What is it that makes languages like Latin and Ancient Greek superior?
What is it that makes languages like Latin and Ancient Greek superior?
Nolan Anderson
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Noah Thomas
Incredible sentence order flexibility, tenses and cases, basically.
Oliver Robinson
Gendered nouns and adjectives, rich verb inflection and most importantly a fully formed case system make them much superior to English. See also why Russian is one of the best big living languages for literature.
Justin Nelson
Care to explain in detail? Why do noun cases make language better? Does it mean that Lithuanian is superior to English then?
Nicholas Peterson
Why did you single out Russian? German or Polish share these features as well.
Alexander James
cases allow for nuance that's hard to conway and free up sentence order without excessive use of support words
compare: cat chases the dog
which is the only way to write this sentence
in Latin and Greek (and Lithuanian, Russian, Icelandic, etc.) you can write this as:
cat chases dog
dog chases cat
chases dog cat (?)
chases cat dog (?)
cat dog chases
dog cat chases
and all have the same meaning as shown by the case of the nouns except in some of the languages putting the verb first turns it into a question like in English
simple example but you get the point
Caleb King
Polish because it's not a "big" language in terms of literature (not compared to Russian or German anyway) and German because German case inflection is much simpler than Russian and is on the decline in many regions
but I didn't mean to single it out, only to point it out as an example
Juan Gonzalez
>German case inflection is much simpler than Russian and is on the decline in many regions
As a native speaker of German I soundly disagree with this apparent observation. There is a tendence of replacing the genetive with the dative in certain local dialects but you won't find that in the written language.
Liam Gonzalez
>genetive
I meant "genitive". Gosh darn typo.
Brandon Roberts
Why the fuck would a cat be chasing a dog?
Kayden Morales
Because cats can be territorial and dominant? A scratched nose is enough to send many domestic dogs running.
Blake Thompson
Not much inherently. They are slightly more flexible and nuanced in certain ways, partly because they're older and partly because they're ossified literary languages, but really it's just about the stuff that is written in them.
They can be beautiful and all, but anyone who says they had a better time reading the Aeneid than Goethe or Rilke because the Aeneid was "more complex" is just trying to seem patrician. It's actually a problem sometimes, since really complex and beautiful stuff like Cicero or his later imitators will always make you double-take once in a while, even after years and years of studying Latin. Most people never lose the feeling of solving a puzzle while reading Latin, even when they get really good at it.
Matthew King
the dative and accusative have essentially merged in some dialects and the genitive is all but dead in low German
and German declensions rarely change the stem of the noun but only the associated article
and German does not have the instrumental or propositional cases period unlike Russian
Jayden Robinson
Why the fuck not?
Charles Jones
>the dative and accusative have essentially merged in some dialects
Irrelevant as we all speak and write High German and if someone confuses dative and accusative while writing he makes himself look like a buffoon
>and the genitive is all but dead in low German
Low German itself is all but dead.
>German declensions rarely change the stem of the noun but only the associated article
That's also wrong, German does that a lot:
das Haus - des Hauses - dem Hause - das Haus
>and German does not have the instrumental or propositional cases period unlike Russian
Point taken.
Christopher Parker
>>German declensions rarely change the stem of the noun but only the associated article
>That's also wrong, German does that a lot:
>das Haus - des Hauses - dem Hause - das Haus
no I mean that's a suffix, not the stem
I think Russian mainly uses suffixes too but compare Icelandic:
köttur - kött - ketti - kattar
maður - mann - manni - manns
ketill - ketil - katli - ketils
where the Germanic i and u-umlauts are productive in case declensions and modify the true stem of the verb instead of just adding a suffix (which in Icelandic is ur - *blank* - i - s)
Aaron Martin
Just done my Latin Language ALevel exam, smashed it lads!
Wyatt Cook
Ah sorry, overread that. Yeah, we have some irregular stems but not that many. Also my knowledge of linguistics is only limited.
Jackson Bailey
Then why is Russian literature so poor compared to every other major European country?
Aiden Wood
...
Ryan Davis
>muh Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy
>muh Chekhov and Gogol
>muh Pushkin
Russian literature doesn't have anything on French, German, or English literature. They were only relevant for two centuries.
Nolan Ward
Easton Scott
Just because a language has cases doesn't mean it has a completely free word order. My understanding is that Latin is like that, but in Icelandic for instance the verb is all but required to be the second element of the sentence and only occurs otherwise in poetry.