Prolog aspires to represent logic, it is still really just a logic-flavored programming language.
    - triska 7y ago
      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.
2ion 7y ago
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.
nitwit005 7y ago
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.
- yarg 7y ago
  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.
  - nitwit005 7y ago
    You can learn living languages and still derive that benefit. Learning French taught me about a number of English words. I can't say that alone would justify the effort to learn a language though.
    - yarg 7y ago
      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.
  - umanwizard 7y ago
    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?
heelix 7y ago
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.
- mc3 7y ago
  // quae est infernum
- jhanschoo 7y ago
  This sounds like a story for both you and that guy!
- anton96 7y ago
  I want to see that commented code
vonnik 7y ago
I happen to love this quote: 'If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin, they would never have found the time to conquer the world.' -Heinrich Heine
kazinator 7y ago
> 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.)). https://www.etymonline.com/word/utility https://www.etymonline.com/word/utility
toolslive 7y ago
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.
blaesus 7y ago
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 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.
- voldacar 7y ago
  >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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Latin#Changes_in_vocabulary,_syntax,_and_grammar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Latin#Changes_in_voca...
- classified 7y ago
  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.
  - blaesus 7y ago
    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.
- umanwizard 7y ago
  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.
giorgioz 7y ago
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.
azangru 7y ago
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.
sramsay 7y ago
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.
kmm 7y ago
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.
- adrianN 7y ago
  > nobody ever learns to read it fluently, let alone speak it That's probably part of the problem. Learning a language is no fun if you can't actually use it.
ergfdsdag 7y ago
Ok, how do I learn Latin? But what reasources are there to understand and read Latin? It seems every resource wants to teach me I need to inflect, which I already know. I want audio books, children's games, in short comprehensible input.
- umanwizard 7y ago
  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.
ergfdsdag 7y ago
Clifford Truesdale (1919-2000), arguably the best American Thermodynamicist after Gibbs, insisted on writing his papers in Latin and opened his own journal just for that purpose. He also wrote his papers with a quilt.
simonblack 7y ago
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. Examples: (Latin) vid/vis=see, audi=hear, equi=equal, voc=voice (Greek) scope=see, micro=small, tele=far 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.
- edjrage 7y ago
  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.
drewcoo 7y ago
An article about language with a confusing title[1]. I found that studying Latin made me pay more attention to English use. [1] https://brians.wsu.edu/2016/05/19/bias-biased/ https://brians.wsu.edu/2016/05/19/bias-biased/

150 points by portobello 7y ago

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.

DoofusOfDeath 7y ago
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?
- triska 7y ago
  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.
the_svd_doctor 7y ago
Yes the order is essentially arbitrary. 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.
hcarvalhoalves 7y ago
But we can shuffle the order in other languages too, we just rely on explicit punctuation, right? Daedalus, meanwhile, on Crete's long detested exile, longing for his birthplace
- triska 7y ago
  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.
  - pdonis 7y ago
    > too erratic the word order would in English become But perhaps helped with that Yoda has. :-)
  - hcarvalhoalves 7y ago
    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
    - josinalvo 7y ago
      lingering brings other ideas besides "long". something like "fading but still there". does not seem appropriate for the text
      - hcarvalhoalves 7y ago
        Doesn't "lingering" have a connotation of "lasting longer than it should" when associated with a negative aspect? E.g. "lingering pain", "lingering stench".
hackyhacky 7y ago
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.
- greydius 7y ago
  Can you explain how your first two examples mean the same thing?
  - schoen 7y ago
    I assume "Janu" is the accusative form of "Jana", indicating that Jana is the recipient rather than the source of the love in each sentence.
    - btilly 7y ago
      That assumption is correct. You see the same conjugation form in other Slavic languages, including Russian.
      - zvrba 7y ago
        Nouns/names/numbers have declensions. Verbs have conjugations.
        schoen 7y ago
        I think the coverall term that btilly wanted was "inflections".
jetrink 7y ago
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.
- harshreality 7y ago
  Book 2 around line 215. https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0055%3Abook%3D2%3Acard%3D195 https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext... 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.
Koshkin 7y ago
Classical Greek is arguably more powerful. In fact, many Romans looked at Greek as the language of the educated and left Latin to soldiers.
schoen 7y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflection#Indo-European_languages_(fusional) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflection#Indo-European_langu... I think Sanskrit is another example.
- kranner 7y ago
  Yes, Sanskrit also has flexible or variable word order (but to an extent.) http://sanskrit.uohyd.ac.in/faculty/amba/PUBLICATIONS/papers/sktsynOffprintAKulkarnietal.pdf http://sanskrit.uohyd.ac.in/faculty/amba/PUBLICATIONS/papers...
guiraldelli 7y ago
> 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. And thank you for your nice comment. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_order#Pragmatic_word_order https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_order#Pragmatic_word_or... [2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_case https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_case
- umanwizard 7y ago
  Is there any scientific or objective way to measure how "expressive" a language is?
  - rimliu 7y ago
    To provide just a glimpse of how expressive Lithuanian can be, just a some derivations from the verb valgyti (to eat): valgąs — present active participle valgęs — past active participle valgydavęs — frequentative past active participle valgysiąs — future active participle valgomas — present passive participle valgytas — past passive participle valgysimas — future passive participle valgant — adverbial present active participle valgius — adverbial past active participle valgydavus — adverbial frequentative past active participle valgysiant — adverbial future active participle valgydamas — special adverbial present active participle valgytinas — participle of necessity The approximate meanings: valgąs — 'the one who is eating' valgęs — 'the one who ate; has eaten; was eating' valgydavęs — 'the one who used to eat' valgysiąs — 'the one who will be eating' valgomas — 'something that is being eaten' valgytas — 'something that has been eaten' valgysimas — 'something which will be eaten' valgant — 'while eating' valgius — 'after having eaten' valgydavus — 'after having eaten repeatedly' valgysiant — 'having to eat' valgydamas — 'eating' valgytinas — 'something to be eaten' Taken from http://www.lituanus.org/1984_3/84_3_05.htm http://www.lituanus.org/1984_3/84_3_05.htm
btilly 7y ago
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.
- ARandomerDude 7y ago
  > being inflected marks marks Latin as a primitive language, not a sophisticated one > it is easy for a language to lose grammatical rules, but very hard to gain them You're assuming loss of grammar over time is a mark of sophistication, but it's hard to see how. I think you have it backwards. Literary, classical Greek and Latin absolutely destroy English in their sophistication.
  - umanwizard 7y ago
    What is the scientific or objective way of measuring "sophistication" of a language that you are using to make this claim?
    - ARandomerDude 7y ago
      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.
bonoboTP 7y ago
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.
- Maultasche 7y ago
  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.
  - bonoboTP 7y ago
    > 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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic-prominent_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic-prominent_language
skissane 7y ago
> 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.)
yaccz 7y ago
> 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. But why?
eru 7y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo
- aemreunal 7y ago
  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 :)
  - eru 7y ago
    Are you referring to the possibility to drop the pronoun when it's clear from context? That's different from questions about gender.
voldacar 7y ago
> It allows you to express the content in such a way that the way you express it matches the content. Which makes Latin poetry both intricately beautiful, but sometimes nearly impossible for students to read and make sense of ;)
tsimionescu 7y ago
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...
- Koshkin 7y ago
  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.
- SamBam 7y ago
  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.
ivanhoe 7y ago
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.
- LessDmesg 7y ago
  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").
simias 7y ago
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.
ciconia 7y ago
"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

vearwhershuh 7y ago

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.

AnimalMuppet 7y ago
How has English suffered from becoming the world language? I don't see it.
- bryanrasmussen 7y ago
  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.
  - notahacker 7y ago
    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.

ziftface 7y ago

This article reads like a fever dream for me

GnarfGnarf 7y ago

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.

kragen 7y ago

> 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.

ngcc_hk 7y ago

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.

umanwizard 7y ago
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.

essenauta 7y ago

Before you tackle any of those I’d suggest you work on English

umanwizard 7y ago
In case the person you’re insulting reads this, I’d like to chime in and say that I understood their comment perfectly easily.
knolax 7y ago
Says the person who didn't punctuate their sentence.

ngcc_hk 7y ago

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. Not sure any use of arbitrary word order.

jhanschoo 7y ago
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.
triska 7y ago
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.
- hackyhacky 7y ago
  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. inorderTraversal(t(V, L, R), Z) :- inorderTraversal(L, Z). inorderTraversal(t(V, L, R), V). inorderTraversal(t(V, L, R), Z) :- inorderTraversal(R, Z). Also, the meaning of ordering of goals with a rule may be significant: ?- not(member(X,[a,b,c])), X=f. false. ?- X=f, not(member(X,[a,b,c])). X = f. Although Prolog aspires to represent logic, it is still really just a logic-flavored programming language.
  - triska 7y ago
    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.

2ion 7y ago

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.

nitwit005 7y ago

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.

yarg 7y ago
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.
- nitwit005 7y ago
  You can learn living languages and still derive that benefit. Learning French taught me about a number of English words. I can't say that alone would justify the effort to learn a language though.
  - yarg 7y ago
    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.
- umanwizard 7y ago
  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?

heelix 7y ago

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.

mc3 7y ago
// quae est infernum
jhanschoo 7y ago
This sounds like a story for both you and that guy!
anton96 7y ago
I want to see that commented code

vonnik 7y ago

I happen to love this quote: 'If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin, they would never have found the time to conquer the world.' -Heinrich Heine

kazinator 7y ago

> 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.)). https://www.etymonline.com/word/utility https://www.etymonline.com/word/utility

toolslive 7y ago

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.

blaesus 7y ago

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 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.

voldacar 7y ago
>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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Latin#Changes_in_vocabulary,_syntax,_and_grammar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Latin#Changes_in_voca...
classified 7y ago
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.
- blaesus 7y ago
  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.
umanwizard 7y ago
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.

giorgioz 7y ago

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.

azangru 7y ago

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.

sramsay 7y ago

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.

kmm 7y ago

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.

adrianN 7y ago
> nobody ever learns to read it fluently, let alone speak it That's probably part of the problem. Learning a language is no fun if you can't actually use it.

ergfdsdag 7y ago

Ok, how do I learn Latin? But what reasources are there to understand and read Latin? It seems every resource wants to teach me I need to inflect, which I already know. I want audio books, children's games, in short comprehensible input.

umanwizard 7y ago
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.

ergfdsdag 7y ago

Clifford Truesdale (1919-2000), arguably the best American Thermodynamicist after Gibbs, insisted on writing his papers in Latin and opened his own journal just for that purpose. He also wrote his papers with a quilt.

simonblack 7y ago

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. Examples: (Latin) vid/vis=see, audi=hear, equi=equal, voc=voice (Greek) scope=see, micro=small, tele=far 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.

edjrage 7y ago
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.

drewcoo 7y ago

An article about language with a confusing title[1]. I found that studying Latin made me pay more attention to English use. [1] https://brians.wsu.edu/2016/05/19/bias-biased/ https://brians.wsu.edu/2016/05/19/bias-biased/