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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, toge

by 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

by triska 7y ago

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