Re:Who speaks Latin these days?
by FreakLegion on Tuesday February 12, 2013 @01:00PM
(#5208325)
It's very difficult to 'mess up' Latin word order. Just because something doesn't read like Caesar or Cicero doesn't mean it's wrong. Latin allows for a lot of rhetorical flair -- Horace's word order, for example, can be incredibly jumbled, but it's perfectly correct. The tweets are probably fine, just like Milton's English is fine.
Latin should be a fine language for Twitter, as wedging a lot into not many words. A lot of Spinoza's paragraphs in the Ethics would certainly fit in 140 characters.
If that's a criteria for language selection, might as well all go with Chinese :)
Re:Who speaks Latin these days?
by gamegoblin on Tuesday February 12, 2013 @02:30PM
(#5208889)
IIRC Vietnamese has the highest syllabic information density of any natural language. Chinese being a close second (about 94% that of Vietnamese).
Edit: found that article http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2091477,00.ht...
In my university days, I had a girlfriend who was studying German and Latin (to become a secondary school teacher in those two subjects). My wife I won over with the much more practical modern language Chinese. Incidental study of Latin is useful to native speakers of Romance languages (French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, and the like) to understand the origin of their native language, and somewhat less useful to speakers of most languages spoken in Europe, whether Indo-European languages or not, to understand the sources of much of their vocabulary. (Concentrated study of the sources of vocabularly of modern languages through study of word roots
http://www.amazon.com/English-Words-Latin-Greek-Elements/dp/...
http://www.amazon.com/English-Vocabulary-Elements-Keith-Denn...
is very helpful, but that doesn't require learning Latin as a language as such.)
As long as there are great landmarks in Western writing like Newton's Principia available in original Latin editions, there will always be a reward for learning Latin. But with many languages to learn to speak to many people, Latin will not be in first place as the language to learn next for interesting live conversation.