Re:In Defense of Latin
by afiori on Wednesday November 20, 2019 @06:51PM
(#21589930)
Primitive is like prototype, they clearly communicate that it is meant to be improved.
> Being inflected is a mark of a language that hasn't yet become positional. It is therefore an objective mark of primitiveness in the language.
This assumes that positional languages work better or are more efficient, but that is not clear to me.
"flowery descriptive speech" a la Jane Austen communicates complex ideas. It is just that different subject have different concept of what constitute useful complexity.
Both Terry Tao and Jane Austen could have written their works in almost any language with little impediments.
In particular here one of the scientific advantages of English is not its simple morphology but its permissive lexicon, where creating new word for new concept is a common occurrence.
If by historical accident we happened to speak Latin to this day it is likely that the major loss (compared to English) would be puns.
> Being inflected is a mark of a language that hasn't yet become positional. It is therefore an objective mark of primitiveness in the language.
This assumes that positional languages work better or are more efficient, but that is not clear to me.
"flowery descriptive speech" a la Jane Austen communicates complex ideas. It is just that different subject have different concept of what constitute useful complexity.
Both Terry Tao and Jane Austen could have written their works in almost any language with little impediments.
In particular here one of the scientific advantages of English is not its simple morphology but its permissive lexicon, where creating new word for new concept is a common occurrence.
If by historical accident we happened to speak Latin to this day it is likely that the major loss (compared to English) would be puns.