In Defense of Latin

Re:In Defense of Latin by bdowling on Wednesday November 20, 2019 @12:49AM (#21581396)

Your example works because English pronouns are the only nouns in English which still have different forms for parts of speech (e.g., nominative I, possessive my, objective me; he, his, him; they, their, them). In other languages all nouns have different forms for different parts of speech.

In languages like Latin, adjectives also have different forms which match the nouns they modify, making word order flexible without being ambiguous. In English, adjectives usually must preceed the nouns they are attached to, save a few exceptions (attorneys general, tacos supreme, Optimus Prime).

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:In Defense of Latin by tsimionescu on Wednesday November 20, 2019 @01:55AM (#21581670)

You can do it with surnames as well:

Peter does give his love to Jana.

To Jana does Peter give his love.

Give his love to Jana, does Peter.

It sounds pretty unnatural, but it is understandable I believe. Not sure if the Czech versions would sound natural to a Czech or not.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:In Defense of Latin by schoen on Wednesday November 20, 2019 @02:33AM (#21581834)

You've gotten a benefit from having an indirect object expressed with a preposition, but presumably a lot of verbs don't take an indirect object and don't have a synonym that can.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:In Defense of Latin by schoen on Wednesday November 20, 2019 @02:38AM (#21581864)

> attorneys general, tacos supreme, Optimus Prime

Apparently "Prime" is a title or rank among the Transformers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Primes_and_Matrix_hold...

In that case, it's probably not best analyzed as an adjective, unless we want to analyze "Senator" as an adjective in "Senator Wyden" or "Mister" as an adjective in "Mister Rogers".

[ Parent | on HN ]