Silene care, I agree with what you say. And the only way to address your point
I’m not so sure how good I would be at it if I weren’t a native speaker
is to consult, or test, someone truly bilingual, immersed equally in the languages compared.
Note that it may complicate things to have to deal in Latin with ‘non-standard’ inflexions (those omitted from standard textbooks today). Whitaker’s Words program contains dozens (gleaned from Allen&Greenough and other sources), and this can be confusing to anyone not aware of their existence. I’ve adapted his database in my own work, and the results sometimes elicit surprise. Typically, “I never saw that ending before! Are you sure about that?” Syncopated endings, Greek endings, and many more. I became interested in the ‘non-standard’ endings because they sometimes bend the penultimate rule for accenting. They usually make good sense from a speech point-of-view (economical, yet unambiguous–otherwise they would never have been used). Of course, it’s untypical to be considering endings from different historical periods all together, but, even in the classical period, there are various options, as you may know. (It was a revelation to me, initially. Whitaker has done such a brilliant job, also, in attaching frequency weightings to stems and inflexions. It’s a joy.)
Adrianus
Hyphenation is reserved for terms like histórico-crÃtico, marxismo-leninismo, etc, in other words, when you try to form a single concept from two distinct terms
That’s what I meant with “Transistor-pulse-width-modulation control-method”.
I like Lucus’s neo-Latin because of the variety of endings (albeit genitive), which I thought was what attracted you, Amadei, to your solution (variety of prepositions). I saw references to entries in the new volume of Vatican neo-Latin dictionary that read more like dictionary definitions than coined words and expressions. I guess that’s the approach that I was wondering about: coining versus defining.
Adrianus
I repeat, you can’t do that in Spanish. It is impossible. We are not dealing with a complex concept, but a complex term, and in my language it has to be expressed with prepositions, i.e., the relations between the components must be explicit.
I like Lucus’s neo-Latin because of the variety of endings (albeit genitive), which I thought was what attracted you, Amadei, to your solution (variety of prepositions).
What I’m looking for is not only a variety of forms, but a variety in relations, that’s why I substituted in Spanish “de” (belonging) with “por” (means). Hope this makes any sense.
Regarding “poor English wording” — it is not poor. English is a Germanic language, and inherits the ability to put words together in just such a manner – a compound noun. Other examples: Acquired Immunodeficiency Disorder Syndrome, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. German does the same thing, but with no spaces. Latin’s beautiful advantage is that it can præserve fully English or Germanic word order, which always demonstrates clear parenthetical relationships between words in such compound nouns, while making explicitly clear the grammatical relation of one word to another. As for my translation, it is direct, and implicit. It could easily be made less direct and litteral, and instead altered for absolute clarity of phrase and meaning — which is Latin’s tendency — but then again, you could do the same to the English.
Talking about compound nouns and language differences, reminds me that when I started to read Donatus Ars Grammatica, the lack of a separate adjectival word category with the grammarians struck me as interesting. Adjectives are to be considered within ‘nomines’, as I understand it.
Anyway, back to “Prosody and Syllable Stress”. French is a language that stresses frequently on a final syllable. Having started to look at French Renaissance sources and accenting, is it just a coincidence that the French grammarians seem to give (slightly) more prominence to oxytones in Latin? I gave some examples earlier of questioning and stresses on the ultimate --such as ‘quid faciám?’ I need to check again on earlier evidence for interrogations bending the penultimate rule. The ‘quid faciám’ example is from the French authors, Ramus and Corderius, and they have lots of ultimately stressed words. Their Latin textbooks were very popular in England for a very long time, and the accenting often is repeated in the English editions. Before English orthographic reform, it wasn’t uncommon–at the English royal court, say-- to class French as a ‘more perfect’ language than English because it’s closer to Latin. English-speakers (certainly some) would, then, have been open to French recommendations about Latin accenting. It doesn’t undermine the argument about final accenting from the grammarians,–French writers/speakers may have been just particularly comfortable in applying classical penultimate-rule bending; but it does mean one has to remember about national and regional accenting differences when interpreting second-level emphatic accenting, I think.
Adrianus.
But what about the user-friendliness of English in a truly global context? Quid dicis, care BP&? Is it really easier for your girlfriend to learn English than for you to learn Korean? If so, why? And what about reading? Is there anything equivalent to our word-length, inflection, etc? Also, would Latin be easier than English for your girlfriend to learn?
Alas, she’s no longer my girlfriend! - but I can’t imagine English is any easier for her than Korean is for me. The difficulties cut both ways - so whereas Korean divides its mutes between aspirated, unaspirated (with voiced/voiceless not being used in minimal pairs), and glottalized, English divides its between voiced and voiceless (with aspirated/unaspirated not being used in minimal pairs).
Syntactically, Korean uses S-O-V instead of S-V-O. So it’s equally difficult regardless of which way you switch. Also, Korean is left-branching, English right-branching: Koreans say “the dog eating person” instead of the “person who eats a dog.” Again, the two languages are so reciprocal that I can’t see how one learner has an advantage over the other.
I’m glad I saw your question, Interaxus! I hadn’t been following this thread for a while.
Interaxe, I wouldn’t infer that because it’s harder to unscramble the letters of a jumbled Latin word, that it’s a less user-friendly language. I was referring to the point raised about word-guessing, given the first and last letters of a word, and, secondly, that I found inflected languages harder to parse in computer algorithm (but that might just reflect on my ability). It’s not really a fair comparison in any other context. You would have to compare ‘amavit’ and ‘he has loved’, say. In that instance, remove the spaces from the English, jumble the letters between ‘a…t’ and h…d’ and English will come off worse. Decoding a sentence in which word spaces were preserved and word-letters jumbled would be easier, I believe, in English than in Latin. In one odd sense, that means English is less user-friendly,–less user-friendly to the code-maker in that instance! If your purpose is to communicate clearly, however, to the widest audience, there’s nothing in what I said that implies Latin is weaker than English. Word-spaces may help slightly in parsing but disambiguating what’s said for what’s meant is another matter.
By the way, thanks for the comments about the computer-voice recordings (good one about Catullus!). I’m not really sure what it shows myself, other than the non-discriminating syllablizing of words without spaces and vowel-lengths produces semi-intelligible/semi-mad results.
Salvete. I don’t have any Greek so my question is to Hu and Lucus and others who do.
Are the following accentings correct for the ultima of certain Greek declensions and, if so, what Greek declensions are they?
nom: ôs, gen: ô, dat: o, acc: on, voc os, abl: û
nom: o, gen: ûs, dat: ô, acc: ô, voc ô, abl: û
The accents in Greek mean that the ultima receives a pitch stress in those cases, don’t they? Because if they do, then my seventeenth-century source for this indicates that Latin second-declension vocatives in ‘i’ (i.e., words ending in ‘ius’) are also ‘perispomenon’,–accented on the ultima with a circumflex, as ‘î’. Such vocatives could be considered clipped words (in the ‘concision’ category) or differentiated (to distinguish from the genitive singular). It’s concision (or ‘apocope’) because the vocative ‘e’ is dropped from the end of the word (‘syncope’ is when letters are omitted from the middle). A circumflex can only go on a long vowel, so the short vowel (‘i’) seems here to be considered to have lengthened, as in other instances where the circumflex is applied in syncopated words. Both concision and differentiation are consistent with such vocatives getting the exceptional pitch stress. The only other evidence I’ve found for this is from Italy in the 1490s, where, in one source, the vocative for ‘son’ is stressed on the ultima, --indicated by ‘filÃ’, albeit with an acute and not a circumflex (and, because that source is consistent in its use of circumflexes, it seems to mean a short ultima ‘i’).
Thanks for any help you can give.
Adrianus
Adriane: may I revert briefly to the subject of readibility? I wonder whether the transformation of Latin into its various European offshoots was a process of simplification or not (for whatever reason)? I’ve always assumed so, but what do the experts say? Is it just a matter of what we are used to? Even though Latin is becoming less and less opaque to me as I pursue the acquaintanceship, Italian, Spanish and French still strike me as being closer to each other (or even to English) than to Latin – i.e. they are ‘simpler’ to learn/understand despite their inflections.
If there has in fact been some kind of progress from complex to less complex, where do we place Latin on the scale - and has there been a comparable development in other major world languages?
Curiously enough, Swedish (North Germanic) has retained a strict inflexional system for nouns and articles – but only to distinguish definite from indefinite and to indicate gender, not to indicate case. Otherwise it has shed virtually ALL personal verb endings. On the other hand, Finnish (non-Indo-European) still has a daunting array of inflexions (perhaps that’s why a few Finnish hotheads still love to broadcast in Latin).
BP&: Sorry to hear about your Korean disconnection. Tu ne excruciaveris! (or how do I say, ‘Hope youâ€:trade_mark:re not doing a Catullusâ€:trade_mark:?). Thanks anyway for confirming my suspicion that English might not be the ‘easiest-to-learnâ€:trade_mark: language for all world citizens. But then, would Latin?
You should read Herman’s Vulgar Latin. It’s the best presentation on the topic (i.e. spoken Latin throughout the language’s existence), and he does a concise and excellent job of demonstrating the processes that converted Latin into the Romance languages. He is especially persuasive in his arguments regarding the loss of inflection.
Btw, the book is a pleasure to read, at least in its English translation.
I must read Herman’s book, too. Thanks, Cantator. On your point, Interaxe, don’t you think one of the reasons Italian, Spanish and French seem more accessible than Latin is because of a changed context for the understanding of modern languages? I don’t mean just the need for an expanded vocabulary in Latin, but for the need to understand turns of phrase that arise from altogether different world-views and cultural values and attitudes belonging to another period. Despite what may be commended about the clarity of expression of classical Latin, when all’s said and done, classical Latin is an historical language. As such, reading a classical Latin author compares (vaguely) to reading an early- or middle- English, French, Italian or Spanish one, as opposed to a modern author. Latin is an unusual language in so far as it survived in its later stages as a language of learning, as opposed to natural speech, and because of a deliberate classical-conservation policy. Erasmus in the second decade of the sixteenth century pointed out the downside of this: so few students, and otherwise educated people in his day, could carry on a conversation in Latin about the world around them anywhere close to at a vernacular level,–they lacked the vocabulary to talk about everyday things (Erasmus complains about students asking for “that thing over there” when referring to a towel, say), but they could have a great academic discussion on more erudite matters. Erasmus and other educational reformers hoped to change that situation in Latin language-learning, but they were ultimately unsuccessful. The living-latin movement today takes up the challenge, and seeks to modernise the language, as any living language must modernise, but can the language propagate beyond the greenhouse?
Adrianus.
Thanks anyway for confirming my suspicion that English might not be the ‘easiest-to-learnâ€:trade_mark: language for all world citizens. But then, would Latin?