Latin and other Indo-European languages

Latin Learning Latin
1

Dear all,

I have just ordered the Old French textbook of Kibler from Amazon, it will takes about 3 weeks to come to me in Vietnam. I am also learning Old English, and for me, it is very simpler than Latin / Ancient Greek in term of grammar and syntax, however it is not less interesting. I just started with Old French, but my feeling is also that it is not as hard as Latin.

What is the reason for that difference? My personal view is that the Ancient English and French [and maybe other “barbarian”] did not have enough time to develop their old literature to the point of being complicated. By Enough Time, I mean the existing time of the Old Language before it transform to Medieval Language.

Hope to hear from you about this topic

@ Beside, cause I am very interested in studying the Old Indo-European languages, hope to hear from someone studying Italian and Old Irish about your experience and feeling [maybe, oneday, I will also learn them]

Sincerely yours,

2

I’m not sure I’ve quite grasped your meaning, testsuda, but if you’re seeing an association between, say, a higher total number of different forms for a complete verb paradigm and a longer literary history, I’m not sure you’re seeing things the right way; there’s no correlation between the two. As Latin and English evolved in their turn from largely oral languages into languages with an increasingly prolific literature they shed grammatical complexity rather than gained it. I don’t know of any languages in which a more highly developed literature goes hand in hand with greater grammatical complexity. Do you know of any?

3

Dear Victor,

Thanks for your reply, and it is very interesting to hear from you, please let me explain you a little bit as below:

I agree with the opinion that there is separation between Written Language and Oral Language as in Latin we have Classical Latin [Written] that we read from texts and the Vulgate Latin [Oral] developing to Romance Languages. As I read from textbook of Gavin Bett, even Cicero have not spoken the same Latin language with one he used to write - the oral is simpler in Syntax, Forms…

Cause the Writting Language is also the Literature Language, that means the Literature Language has a POTENTIAL to be more complex than the oral. Why do I say “potential” ? Cause it must take time for writters generation by generation to develop, to create more Syntax Type, more Forms… The more they develop the more complex the literature language is. At this point, you could ask why they WANT to develop to be more sophisticated. About this, I think it is NATURALLY for human to develop like this, cause a complex grammar means you have so many ways to express your idea, thinking. Comparing the Old English with Latin, it is in many great texts of Old English that the syntax used is just equivalent to that of Intermediate Latin texts [the texts that Intermediate level people could read smoothly]

So, if they do not have long time enough, they will not be able to develop it to the complex point. As for the English, they had stopped the Old English at time of Normandy Conquest in 11 century. That is what I mean

Hope to hear more from you and the others

Sincerely yours,

4

As Victor said, languages tend to shed grammatical complexity rather than gain it. The Indo-European antecedents of Latin and Greek had more cases, for instance. The Romance languages (e.g. Old French), which derive from Latin, simplify further. Similarly Anglo-Saxon is more complex than modern English. The Norman conquest enlarged the lexicon but the grammar was simplified. English is still in process of simplification (e.g. subjunctive mood fading) and standardization. Compare Plautus’ syntax with Cicero’s, or Homer with Attic, and Attic with koine.

In literary cultures written forms of expression may tend to greater syntactical complexity than oral ones (but also to more grammatical regularity), but that is quite a different matter.

Obviously there’s more to it than this, and other ways of looking at it too (is “of” less complex than a genitive inflection or more?), but I think you have linguistic development largely the wrong way round.

5

Dear MWH,

Thanks for your idea. Certainly, it is just my personal view and explaination, and it is difficult [if not impossible] to check whether it is real truth or not

Thanks all for your share that help me lots of understanding more about old languages

Sincerely yours,

6

A theory cannot be true if it is inconsistent with the facts.

7

hi testsuda, i agree with the earlier posters, but i think in addition that you can draw a valuable lesson for yourself from your original observation. you started by talking about how you found latin harder (subjective) than some other IE languages, but then the thread shifted to whether IE languages become more or less complex (objective) over time.

the earlier posters are right about the objective part (although, as they said, it’s not quite so simple when you look at literary genres, e.g. the shift from paratactic to hypotactic syntax can seem to be a shift to greater complexity), but you can draw some useful information for yourself about the subjective part and find out why you find one IE language harder (subjective) than another. if you read a complete thought expressed in two IE languages, but find one harder than the other, is it because one is just more “complex” than the other as a whole, or is it simply because you are weaker in one particular aspect of language learning (e.g. complex syntax of subordinate clauses) which is only present in the “harder” one?

i suggest you take a few sentences of latin, and a few sentences of the other IE languages that you’re learning, and start reading them and see where you get stuck, i.e. where you give up reading. why did you give up there? is it because you don’t know the word ending? you don’t see how the syntax works? you don’t know the word’s meaning (vocabulary)? you don’t know what the word is referring to (pronouns etc)? etc.

if you do this you can refine your judgment “latin is harder” down to something more concrete like e.g. “latin syntax is harder” and then you can work on that aspect specifically. turn that from one of your weaknesses into one of your strengths.

then you might find your judgment of one IE language being “harder” (subjective) than others shifting. cheers, chad

8

Dear CB,

Very amazing explaination. I quite agree with you that “easy” or “hard” also depend on our language skill. It is our personal feeling. Totallly agree on this angle

However, I believe that we can use some objective standard to measure that degree. That is the time for learning people to master that language/ or to understand a text

For more clearly describing my idea, we will compare texts inside Latin:

I have read Gallic War of Caesar, and also Deeds of the Frank. The writting style of Gallic War is more complex that Deeds of the Frank, for particular: Caesar use lots of complex sentences, and usually his sentences comprise many more clauses, phrases than those of Deeds of the Frank

So, why Ceasar wrote like this, and why the writter of Deeds of the Frank composed like that? I think that simply because Caesar wanted to write by complex ways, to make things more colorful [to show his ability, knowledge…]

And, why can Caesar make things complex? Cause the Latin grammar has enough elements [tense, cases, pronoun…] for him to do that. Those elements belong to the language, but the way one choose to write is of himself. For me, grammar as a whole is relatively fixed, but syntax - or writting style is what a person can create. And if his creation is well, other peopole will follow him, and that style will be more common

Come back to Old Enlgish, although its grammar elements is not as detailed as Latin, but I think it also has enough complexity, but the point is that there is still no person translating its complexity potential to be real, so the sentences in Old English great texts are still far simpler than those of Caesar

And the reason for that is they just have a short time to develop their native Old English literature, so Old English literature language was still near to Old English oral language. If they had more time, I belive there would been some people that liking to make complex things like Caesar the Great :smiley:

Just for fun and understand more :smiley: Please kindly share your idea

Sincerely yours,

9

hi testsusa, if i understand your idea correctly, you are saying that:

  1. as time passes, a language acquires more and more ways to say the same thing (through innovations of language users, which are available to be used in turn by later users of the same language)
  2. as a language acquires more and more ways to say the same thing, users of the language exploit these possibilities to make their work more artistic/stylistic
  3. as users of the language exploit these possibilities to make their work more artistic/stylistic, the language becomes more complex
    therefore
  4. as time passes, languages become more complex

but i think 1, 2 and 3 aren’t as simple as that.

on 1, it’s true that there are innovations in language use over time, but it would be difficult to figure out whether the fund of available ways to say the same thing really increases over time or not. previously used ways to say the same thing can become less used and die out. i can’t use the english language of shakespeare in addition to the post-shakespearean english language innovations - it’s not as if the pot goes on increasing forever. does e.g. homer really have less ways of saying the same thing than later greek writers – a narrower vocabulary, a poorer syntax?

on 2, there are lots of reasons (which have nothing to do with the passing of time) why a writer might not exploit to the full all the different ways of saying a thing. just one e.g. is literary genre: see for instance how cicero limits his use of the resources at his disposal when writing/giving orations compared to writing philosophical works and letters (these are quotes from von albrecht’s “cicero’s style: a synopsis”, chapter 1):

“A first negative guideline for any orator who wants to influence his audience is to avoid all that could strike them as odd; and therefore he conforms his language and style to the common usage … In his orations, Cicero eschews poetic and colloquial expressions. To give an example, he may say in a letter quod in buccam venerit (‘what came to the tip of his tongue’) whereas in his orations the wording is more dignified: neque hoc mihi nunc primum in mentem venit dicere (‘and this has not come to my mind now for the first time’ Pro S. Roscio 42. 122). Archaic and poetic vocabulary is more frequent in Cicero’s philosophical writings than in his orations … Technical terms used in the philosophical and rhetorical treatises are absent from the orations … As compared to his poetry, Cicero’s orations exhibit less striking metaphors; even in the philosophical writings he uses them more freely … Unlike the style of the philosophical writings, which sometimes rises to archaic solemnity, the diction of the orations is generally ‘modern.’ Consequently, in the orations, the position of the finite verb in the main clause is conventional (the verb stands mostly at the end of the sentence), whereas in the philosophical writings the (allegedly ‘logical’) position in the middle of the sentence occurs as often as the customary one … Among positive stylistic features, sentence construction is more complex in his orations than in his letters … The elaborate alternation of parataxis and hypotaxis found in the orations is also absent from Cicero’s poetry. In the course of his life, his prose and his poetry developed in different directions: in his poems, participial constructions and connecting particles typical of prose become ever less prominent, while in the orations the use of participles gains in frequency and freedom … Furthermore, in his orations, Cicero exploits the emotional potential of word order by often placing the verb at the beginning of the sentence, especially in lively narrative. The less balanced character of the orations implies a less regular distribution of participles in their text. Furthermore, in the orations participles are more often used in predicate (in such cases their ‘verbal’ power serves to reflect a process), whereas in the philosophical writings they rather appear as attributes (conveying descriptions of circumstances in nominal form). However, parallelism, despite its ‘logic’ and matter-of fact appearance, is slightly more favoured in the orations and letters than in the philosophical writings. The reason is that parallelism has a strong psychological impact on listeners, as modern political orators know …”

on 3, i don’t think this is necessarily right. a lot depends on context, and so there isn’t a direct correlation between the number of variants, synonyms etc used and the complexity of the language. e.g. plato has lots of ways to say “yes” in his dialogues when socrates has asked a leading question prompting the answer “yes”. However, whether plato used just one word for yes or twenty variants, i don’t think this affects the complexity in any way. the context makes it clear. winston churchill talked about this in “the scaffolding of rhetoric”: the meaning of the rare word “dour” is actually very clear in the context of the phrase “stern and dour” (and so its use doesn’t make the language any more complex than if the word “stern” was used alone):

"There are few audiences so ignorant as to be incapable of admiring correct diction–for even if they have never heard the word before they will, if it be rightly used, understand its meaning. The Scotch have been described as a ‘stern and dour’ folk. ‘Dour’ is a rare and uncommon word: but what else could it convey to the Anglo-Saxon mind than the character of the people of a cold, grey land, severe, just, thrifty and religious. "

and so i just can’t think of any objective criteria you could use to show how a language becomes more complex over time. Instead what you can measure is much more limited things – like what innovations in language a particular author makes, what grammatical/syntactical features drop out over time, what is the density of vocabulary (i.e. discrete lemmata used) in a particular author or range of authors, does the author draw on a range of rare/obsolete vocabulary or not (try reading Huysmans in French!), what features are common to specific genres, etc.

cheers, chad

10

Dear CB,

Thanks you so much. You understood me correctly and that is enough for me to be happy.

Your explaination is full, and I learn lots from it, guess that you must be a Latin Professionial or a scholar

Very thanksful

Sincerely yours,

11

hi testsuda, no you should in fact disregard everything i say. i’ve never had a classics class. i’m just interested, have a community borrower’s library card at the local uni, and have been coming to this forum for over a decade to learn! cheers, chad

12

I think the complexity of a language is more or less inversely proportional to the number of its speakers. By complexity I mean things like large and irregular inflectional paradigms, complex tense systems, and the like. It’s often said that this is subjective, but I don’t think it is, at least not beyond a certain point. It’s the fact that a language has a lot of speakers over a large area, especially non-native ones, that tends to even out its peculiarities.

The languages that have most speakers in the world, English and Chinese, are both very “simple” in that they have minimal inflection (personnally I don’t know Chinese, though) and syntactic relations are mostly defined by the position of words in the sentence. Old English (and I presume it’s similar with Old Chinese) was more complex, and the reason it got simplified is, I believe, intimately related to the fact that more and more people started to speak English, especially non-native speakers. Looking at the history of English, first you have Scandinavians (Vikings) who settled in England – at the time, they spoke Old Norse, which was mutually understandable with Old English. Then you had the Norman Conquest, with Old French speaking people invading the country. The fact that there were over the centuries so many non-native speakers in England was certainly one important element that caused a levelling of many complexities of the language, and this continues to day when English has become the lingua franca in the whole world.

When we look at languages that are spoken in the world today, it seems almost invariably so that languages get more simple with time. But I think it’s an illusion, it’s rather that we see only at the languages that are gaining ground in the world, those that have very large (and growing) communities and have perhaps a colonial history. Languages spoken by small, isolated communities tend to be complex, but we don’t know them because they have no literature and almost no speakers - and most of them are dying out.

13

Paul, I’ve actually come to the same exact conclusion: the number of speakers in a language is directly proportional to it’s conformance to regular, simple patterns. I think there is a parallel to this in cultures themselves: as they get larger and encompass more people they “level” and their core values become more and more simplified. A small tribe can be based on very specific and detailed religious/spiritual views but as a society becomes larger its core values become more abstract, generic and simple.

14

Dear Paul, and brothers

I am not sure about the formula: “the more people use a language, the simpler the language is”

However, I totally agree with you about the simple of both Modern English & Modern Chinese. I know the Classical Chinese, it is quite simple in term of grammar. The only complicated thing of it is its characters. The Modern Chinese - I think, is equivalent with its Classical, it is more complex in somethings, but simpler in some other things comparing with the Classical

My native language - Vienamese, is also extremely easy in Grammar, it is similar with Chinese grammar. But its pronunciation is very hard

Vietnamese nearly has no tense, no inflection, relatively fixed word order. You all have experience of studying language, if you want to learn Vietnamese, I dare to say that you can master its grammar just in 1 month [of course, its pronunciation is another story]

Just for reference:

In Vietnamese, you can say:

“tomorrow, I go” [ngày mai, tôi đi]
“yesterday, I go” [hôm qua, tôi đi]
“today, I go” [hôm nay, tôi đi]

The adverb already showed the happening time of the verb, so there is no need for conjugating the verb

Sincerely yours,

15

Paul,
I don’t quite agree with all your assessments. It seems to me this conclusion of language simplification is most often reached on the basis of English and Chinese. However, when seen in wider scope, it ceases to hold water.

An infant learns every language with the same ease, an observation on which Noam Chomsky based his influential (though, in some of its aspects, quite ill-advised) theory. One only needs to think of Arabic, which could be labelled as a complex language but has 242 million speakers (according to Ethnologue). The Latin language easily spread (as is well known) to vast areas in Western Europe despite its greater inflectional complexity. This is seen even today in Romance languages. It is not the language but prestige of the culture of its speakers.

Most importantly, however, having little inflection does not mean the language is simple (as testsuda noted). The roots of this notion are in fact in the classification of the 19th century, when (chiefly) German linguists thought that, on the one hand, the absence of intricacy in Chinese meant that the Chinese are simple, and, on the other hand, the polysynthesis of language such as West Greenlandic shows that as it is still undeveloped, so are the Esquimaux. Lo and behold: the ideal state of a language coincided with that of German, the lingua franca of linguists in that period. These kinds of undercurrents have been abandoned, but some of the mindsets persist. I for one do not regard Chinese and English as easy or simple languages, their simplicity being only superficial. As said, this must not be upset with the impression of an infant learning its first language.

Besides, it is easy to imagine English or Chinese (re)developing cases or verbal inflection. This happened for instance in Hungarian, which famously has a myriad of cases. Most of them are relatively late, ensued as originally two words merged into one. Thus we have paradisumben ‘in paradise’ already in Halotti Beszéd, having originally the word bél ‘(the) inside’ plus -n of locative. In Finnish, as well, cases conveying locality are more recent than the so called grammatical cases (like genitive).

As for English, it has indeed been expressed that it would have pidginised due to strong contact with Norman French and especially Old Norse, but this has convincingly been refuted or at least shown as highly unlikely. In addition, it is important to bear in mind that when Shakespeare started his career—that is, when English had already developed more or less to its present stage—English was, besides Britannia, only spoken on the Isle of Man and the eastern and southern coasts of Ireland. The expansive spreading that ensued did little to the language.

testsuda,
As the language learning experience differs immensely between individuals, it is very difficult for me to appraise your ordeals. I can only guess that multitudinous inflectional system of Latin and Ancient Greek may cause you hardships. This could indeed be due to the analytic nature of your native Vietnamese. My mother tongue is Finnish, but as the first foreign languages we learn are generally Swedish and English, everything tends (at least at first) to be viewed through Germanic grammar. Often either languages that are dissimilar to one’s first language or to those that one began with are considered most difficult. It is often said that Finnish is really complex, and Finns like to reiterate it. However, Finnish is not that difficult, only somewhat different from Indo-European languages with which many are familiar.

As to how languages evolve, I think our minds are obfuscated by the at least superficially conflicting knowledge we get from our different experiences. Languages do seem to attain complexity as the tradition of writing them becomes more and more established. I think of Biblical Hebrew here (having highly heterogenous collection of texts) which lacked in some of its syntactic features intricacy which it may have obtained had it had opportunity to develop as a natural language. This is, though, only one way of viewing things.

Literary languages obviously lacks the non-verbal qualities of spoken language and thus has to be more strictly governed. And features like floundering and repetition of content would seem more disturbing in writing than in speech where they may abound.