Comment by ken
7 years ago
In what way is Latin powerful, compared to other languages? Or elegant?
I've had to learn a little Latin, because it's the root of half the English language, and I would not describe it this way at all. It's overly complex and arbitrary. The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_spelling_and_pronunciati... article is full of tables of exceptions. Over its lifetime, they not only couldn't agree on pronunciation, but whether it had lower-case letters, whether to put spaces between words, or which direction to write it.
C is Latin. It's revered because of its age and the the works written in it. It was in the right place at the right time. Half the world who came after tried to make their own improved version, and those improved versions are the languages that are actually popular today.
What spoken language is powerful and elegant? When I was in college, a friend was taking a language (I think it was Swahili but don't quote me on that) that was so simple students learned all of the grammar in the first semester. Everything after that was just learning vocabulary and getting comfortable with it. Turkish has a completely 1:1 mapping of letters to sounds, and perfectly regular conjugation. Korean also has an extremely consistent writing system. Any of those seem more Lisp-like to me than Latin.
> a language that was so simple students learned all of the grammar in the first semester.
Natural languages tend to be similar in complexity, which tends to increase to the bounds placed by a child's ability to learn. Languages with simpler grammar often have eg. more complex phonetic systems. For instance, mandarin is "simple" in that it doesn't have conjugations or tenses, but it's complex in that it has tones. Likewise, Turkish has vowel harmony.
> Korean also has an extremely consistent writing system.
Not only that, but the gylphs actually represent the mouth movements necessary to make the sounds. It's like that because Hangul is a relatively new writing system that was designed with discoveries in linguistics in mind, unlike English and French that have things like vestigial spellings (eg. "through"). So I'd say that Korean would be like an up-and-coming like, uh... Rust. Of course, writing systems aren't really part of a language itself: you can write any language in IPA.
Here is a powerful and elegant human language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto (although it should be said that its power is mostly hypothetical until it becomes widely used, which may be never)
Are you kidding me!?
I understand sanskrit is elegant and simple, and of course ancient, perhaps that would be a better analogy