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Comment by jackfoxy | Hacker News Reader

With the benefit of one semester of college Latin, I understand why I can't find a good online Latin translation service (for all those little gems you run into from time to time). The language has one of the smallest vocabularies, but it's hugely dependent on complex grammar for meaning.

Anyone create a Cleeki accelerator to do lookups on this page?

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Because of its rich case system, Latin has fairly free word order. This makes it much easier to parse programmatically than, for example, English, which has to mostly rely on word order and prepositions to indicate subjects and objects. The lack of machine translation tools for Latin has more to do with lack of demand than the technical challenge.

>Because of its rich case system, Latin has fairly free word order. This makes it much easier to parse programmatically

From seeing this, I couldn't help but think of the Perl language filter Lingua::Romana::Perligata by Damian Conway.

http://search.cpan.org/~dconway/Lingua-Romana-Perligata-0.50...

Word order in statements means nothing and case means everything -- lvalues, for example, are designated as such by being in the dative case.

It's not terribly useful for writing real code, but it certainly was a great cerebral exercise just to read the manpage (it's been 15 years since I took high school Latin and I realized I remembered more of it than I thought!).

Ha, that's very cool, never saw that before. Thanks for posting.

Compared to any other natural language I've ever studied, Latin grammar is a paragon of simplicity and logic.

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