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OK, if your aesthetic preference is such that you find languages with complicated noun morphology more beautiful than those with complicated word-order constrai

OK, if your aesthetic preference is such that you find languages with complicated noun morphology more beautiful than those with complicated word-order constraints, that's fine. But if we're just talking about personal taste, there's no real reason to debate it with other people, since it's arbitrary. > Its over-dependence on word order also makes it easier to construct grammatically ambiguous statements, leading to misunderstandings. Now this, on the other hand, is an objective, quantifiable statement that regardless of taste is either true or false. Incidentally, I strongly suspect that it is not in fact true, and that you only believe English sentences are more likely to be ambiguous than Latin ones is because you speak and write English better than Latin and so are more intuitively aware of its weirdness.

ARandomerDude 7y ago
> if your aesthetic preference is such that you find languages...But if we're just talking about personal taste...it's arbitrary Again, I don't agree with your worldview. The reason I referred to the Sistine Chapel was to provide an analogy: it doesn't merely fit my preferences better than my sketch. It is objectively better. There is something in the painting that is real. The beauty is real. But on your view, the beauty is unreal. It's only real if you can measure it. I disagree. Objectively. I think you're wrong and I suspect you think I'm wrong. And that means there is an objective philosophical truth even though we can't measure it. ETA: not all truth is immeasurable, of course. There are plenty of measurable truths (for example, how many comments are on this thread, or the boiling point of water at standard pressure). But some truth cannot be measured in a laboratory, and that doesn't make it false or unreal.
- tsimionescu 7y ago
  Comparing English to Latin is not like comparing the Sistine Chapel with a sketch. It's more like comparing the Sistine Chapel with a modernist painting. Is the Sistine Chapel objectively more beautiful than Mondrian's Broadway Boogie-Woogie?
  - umanwizard 7y ago
    That’s still a bit dubious IMO as it implies that Latin is the way it is because it reflects an older, “classical” style. Which is not true at all (ask any historical linguist) and only appears to be true if you restrict yourself to looking at Western European language. But in reality, there are ancient analytic/isolating languages (e.g., Classical Chinese), and contemporary highly fusional ones (e.g. Finnish, Navajo).
Koshkin 7y ago
By the same objective measure by which a statue of Venus is more beautiful than a cube made of concrete (despite of the latter possessing more symmetry). The measure could be: the number of people saying so; the shape of the distribution of color in a brain scan of an observer, etc.
- umanwizard 7y ago
  A statue of Venus took creativity and skill to create that a cube of concrete didn’t. There’s no meaningfully similar statement you could make about Latin vs. English.

ARandomerDude 7y ago

> if your aesthetic preference is such that you find languages...But if we're just talking about personal taste...it's arbitrary Again, I don't agree with your worldview. The reason I referred to the Sistine Chapel was to provide an analogy: it doesn't merely fit my preferences better than my sketch. It is objectively better. There is something in the painting that is real. The beauty is real. But on your view, the beauty is unreal. It's only real if you can measure it. I disagree. Objectively. I think you're wrong and I suspect you think I'm wrong. And that means there is an objective philosophical truth even though we can't measure it. ETA: not all truth is immeasurable, of course. There are plenty of measurable truths (for example, how many comments are on this thread, or the boiling point of water at standard pressure). But some truth cannot be measured in a laboratory, and that doesn't make it false or unreal.

tsimionescu 7y ago
Comparing English to Latin is not like comparing the Sistine Chapel with a sketch. It's more like comparing the Sistine Chapel with a modernist painting. Is the Sistine Chapel objectively more beautiful than Mondrian's Broadway Boogie-Woogie?
- umanwizard 7y ago
  That’s still a bit dubious IMO as it implies that Latin is the way it is because it reflects an older, “classical” style. Which is not true at all (ask any historical linguist) and only appears to be true if you restrict yourself to looking at Western European language. But in reality, there are ancient analytic/isolating languages (e.g., Classical Chinese), and contemporary highly fusional ones (e.g. Finnish, Navajo).

Koshkin 7y ago

By the same objective measure by which a statue of Venus is more beautiful than a cube made of concrete (despite of the latter possessing more symmetry). The measure could be: the number of people saying so; the shape of the distribution of color in a brain scan of an observer, etc.

umanwizard 7y ago
A statue of Venus took creativity and skill to create that a cube of concrete didn’t. There’s no meaningfully similar statement you could make about Latin vs. English.