11 ms·
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,
by 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 agoCan you explain how your first two examples mean the same thing?
- schoen 7y agoI assume "Janu" is the accusative form of "Jana", indicating that Jana is the recipient rather than the source of the love in each sentence.
- smcl 7y agoShameless plug, I wrote about this here: https://blog.mclemon.io/cases-are-hard-who-punched-who https://blog.mclemon.io/cases-are-hard-who-punched-who - I used a slightly more one-sided example (Petr punches Pavel) to start things off ... but I talked a bit more about other cases to explain how it all fits together and why they're important. Basically though, in the specific example in the GP comment we know who loves whom by the order of words in the sentence - "${subject} loves ${object}" which is different from "${object} loves ${subject}". We know this because the word order in English tells us this. But in Czech and Latin this isn't how it works - the word order doesn't have the same significance or meaning as it does in English [1]. You indicate who does what by making a little modification to the words. In this example it's one of the simpler cases - a simple verb with a subject and an object. The subject is the "nominative" case (like the dictionary/default form of a word) and the object should be in the "accusative" case. So it's actually something like "${object.nominative()} loves ${subject.accusative()}". And just to confuse you further - it's not just "who does what" - there are other cases that denote doing something with or to or in :-) I give some examples in the above link [1] = that's not to say word order doesn't have a role, it's just not the same role as in English
- hackyhacky 7y agoRegarding the linked blog page: It's a nice introduction to the idea of cases, but it's not entirely accurate: the usual dative/locative form of Pavel is Pavlovi. Pavlu would be used only when there's a surname present. Thus "o Pavlovi" but "o Pavlu Novákovi".
- smcl 7y agoOops, thanks! Fixed - these nuances still kinda escape me :-O
- zvrba 7y ago> ${object.nominative()} loves ${subject.accusative()} You mixed it up, it should be "${object.accusative()} loves ${subject.nominative()}". Or, I guess, how you define "object" and "subject" for "loves" :P But grammatically, for transitive verbs, "subject" is the doer of an action, "object" is the target of an action.
- asveikau 7y agoThe real answer is that all European languages used to be this way, and western Europe at some point* started relying more heavily on fixed word orders and prepositions instead of suffices, but further east in Europe they did not have this trend. * in romance languages my understanding is that the big deal was that consonants at the end of words and sometimes syllables were no longer pronounced, therefore it was impossible to distinguish a bunch of suffices. eg. final -m nasalized the vowel before it and then later was dropped entirely. Or you could no longer distinguish between -us and -um because they were both -u (later -o).
- mumblemumble 7y agoThe creole languages I'm familiar with tend to be at least as analytic as the most analytic of its parent languages, and possibly more analytic than any of them. Haitian creole is the most analytic language I'm familiar with. I gather it's about on par with languages like Ewe, but I know next to nothing about Ewe, so I'm not sure on that. I don't think it absorbed a single inflection from French, though. Modern English, arguably descended from a creole of Old English and Norman French, is less inflected as either of those parent languages. For example, both Old English and French have grammatical gender, but middle and modern English retain it only for third person singular pronouns. I don't know much about the history of the development of the Romance languages, but I had always guessed that they are at least somewhat a result of creolization of Latin with local language groups, and, if my speculation (it's not even a hypothesis) is at all correct, that would imply that they all would tend to lose inflection, including agglutination, in the process. So, all that said: Perhaps the reason eastern European languages are more like Latin in this respect is, ironically, because they were less influenced by Latin?
- asveikau 7y agoWell, there was something called "Vulgar Latin" which varied by region, and I do think the biggest change was that differing pronunciations forced grammar changes as you could no longer differentiate with "silent" letters. The loss of inflection due to final consonants no longer being pronounced explains quite a bit of things I found mysterious when learning romance languages without much Latin knowledge. Some examples using Spanish: * Spanish lost most neuter forms, but why does it distinguish este and esto [both meaning "this"]? Well, in Latin it was iste and istud respectively, so dropping final consonants still preserves distinct forms: iste and istu. Contrast that with most masculine/neuter contrasts: bonus and bonum both become bonu. (Hence, only one bueno in Spanish.) * When I learned the language I was always confused why imperfect or present subjunctive first person singular is indistinguishable from third person. (eg. yo amaba, el amaba, I loved, he loved) Well, in Latin, those differed by a final consonant: ego amabam vs. amabat for third person.
- minieggs 7y agoExtremely interesting and extremely frustrating. I'm entering my fourth month learning Czech. Thanks for the comment.
- simonbw 7y agoHeck, you can do that in English sometimes if you pause correctly and don’t mind sounding Shakespearean. > I love you. > You, I love. > You, love I. > Love you, I do. > Love I, you.
- eru 7y ago> [...] and don’t mind sounding Shakespearean. Yes, exactly. When Shakespeare was around, English still had more of these features, and is gradually losing them over time. Shakespearean English always reminds me of German grammar. The benefit in communication is that the remaining basic form is unambiguous even without proper pausing.
- saalweachter 7y agoAlso note that poetic forms and loosened syntax go and in hand.
- mc3 7y agoOk, perfect excuse for me to wheel out the Buffalo! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffal....
- schoen 7y ago> Shakespearean English always reminds me of German grammar. One of the strongest phenomena that produces this resemblance is that in Early Modern English, there was no restriction¹ on forming questions by putting the verb before the subject noun phrase (optionally with a question word before both). In modern German, there's still no restriction on forming questions this way. Essen Sie Fleisch? eat you meat? Sprechen Sie Französich? speak you French? Kommt Ihr aus Russland? come you from Russia? Glaubt er an Gott? believes he in God? Wohin geht sie? whither goes she? Wie macht er das? how does he that? Wir sind hier - wann kommt Ihr? [a travel ad slogan] we are here - when come you? In modern English, there is a new restriction that the verb that gets moved to the front can only be a form of "do"², "be", or an auxiliary verb (e.g. "can", "may", "should", "must", "might", "will", or "have"³, among others). When the main verb is not one of these, the sentence must be turned into a paraphrase (almost always using "do") before forming the question, like "I do speak Portuguese" → "Do you speak Portuguese?" or "I did have a pet lizard" → "Did you have a pet lizard?". I have a German colleague who doesn't seem to have learned this restriction and continues producing German-style, or Shakespearean-style, questions in writing like "What contains that file?", "What message produced that command?" or "Updated you the configuration recently?". In one of my college linguistics classes, I tried to deny that this change was real because I could still easily understand the Shakespearean questions. The trouble is that they nonetheless sounded archaic to me and I wouldn't actually have produced them myself in speech. So really, I should have admitted that there was a practical difference between comprehensibility and acceptability (and that difference with regard to a historic form is exactly what "sounding archaic" refers to). ¹ I'm not totally sure that there was no restriction at all; it may have begun to appear already but just not been complete. ² Though not as a main verb! Shakespeare has "wherefore did you so?" in Macbeth and "wherefore didst thou so?" in King John, which in modern English would have to be "why did you do so?" or "why did you do that?" rather than "why did you so?" or "why did you that?". ³ In some varieties of English "have" can be used this way in both the possessive and auxiliary senses ("have you any wool?" / "have you eaten?"), but in other varieties only in the auxiliary sense (in which case the paraphrase with "do you have..." is required when asking about possession). I'm not sure whether this still works in the past tense, or only in the present tense.
- LessDmesg 7y agoYou're not quite right. Classical Latin had a lot of things that virtually no modern language has: a fully developed passive conjugation, a fully developed conjunctive, and - the cherry on the cake - a rigorously expressed separation between phases (consecutio temporum). Latin is quite magical, and even if it was actually more crude than some of its contemporaries like Ancient Greek and Sanskrit, it's still sweeter than virtually all modern languages, some of which don't even have a past perfect tense or more than one conjunctive form.
- rimliu 7y agoI have no idea what "fully developed passive conjugation" is, but my language is very old and I imagine very difficult for English speaker to learn. There is an example how fun it can be: http://www.lituanus.org/1987/87_1_04.htm http://www.lituanus.org/1987/87_1_04.htm
- tremon 7y agoIt means that every conjugation of an active verb has a corresponding passive form, as in your link: esąs - buvęs - būsįas versus esamas - būtas - būsimas . But that's underselling it a bit, because Latin actually had a full 3-dimensional matrix of conjugations: time-based tense (past, present, future), goal-based tense (completed or ongoing), and action (active or passive), with accompanying participles for each case. To compare with your link, I notice Lithuanian seems to lack passive participles ("while being beaten" is the corresponding example), while keeping some of the circumstantial conjugations (frequency, intent, necessity, conjunct phrases) that older languages did have, but Latin did away with. In more analytical languages, most of these constructs have been replaced with auxiliary verbs (as in English: I see versus I'm seen, I'm watching versus I'm being watched). With full conjugations, entire sentences can change in tense or action without affecting word order. This may not seem that special if your native language is like that, but as the OP started out saying, it allows for much more expressiveness in (predominantly written) language.
- rimliu 7y agoIf I got it right, Lithuanian does have passive participle (neveikiamasis dalyvis). In the case of "while being eaten" it would be "valgomas". "While being beaten" -> "mušamas". He was silent while being beaten -> Mušamas jis tylėjo. To quote Wikipedia: the Lithuanian language is unique for having fourteen different participial forms of the verb, which can be grouped into five when accounting for inflection by tense. Some of these are also inflected by gender and case. For example, the verb eiti ("to go, to walk") has the active participle forms einąs/einantis ("going, walking", present tense), ėjęs (past tense), eisiąs (future tense), eidavęs (past frequentative tense), the passive participle forms einamas ("being walked", present tense), eitas (“walked” past tense), eisimas (future tense), the adverbial participles einant ("while [he, different subject] is walking" present tense), ėjus (past tense), eisiant (future tense), eidavus (past frequentative tense), the semi-participle eidamas ("while [he, the same subject] is going, walking") and the participle of necessity eitinas ("that which needs to be walked"). The active, passive, and the semi-participles are inflected by gender, and the active, passive, and necessity ones are inflected by case.
- kazinator 7y agoMoreover, case decensions are very difficult to learn for people from non-case languages. They often exist in addition to verb conjugation for person/number/gender and tense. They have their own divisions into various groups, and irregularities. Moreover, there are other ways to achieve flexibility in word order, such as particles which agglutinate without tweaking the target word in any way: Japanese: PetrがJanaを好きだ。(Petr-ga Jana-o suki da) JanaをPetrが好きだ。(Jana-o Petr-ga suki da) Petrが好きだ...Janaを。(Petr-ga suki da, ... Jana o.)
- fiblye 7y agoThe grammar here isn't standard. Usually you'd mark the subject doing the liking with は and the object being liked with が. Both generally function as topic markers in other circumstances, so context is important. You can even occasionally use は to mark the object being liked if you're pointing out one particularly liked thing. Using を to mark a subject of affection is pretty rare and regarded as incorrect/usually just a tongue slip. Oftentimes in conversation, particles will be completely dropped in a 好き statement. So getting something like "俺、これ好き" (I, this like) isn't uncommon. In that situation, it's the pause marking the subject doing the liking. If the order is reverse, usually the object marker is used, though as in "これすき、俺は" (this like, I). Japanese grammar is a complex mess. It uses particles and can be orderless, or it can drop many particles (sometimes all) and have everything marked by pauses and timing.
- Ntrails 7y agoJanu miluje Petr. -- PETR loves Jana. Petr miluje Janu. -- Petr loves JANA. Does context define subject/object since otherwise these seem equally to mean Jana loves Petr?
- hackyhacky 7y agoThese sentences do not mean "Jana loves Petr." Subject/object relationship is determined by case marking suffixes on nouns. Another comment proposed an apropos analogy: English is like position-based parameter-passing. sentence.love("Petr", "Jana") Czech is like keyword-based parameter passing. sentence.love(object="Jana", subject="Petr")