Comment by schoen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by schoen | Hacker News Reader

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Latin is still perfectly capable of every kind of ambiguity that other natural languages are. For example, I once wrote the sentence

Quisque aliquid habet quod occultet

for a t-shirt.

While the intended meaning is 'everybody has something to hide', in a different context one could imagine that the subject of "occultet" is someone else previously referred to. For example, if we had just been talking about Moxie Marlinspike, we could conceivably read this sentence as 'everybody has something for him [Moxie] to hide'. (Like, all of us users out here have got different things that Moxie can help each of us to protect.)

There's also a famous joke "malo malo malo malo malo" ('I prefer (being) a bad man in a bad situation to (being) an apple in an apple tree'). I'm sure we can proliferate examples of ambiguous Latin to match every other natural language.

A cool disambiguation feature in Latin is the distinction between the possessive pronouns "eius" and "suus", where "suus" is used when referring to possessions of the grammatical subject of the sentence and "eius" when referring to someone else's possessions. While English can specify the former ("his/her/its own"), it doesn't have a straightforward way to show that the possessor is not the subject of the sentence.

You can see the contrast between eius and suus in the text of the Magnificat

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnificat#Text

where "ancillae suae" ('his handmaiden') occurs in a sentence whose grammatical subject is God, but "nomen eius" ('his name') in a sentence whose grammatical subject is the name. And sure enough, there is an actual disambiguation between the subject of a sentence and someone else later on:

Suscepit Israel, puerum suum, recordatus misericordiae suae, sicut locutus est ad patres nostros, Abraham et semini eius in saecula.

He [God] has taken up Israel, his [God's] servant, remembering his [God's] mercy, as he [God] said to our ancestors, Abraham and his [Abraham's] seed forever.

In this case "his mercy" and "his seed" refer to God's mercy but Abraham's seed, but there is no referential ambiguity about that in the Latin because one is "misericordiae suae" and the other is "semini eius".

That's a great point and very interesting comment. I imagine one of the reasons for this formalized (or if you don't like it, over-precise) language to arise and take hold in the Indian setting may have been the fact that Sanskrit too is capable of an amazing amount of ambiguity, in multiple ways:

1. Creative re-interpretation/re-analysis: A lot of commentators have re-interpreted existing verses to derive different meanings, and this is very possible to do. To pick a simple example, there is Kālidāsa's verse “…jagataḥ pitaru vande pārvatīparameśvarau” which clearly is a prayer to Pārvatī and Parameśvara (Shiva). But pārvatī-parameśvarau could be re-analyzed as pārvatīpa-rameśvarau (Parvati's and Ramā (Lakshmi)'s husbands), i.e. a prayer to Shiva and Vishnu. Similarly there are Shiva-para and Vishnu-para interpretations of various verses/works, people have written spiritual commentaries on love poetry, etc. So if something straightforward you say can be interpreted to have any meaning whatsoever (exaggerating a bit) by a sufficiently clever commentator, you better be careful :)

2. Happening naturally: Poets have used this too, what appear to be the same word being used in different settings. For example, here's a prayer that millions of people recite, to Ganesha: “agajānāna-padmārkaṃ gajānanam aharniśam / anekadantam bhaktānām ekadantam upāsmahe” — here the first line has the well-known word “gajānana” (the one with an elephant face), but it also starts with “agajānana” with appears to be the opposite (not an elephant face?). Actually the simple compound “agajānāna-padmārkaṃ” turns out to be made from: a-ga=mountain (that which does not move), thus agajā=daughter of the mountain (Pārvatī), agaja-ānana=Pārvati's face, agajānana-padma=the lotus of Pārvati's face, and the whole word agajānana-padma-arka=the sun to the lotus that is the face of Pārvatī (the sun of course being what makes a lotus bloom), thus it's a simple adjective describing Ganesha (namely that he makes his mother's face bloom with joy). And this is a perfectly straightforward usage of language that most educated readers will simply understand and find unremarkable, not a trick. At most a pleasing coincidence that the same syllables repeat (known as “yamaka”). In the second half, “ekadantam” refers to Ganesha having one tusk, but the “anekadantam” that it starts with is not the opposite of that but simply “anekadam taṃ” (him, who gives many things).

3. Used intentionally: At the extreme, poets have used ambiguity in the above way and also using puns (śleṣa, words with multiple meanings like kara=hand/doer/tax), to compose poems that have multiple meanings, including entire continuous works of poetry that tell two stories at once (each stanza being interpretable in two ways, and in one instance even up to six ways). There's a book about this called Extreme Poetry (https://cup.columbia.edu/book/extreme-poetry/9780231151603 — unfortunately for the lover of literature, this is a product of modern academia so heavy on theory and light on examples, but worth a look nevertheless). There's even a verse that consists of the syllable yā repeated 32 times (yāyāyāyā...) (https://www.scribd.com/document/6591853/The-Wonder-That-is-S...) which is not just “yeah, yeah” but is intended by the author to mean something. :-)

> straightforward usage of language that most educated readers will simply understand and find unremarkable, not a trick

Do you think those readers would recognize the specific words, or that they would successfully parse the words in context at first glance using their language ability?

> There's even a verse that consists of the syllable yā repeated 32 times

Wow! It seems like this tradition or at least possibility is shared between Sanskrit and Chinese.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_...

In general, a lot of the wordplay techniques and genres that are mentioned in the Extreme Poetry book you linked to are also practiced in similar forms in modern English (and to some extent French due to the Oulipo), but many of them were only invented or popularized during the 20th century, so I imagine some of these Sanskrit wordplay traditions are dramatically older.

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

I meant that they would successfully parse the words in context (and recognize the specific words and meanings), using their language ability. To use an example from an interview with a modern master of Sanskrit constrained writing (http://www.indictoday.com/interviews/citrakavya-the-wonder-p...), in an English sentence like “She is his panicky Hispanic friend”, the sound “hispanic” may recur when spoken (depending on the speaker's accent I guess) but most listeners would successfully parse it anyway. (I think there is some “lookahead” in the way we parse things... even if “She is Hispanic” and “She is his panicky…” begin with the same set of sounds, when listening to the latter sentence the listener would quickly backtrack and latch on to the correct understanding, which includes unconsciously re-analyzing the earlier words.)

The difference I was suggesting is that such instances are either rare or awkward in English. But in Sanskrit they are common (helped by poets' enormous skill over centuries, honed in a highly language-focused tradition) even in popular works, and feel natural/elegant.

When it comes to ambiguity in languages, linguistics has a distinction/designation of low-context vs. high-context languages which can also be related to the concept of entropy. Latin is often used as an example of a low-context language because so much is explicit in the surface representation. Japanese is often used as an example of a high-context language - meaning that a good deal of context is needed to properly interpret a sentence. This is loosely analagous to Java (low-context) vs. a Groovy DSL (high-context).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-context_and_low-context_c...

A famous ambiguity built into Latin grammar is the objective vs. subjective genitive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genitive_case#Functions

People would usually mention that "amor Dei" ("love of God") could mean love toward God, or love that God has toward someone else.

Similarly you could have "odium brassicae" ("hatred of cabbage") which could mean a person's attitude toward cabbage, or perhaps a cabbage's attitude toward something or someone else.

Latin obviously has other ways to be more specific ("odium, quod brassica in te fert" 'hatred that cabbage bears against you' or something) but if you just use a genitive to express an attitudinal relation, it's going to be gramatically ambiguous which direction that attitude flows!

You remind me of the famous "I vitelli dei romani sono belli" [0], which:

1) Is correct Latin

2) Sounds Italian, not Latin

3) In Italian it would mean "God's veals are beautiful"

4) In Latin it actually means "Go, Vitellio, to the sound of war (made by) the roman God"

[0]: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_vitelli_dei_romani_sono_bell... (didn't find an English version of it)

3) Actually it means "Romans' calfs are beautiful".

4) The "Vitelli" in Latin would be the vocative of the name "Vitellius" rather than "Vitellio".

Cool sentence -- I had never heard of it before!

The Latin etymological equivalent of the Italian sentence would be "illi vitelli de illis Romanis sunt belli", which uses "de" in a way that's unidiomatic for ancient Latin (where it only means something like "from", not "of" in the sense of "belonging to").

Oh my, you are right! Somehow I guess I got confused when trying to explain.

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