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Latin is the most powerful natural language I know.

The reason is that the grammar is so developed that the word order is essentially arbitrary, and that, together with other grammatical features, gives rise to a method I have not seen so fully realized in any other language:

It allows you to express the content in such a way that the way you express it matches the content.

For example, consider the verses:

    Daedalus interea Creten longumque perosus
    exilium tactusque loci natalis amore

Here, exilium (= "exile") logically belongs to the first verse. The flexible word order has allowed the author to arrange it so that this word appears in isolation (i.e., "in exile") from the verse it belongs to, while still fitting the metre (hexameter), thus matching what is being described with the form that is used to describe it. The suffix "-que" that can be attached to Latin words to mean "and" makes "longumque" also quite long as a word, stressing how long the exile is.

Especially in the Metamorphoses, this strategy is extremely common and applied masterfully: If something is being described that is hard to do, then the sentence is structured in such a way that it is comparatively hard to understand, by using an unusual word order etc. If things are far apart, the words are themselves far apart etc. For quick things, words are omitted that cannot be omitted in other languages etc.

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The reason is that the grammar is so developed that the word order is essentially arbitrary

Lots of languages are like this. Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Polish, etc. And those are just the ones that I know.

  Janu miluje Petr. -- PETR loves Jana.
  Petr miluje Janu. -- Petr loves JANA.
  Petr Janu miluje. -- Petr LOVES Jana.
  etc etc

The only people who say that Latin is uniquely flexible are those people with no experience in other languages. If expressive inflection and flexible word-order are your thing, you have lots of languages with millions of living speakers that fulfill that requirement.

Latin is not magical. It's just another language. I'm happy that the author enjoys it (language, any language, makes a great hobby!), but I wish we could skip the hyperbole around Latin's alleged virtues just because the Romans happened to use it.

Can you explain how your first two examples mean the same thing?

I assume "Janu" is the accusative form of "Jana", indicating that Jana is the recipient rather than the source of the love in each sentence.

That assumption is correct. You see the same conjugation form in other Slavic languages, including Russian.

Nouns/names/numbers have declensions. Verbs have conjugations.

I think the coverall term that btilly wanted was "inflections".

Shameless plug, I wrote about this here: https://blog.mclemon.io/cases-are-hard-who-punched-who - I used a slightly more one-sided example (Petr punches Pavel) to start things off ... but I talked a bit more about other cases to explain how it all fits together and why they're important.

Basically though, in the specific example in the GP comment we know who loves whom by the order of words in the sentence - "${subject} loves ${object}" which is different from "${object} loves ${subject}". We know this because the word order in English tells us this.

But in Czech and Latin this isn't how it works - the word order doesn't have the same significance or meaning as it does in English [1]. You indicate who does what by making a little modification to the words. In this example it's one of the simpler cases - a simple verb with a subject and an object. The subject is the "nominative" case (like the dictionary/default form of a word) and the object should be in the "accusative" case. So it's actually something like "${object.nominative()} loves ${subject.accusative()}".

And just to confuse you further - it's not just "who does what" - there are other cases that denote doing something with or to or in :-) I give some examples in the above link

[1] = that's not to say word order doesn't have a role, it's just not the same role as in English

Regarding the linked blog page: It's a nice introduction to the idea of cases, but it's not entirely accurate: the usual dative/locative form of Pavel is Pavlovi. Pavlu would be used only when there's a surname present. Thus "o Pavlovi" but "o Pavlu Novákovi".

Oops, thanks! Fixed - these nuances still kinda escape me :-O

> ${object.nominative()} loves ${subject.accusative()}

You mixed it up, it should be "${object.accusative()} loves ${subject.nominative()}".

Or, I guess, how you define "object" and "subject" for "loves" :P But grammatically, for transitive verbs, "subject" is the doer of an action, "object" is the target of an action.

Damn I rewrote that comment about 2 times and must have mangled it in the process!

The real answer is that all European languages used to be this way, and western Europe at some point* started relying more heavily on fixed word orders and prepositions instead of suffices, but further east in Europe they did not have this trend.

* in romance languages my understanding is that the big deal was that consonants at the end of words and sometimes syllables were no longer pronounced, therefore it was impossible to distinguish a bunch of suffices. eg. final -m nasalized the vowel before it and then later was dropped entirely. Or you could no longer distinguish between -us and -um because they were both -u (later -o).

The creole languages I'm familiar with tend to be at least as analytic as the most analytic of its parent languages, and possibly more analytic than any of them.

Haitian creole is the most analytic language I'm familiar with. I gather it's about on par with languages like Ewe, but I know next to nothing about Ewe, so I'm not sure on that. I don't think it absorbed a single inflection from French, though.

Modern English, arguably descended from a creole of Old English and Norman French, is less inflected as either of those parent languages. For example, both Old English and French have grammatical gender, but middle and modern English retain it only for third person singular pronouns.

I don't know much about the history of the development of the Romance languages, but I had always guessed that they are at least somewhat a result of creolization of Latin with local language groups, and, if my speculation (it's not even a hypothesis) is at all correct, that would imply that they all would tend to lose inflection, including agglutination, in the process.

So, all that said: Perhaps the reason eastern European languages are more like Latin in this respect is, ironically, because they were less influenced by Latin?

Well, there was something called "Vulgar Latin" which varied by region, and I do think the biggest change was that differing pronunciations forced grammar changes as you could no longer differentiate with "silent" letters.

The loss of inflection due to final consonants no longer being pronounced explains quite a bit of things I found mysterious when learning romance languages without much Latin knowledge.

Some examples using Spanish:

* Spanish lost most neuter forms, but why does it distinguish este and esto [both meaning "this"]? Well, in Latin it was iste and istud respectively, so dropping final consonants still preserves distinct forms: iste and istu. Contrast that with most masculine/neuter contrasts: bonus and bonum both become bonu. (Hence, only one bueno in Spanish.)

* When I learned the language I was always confused why imperfect or present subjunctive first person singular is indistinguishable from third person. (eg. yo amaba, el amaba, I loved, he loved) Well, in Latin, those differed by a final consonant: ego amabam vs. amabat for third person.

But in Spanish, unlike French for example, all letters are still pronounced. So I'm not sure this reasonning holds.

I think we are talking about differing times in evolving languages. All the letters of Latin are most certainly not pronounced in Spanish. That is why a bunch of words end in -o instead of -us or why no verb conjugation ends in -m or -t anymore.

At some point people in Spain stopped writing Latin and started writing Spanish, at which point spelling matched pronunciation. But that was not today's Spanish. There were big pronunciation and spelling changes around the 15th century IIRC - see this article for some hints of how it used to look and sound. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Spanish_language

The current "spelling matches pronunciation" thing only occurred because the spelling was updated when pronunciation changed. It is kind of a time capsule, needs to be periodically "maintained", not innate to the language.

Also important to note that there are places where not every letter is pronounced in modern Spanish. Eg. Many accents aspirate or omit S in some positions. Some people omit D between vowels.

A few more examples:

1) z and s, or ce and se, are pronounced the same everywhere except some parts of Spain. I guess not an example of silent letters but still, an example of a distinction that existed historically/etymologically but that no longer does in the spoken language for the vast majority of speakers.

2) The h is silent in every dialect despite having usually represented a real sound in Latin

Also <b> and <v> have merged in a lot of versions of Spanish. The <v> is postclassical but represents /w/. A minimal pair for these in Latin is bis 'twice' and vis 'force'. (Well, not quite, because of different vowel lengths... let's try bilis 'bile' and vilis 'vile'.)

So, I can't speak to Spanish, but I can speak to French. There, the suffixes that are silent in Metropolitan French are still pronounced in some regional dialects, but the grammar doesn't really change (that I've noticed).

That leads me to think that it could just as easily be that grammar changes render the agglutination superfluous, and it subsequently withers away like a vestigial organ.

> z and s, or ce and se, are pronounced the same everywhere except some parts of Spain.

I didn't cite that because I'm already blabbing too much about this topic, and I didn't want to overwhelm people, but yes. Also, as cited by the sibling comment, the merger of /b/ and /v/. Also, in many accents, but not all, Y and LL are the same. Also, consonants like /b/ or /g/ are sometimes swallowed when followed by /w/.

Extremely interesting and extremely frustrating. I'm entering my fourth month learning Czech. Thanks for the comment.

Heck, you can do that in English sometimes if you pause correctly and don’t mind sounding Shakespearean.

> I love you.

> You, I love.

> You, love I.

> Love you, I do.

> Love I, you.

> [...] and don’t mind sounding Shakespearean.

Yes, exactly. When Shakespeare was around, English still had more of these features, and is gradually losing them over time. Shakespearean English always reminds me of German grammar.

The benefit in communication is that the remaining basic form is unambiguous even without proper pausing.

Also note that poetic forms and loosened syntax go and in hand.

Ok, perfect excuse for me to wheel out the Buffalo! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffal....

> Shakespearean English always reminds me of German grammar.

One of the strongest phenomena that produces this resemblance is that in Early Modern English, there was no restriction¹ on forming questions by putting the verb before the subject noun phrase (optionally with a question word before both). In modern German, there's still no restriction on forming questions this way.

  Essen Sie Fleisch?
  eat   you meat?

  Sprechen Sie Französich?
  speak    you French?

  Kommt Ihr aus  Russland?
  come  you from Russia?

  Glaubt   er an Gott?
  believes he in God?

  Wohin   geht sie?
  whither goes she?

  Wie macht er das?
  how does  he that?

  Wir sind hier - wann kommt Ihr?  [a travel ad slogan]
  we  are  here - when come  you?

In modern English, there is a new restriction that the verb that gets moved to the front can only be a form of "do"², "be", or an auxiliary verb (e.g. "can", "may", "should", "must", "might", "will", or "have"³, among others). When the main verb is not one of these, the sentence must be turned into a paraphrase (almost always using "do") before forming the question, like "I do speak Portuguese" → "Do you speak Portuguese?" or "I did have a pet lizard" → "Did you have a pet lizard?".

I have a German colleague who doesn't seem to have learned this restriction and continues producing German-style, or Shakespearean-style, questions in writing like "What contains that file?", "What message produced that command?" or "Updated you the configuration recently?".

In one of my college linguistics classes, I tried to deny that this change was real because I could still easily understand the Shakespearean questions. The trouble is that they nonetheless sounded archaic to me and I wouldn't actually have produced them myself in speech. So really, I should have admitted that there was a practical difference between comprehensibility and acceptability (and that difference with regard to a historic form is exactly what "sounding archaic" refers to).

¹ I'm not totally sure that there was no restriction at all; it may have begun to appear already but just not been complete.

² Though not as a main verb! Shakespeare has "wherefore did you so?" in Macbeth and "wherefore didst thou so?" in King John, which in modern English would have to be "why did you do so?" or "why did you do that?" rather than "why did you so?" or "why did you that?".

³ In some varieties of English "have" can be used this way in both the possessive and auxiliary senses ("have you any wool?" / "have you eaten?"), but in other varieties only in the auxiliary sense (in which case the paraphrase with "do you have..." is required when asking about possession). I'm not sure whether this still works in the past tense, or only in the present tense.

Excellent write-up!

Btw, in modern spoken German we mostly only have two tenses left: present and perfect. Present is used for the present and the future. Perfect (formed with 'haben') is used for past events.

(Yes, we also still use other tenses. But they are much rarer in spoken German.)

And especially in spoken questions about things people did or didn't do, an auxiliary verb (like "haben" or "sein") is almost mandatory.

"Gingst Du nach Hause?" vs "Bist Du nach Hause gegangen?"

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).

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.

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.

> 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".

You're not quite right. Classical Latin had a lot of things that virtually no modern language has: a fully developed passive conjugation, a fully developed conjunctive, and - the cherry on the cake - a rigorously expressed separation between phases (consecutio temporum). Latin is quite magical, and even if it was actually more crude than some of its contemporaries like Ancient Greek and Sanskrit, it's still sweeter than virtually all modern languages, some of which don't even have a past perfect tense or more than one conjunctive form.

I have no idea what "fully developed passive conjugation" is, but my language is very old and I imagine very difficult for English speaker to learn. There is an example how fun it can be: http://www.lituanus.org/1987/87_1_04.htm

It means that every conjugation of an active verb has a corresponding passive form, as in your link: esąs - buvęs - būsįas versus esamas - būtas - būsimas . But that's underselling it a bit, because Latin actually had a full 3-dimensional matrix of conjugations: time-based tense (past, present, future), goal-based tense (completed or ongoing), and action (active or passive), with accompanying participles for each case. To compare with your link, I notice Lithuanian seems to lack passive participles ("while being beaten" is the corresponding example), while keeping some of the circumstantial conjugations (frequency, intent, necessity, conjunct phrases) that older languages did have, but Latin did away with.

In more analytical languages, most of these constructs have been replaced with auxiliary verbs (as in English: I see versus I'm seen, I'm watching versus I'm being watched). With full conjugations, entire sentences can change in tense or action without affecting word order. This may not seem that special if your native language is like that, but as the OP started out saying, it allows for much more expressiveness in (predominantly written) language.

If I got it right, Lithuanian does have passive participle (neveikiamasis dalyvis). In the case of "while being eaten" it would be "valgomas". "While being beaten" -> "mušamas". He was silent while being beaten -> Mušamas jis tylėjo.

To quote Wikipedia:

    the Lithuanian language is unique for having fourteen different
    participial forms of the verb, which can be grouped into five
    when accounting for inflection by tense. Some of these are also
    inflected by gender and case. For example, the verb eiti ("to
    go, to walk") has the active participle forms einąs/einantis
    ("going, walking", present tense), ėjęs (past tense), eisiąs
    (future tense), eidavęs (past frequentative tense), the passive 
    participle forms einamas ("being walked", present tense), eitas 
    (“walked” past tense), eisimas (future tense), the adverbial 
    participles einant ("while [he, different subject] is walking" 
    present tense), ėjus (past tense), eisiant (future tense), 
    eidavus (past frequentative tense), the semi-participle eidamas 
    ("while [he, the same subject] is going, walking") and the
    participle of necessity eitinas ("that which needs to be 
    walked"). The active, passive, and the semi-participles are 
    inflected by gender, and the active, passive, and necessity 
    ones are inflected by case.

The definition you provide here does not apply to Latin.

> every conjugation of an active verb has a corresponding passive form

If we're talking about individual verbs, this does not and cannot apply to any language; there are always verbs that for semantic or syntactic reasons cannot take passive forms. (Examples in Latin: "esse" [to be] has no passive because the passive form of "to be" doesn't exist even conceptually; "sequi" [to follow] has no passive because sequi is, from a strictly syntactic perspective, already inflected as if it were a passive verb.)

If you're talking at a more general level about whether the language offers the possibility of a passive form for every active form a verb might possess, that still isn't true for Latin -- and in fact, the very example you give is quite badly wrong.

> Latin actually had a full 3-dimensional matrix of conjugations: time-based tense (past, present, future), goal-based tense (completed or ongoing), and action (active or passive), with accompanying participles for each case.

Side note: in the traditional analysis, a Latin verb is inflected in five dimensions ("tense", "voice", "mood", "person", "number"). What you call "goal-based tense" is traditionally just called "tense", though I agree with you that it is a separate dimension and shouldn't be conflated with actual tense. In linguistics, this dimension is called "aspect".

Latin participles do not inflect for person or number. Despite what you say here, they also don't inflect for aspect. They do inflect for tense and voice, but of the six possibilities (past / present / future) x (active / passive), only four are possible in Latin -- the present passive and past active forms do not exist for any verb. [1]

(It's possible to make the argument that Latin participles do inflect for aspect, in that some participial forms (the present and the future passive) use the imperfect verb stem and others (the perfect and the future active) use the perfect verb stem. That makes the argument you're making here weaker -- instead of Latin offering four out of six participial forms, it would be offering four out of twelve.)

[1] But remember how "sequi" couldn't have a passive form because it's already formally passive? This opens up a possibility for the perfect participle: secutus can mean "having been followed", the normal perfect passive sense, but it can also mean "having followed", in an otherwise impossible perfect active interpretation of the participle. The "passive form, active meaning" state of the verb can be carried through to its participle.

Italian borrowed all these features from Latin, since it is a directive descendant, tough in Italian these are less strict rules, and nowadays a lot of people doesn't know them and get them wrong (including a lot of politicians, that always get conjunctives wrong).

Moreover, case decensions are very difficult to learn for people from non-case languages. They often exist in addition to verb conjugation for person/number/gender and tense. They have their own divisions into various groups, and irregularities.

Moreover, there are other ways to achieve flexibility in word order, such as particles which agglutinate without tweaking the target word in any way:

Japanese:

PetrがJanaを好きだ。(Petr-ga Jana-o suki da)

JanaをPetrが好きだ。(Jana-o Petr-ga suki da)

Petrが好きだ...Janaを。(Petr-ga suki da, ... Jana o.)

The grammar here isn't standard. Usually you'd mark the subject doing the liking with は and the object being liked with が. Both generally function as topic markers in other circumstances, so context is important. You can even occasionally use は to mark the object being liked if you're pointing out one particularly liked thing. Using を to mark a subject of affection is pretty rare and regarded as incorrect/usually just a tongue slip.

Oftentimes in conversation, particles will be completely dropped in a 好き statement. So getting something like "俺、これ好き" (I, this like) isn't uncommon. In that situation, it's the pause marking the subject doing the liking. If the order is reverse, usually the object marker is used, though as in "これすき、俺は" (this like, I).

Japanese grammar is a complex mess. It uses particles and can be orderless, or it can drop many particles (sometimes all) and have everything marked by pauses and timing.

    Janu miluje Petr. -- PETR loves Jana.
    Petr miluje Janu. -- Petr loves JANA.

Does context define subject/object since otherwise these seem equally to mean Jana loves Petr?

These sentences do not mean "Jana loves Petr." Subject/object relationship is determined by case marking suffixes on nouns.

Another comment proposed an apropos analogy:

English is like position-based parameter-passing.

  sentence.love("Petr", "Jana")

Czech is like keyword-based parameter passing.

  sentence.love(object="Jana", subject="Petr")

> The reason is that the grammar is so developed that the word order is essentially arbitrary

It isn't really arbitrary. There is a standard order. You can use non-standard orders, but that changes the emphasis of the sentence. If you don't want to emphasise some part of the sentence, you stick to the standard order. If you are going to emphasise some part of the sentence, that emphasis ought to make sense in the context. (Imagine if I wrote in English "The CAT sat on the mat" – my emphasis on the word "cat" needs to make sense in the broader context in which I am using that sentence, or else I'm using the language in an eccentric way.)

(An exception to this is poetry, where non-standard word order can be used for reasons of metre rather than emphasis alone. But, having somewhat different rules for poetry isn't unique to Latin, the same is true for many other languages, English included.)

Arbitrary word order doesn't make a natural language more 'powerful'. German has more flexible word order than English, but anything you can say in one, you can say in the other.

It's just a trade off between marking the roles of your words in a sentence either with position or by decorating your words. Very similar to positional vs keyword arguments in programming languages.

(Interestingly, just like Python allows you to mix and match keyword arguments and positional arguments subject to certain rules, Turkish usually goes for the decoration-approach via suffixes but allows you to drop some of the grammatical markings if it's clear from context. Eg if you provide an explicit number, you don't have to mark your plurals.)

While on the topic: grammatical gender is often seen as arbitrary, especially in language like German were potatoes are female and girls are neutral. The programming perspective on the use of grammatical gender is that they are essentially 'registers' that allow you to quickly refer to terms you just used. Having more than one register is useful, and a somewhat random hashing of terms to registers is fine for that purpose.

(Btw, Turkish has only one gender.)

I do agree that flexible word order is useful for poetry. But then: poetry like all artistic endeavors thrives on limitations. Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo

It would be more correct to say that Turkish language doesn't have 'genders' in the way that English and German has them. Turkish refers to a 'being' instead of 'he/she/they/it'. I love that aspect of the Turkish language :)

Are you referring to the possibility to drop the pronoun when it's clear from context?

That's different from questions about gender.

Yes the order is essentially arbitrary.

I took 6 years of Latin classes in school (12 yo -> 18 yo). The first day I learned the order "didn't matter", I was so happy. I thought it would make it so easy to study.

Then after 6 years, I was still terrible at Latin. Instead of "The soldier yield the sword at the ennemy", I would always end up with "The sword yield the ennemy at the soldier" (you get the point).

I think the order is so important to make the language easy. For me in certainly didn't help studying Latin (even coming from French). Maybe it was my math spirit or so, I don't know.

But your point is totally valid. Authors (I studied Cicero a lot during the last year) basically use that to enrich their style constantly.

It would be interesting to know how much this was a feature of everyday Latin versus how much it may have been essentially a constructed language used only by highly-educated people.

Would a Roman farmer in the field even understand that sentence? Would it sound natural to them? Would they ever speak it?

The disconnect between literary language and everyday language is sometimes relatively high even in today's world of mass education, where every child is forced to learn the literary language of their country regardless of the actual language spoken in their region. In societies where this wasn't the norm, the literary language may have been significantly more divorced from the natural language which it derives from, allowing much more complex rules to be invented for it...

In the past the divide between the educated and the illiterate was indeed extreme, and so was the difference between the written and the generally spoken ("vulgar") language, let alone local dialects.

I think there certainly would have been a distinction, since even vulgar English, with its much more limited grammar, has education/class distinctions in how grammar is applied.

In many English communities, using the subjunctive case would mark the speaker as being "posh," as would using I/me/my "correctly" ("me and me gran had supper").

I think the average uneducated citizen would similarly note someone as "posh" if they heard them using the pluperfect subjunctive, and, unlike a modern English speaker who has been immersed in "correct" English through the ever-present media of today, they might not actually understand the sense correctly.

The flexible word order is shared with some other highly inflected languages, including Russian and ancient Greek. (I haven't studied Russian, so I don't know exactly how flexible the word order is.)

In Latin the arbitrariness of the word order doesn't usually extend to prepositions (that's why they're called prae-positiones), which should usually immediately precede, and almost never follow, the words they govern. There are interesting exceptions to this (for example ADJ PREP NOUN, like "magna cum laude", or somewhat or completely fixed forms involving personal pronouns, like "te propter" or "nobiscum"), but it's generally a pretty strong restriction.

You might also find flexible word order in any ancient Indo-European language

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflection#Indo-European_langu...

I think Sanskrit is another example.

Yes, Sanskrit also has flexible or variable word order (but to an extent.)

http://sanskrit.uohyd.ac.in/faculty/amba/PUBLICATIONS/papers...

> Latin is the most powerful natural language I know.

> The reason is that the grammar is so developed that the word order is essentially arbitrary, and that gives rise to a method I have not seen so fully realized in any other language:

I have the pleasure to experience this freedom on word order in my native language (Portuguese) and the one I am currently learning (Lithuanian). [1]

Although Portuguese presents this feature, it doesn't have grammatical cases, which I assume it is the feature you describe as "grammar is so developed".

On the other hand, Lithuanian has grammatical cases and other grammatical features (e.g., prefix verbs with prepositions) which, as yourself put it, allow texts to be much more expressive than the ones in other languages I can read. In fact, I am astonished by how compactly and accurately one is possible to expresses oneself in that language!

Is it a case for all languages with grammatical case? Are most of the Europeans (languages) [2] so expressive? Is it possible that more incredible writers than Shakespeare or Cervantes are hidden from the general global public because of the complexity to translate their works?

I have a lot of those speculative questions in my mind, which I expect to find an answer someday.

And thank you for your nice comment.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_order#Pragmatic_word_or...

[2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_case

Is there any scientific or objective way to measure how "expressive" a language is?

To provide just a glimpse of how expressive Lithuanian can be, just a some derivations from the verb valgyti (to eat):

valgąs — present active participle

valgęs — past active participle

valgydavęs — frequentative past active participle

valgysiąs — future active participle

valgomas — present passive participle

valgytas — past passive participle

valgysimas — future passive participle

valgant — adverbial present active participle

valgius — adverbial past active participle

valgydavus — adverbial frequentative past active participle

valgysiant — adverbial future active participle

valgydamas — special adverbial present active participle

valgytinas — participle of necessity

The approximate meanings:

valgąs — 'the one who is eating'

valgęs — 'the one who ate; has eaten; was eating'

valgydavęs — 'the one who used to eat'

valgysiąs — 'the one who will be eating'

valgomas — 'something that is being eaten'

valgytas — 'something that has been eaten'

valgysimas — 'something which will be eaten'

valgant — 'while eating'

valgius — 'after having eaten'

valgydavus — 'after having eaten repeatedly'

valgysiant — 'having to eat'

valgydamas — 'eating'

valgytinas — 'something to be eaten'

Taken from http://www.lituanus.org/1984_3/84_3_05.htm

All of those, which can be applied to prefixed verbs [1], such as the ones below derived from the verb "valgyti" (to eat) [2]:

antsivalgyti - (with genitive) to eat one's fill (of); to fill up (on)

apvalgyti - (with accusative) to eat (someone) out of house and home

įvalgyti - to be able to eat up; to be able to consume

išvalgyti - to eat up; to devour; to eat away

pravalgyti - to spend (one's money) on food

privalgyti - to eat one's fill

suvalgyti - to eat up; to consume

užvalgyti - to eat a snack

[1]: http://www.lituanus.org/1991_4/91_4_06.htm

[2]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/valgyti#Derived_terms

But you gave English translations for all of those examples. So they don’t actually show that Lithuanian is more expressive than English.

One word instead of four is quite expressive, I'd say.

Actually, Lithuanian is the most archaic language in Europe, which is what makes it so good.

> Lithuanian is the most archaic language in Europe

By what metric?

> which is what makes it so good

By what metric?

By most archaic language they are probably referring to Lithuanian being considered closest to Proto-Indo-European in terms of language features: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithuanian_language

I’ve heard this and also heard it’s mostly complete rubbish. It might technically be the closest but that is still not close at all, simplifying like this doesn’t really help anything.

Lithuanian is very conservative in some aspects, and very progressive in others. For example, it has lost the neutral gender and it has innovated some cases that didn't exist in PIE. There is no scientific, consistent way to call it as a whole more archaic than any other language.

   > and the one I am currently learning (Lithuanian).

Smagu matyti, kai nelietuviai mokosi lietuvių kalbos. Sėkmės!

Ačiū! Aš pradėjau mokytis lietuvių kalbą todėl šeimos priežasčių.

Dabar, aš mokausi todėl, kad tai man yra viena iš gražaisių kalbų pasaulyje: kaip tai gražiai garsa, koks ekspressiva lietuvių kalba yra ir kiek įdomios knygos parašytos lietuviškai! :)

Oh, feel free to correct my mistakes! :D

Sometimes it feels like Lithuanian (as well as a number of other languages like Vietnamese) could benefit from having its own alphabet.

Well, we do have it. Of course, it is Latin based, but still.

The reason, in this case, is mostly historical (religious affiliation). At the same time, Latin alphabet is phonetic and as such it is not really a good single base for many languages that have more sounds than Latin (even there some letters represent two different sounds). Excessive use of diacritics is not a good solution. Some languages address this by mixing several base alphabets, but ideally, each should have its own alphabet; besides the obvious advantage, this allows to avoid issues arising from the sharing of an alphabet between completely different languages (like "literal" carrying over personal names etc. without taking their pronunciation into account; this issue even exists in regard to Chinese, where names spelled in pinyin are carried over into English leaving them unpronounceable for a native English reader; but forget pinyin: here is a last name - Chrzaszcz - you'll have a hard time even remembering how to pronounce it a while after you have been told how).

Lithuanian is mostly phonetic. And "mostly" here is just a precaution to take some edge cases into account. Some diacritics just modify the length of the base sound (Ą, Ę, Į, Ų, Ū). I would not say that case Ė, Č, Š and Ž warrant having a completely new alphabet. If that was a case pretty much any language that has Latin-based alphabet should get a new one, because pretty much all of them have their own additions.

Puiku!

   > Oh, feel free to correct my mistakes! :

If you wish so ;)

I will have my comments in Lithuanian, I think you will be able to understand them just fine.

1. „mokytis lietuvių kalbą“ -> „mokytis lietuvių kalbos“ [0].

2. „todėl šeimos priežasčių“ keisčiau į „dėl šeimyininių aplinkybių“. „Todėl“ čia netinka: jis prasmiškai artimesnis angliškam „thus“, o anglišką „for/because of“ atitinka „dėl“. Pavyzdžiui: „automobilis sugedo, todėl pavėlavau į darbą“ ir „Į darbą pavėlavau dėl automobilio gedimo“.

3. „viena iš gražaisių kalbų pasaulyje“ — beveik idealu, tik „gražaisių“ turi būti „gražiausių“.

4. „kaip tai gražiai garsa“ — turbūt norėta pasakyti „kaip tai gražiai skamba“. "a sound" (noun) -> „garsas“. "to sound" (verb) -> „skambėti“. Stilistiškai vietoj tai „tai“ geriau tiktų „ji“.

5.„koks ekspressiva lietuvių kalba yra“ -> „kokia išraiškinga lietuvių kalba yra“ arba šiek tiek geriau stilistiškai: „kokia išraiškinga yra lietuvių kalba“. „Kalba“ — moteriškos giminės, todėl „kokia“, ne „koks“.

6. „įdomios knygos parašytos lietuviškai“ — nors atskirai paėmus ši frazė gramatiškai teisinga, bet šiame kontekste (su „kiek“) taisyklingiau būtų „kiek įdomių knygų parašyta lietuviškai“.

Nepaisant kelių klaidų, dar kartą noriu pasidžiaugti, kad yra žmonių, kuriems ši kalba patinka ir kurie jos mokosi. Kuo didžiausios sėkmės!

[0] http://www.vlkk.lt/konsultacijos/3919-mokytis-ka

Latin is the most powerful natural language I know.

The key phrase is "I know". Latin is not the only one.

As much as you may like this feature, being inflected marks marks Latin as a primitive language, not a sophisticated one. The reason is that it is easy for a language to lose grammatical rules, but very hard to gain them. By this measure French is more modern than Latin because it is no longer inflected, and English is more modern than French because it has lost gender.

In a real sense, Chinese is the direction that all languages are heading. In English we still conjugate differently depending on how many, past/present/future, and so on. These are all vestiges of an inflected past. Chinese doesn't do that.

> being inflected marks marks Latin as a primitive language, not a sophisticated one

> it is easy for a language to lose grammatical rules, but very hard to gain them

You're assuming loss of grammar over time is a mark of sophistication, but it's hard to see how. I think you have it backwards.

Literary, classical Greek and Latin absolutely destroy English in their sophistication.

What is the scientific or objective way of measuring "sophistication" of a language that you are using to make this claim?

Well I don't agree with the modernist/empiricist worldview that question stems from.

I think some things are qualitative, and other things are quantitative. The Sistine Chapel is beautiful, but my sketches aren't. If I were to design an experiment, I might learn what molecules are moving or how many people agree with me, but that wouldn't change what I know about the elegance of the paintings (or languages).

Latin is the same way. Having spent a fair amount of time in it, I can see its beauty and sophistication.

Modern English is great. I love it, especially the size of the vocabulary. But it's a comparatively clumsy language, and it frequently abuses prepositions. Its over-dependence on word order also makes it easier to construct grammatically ambiguous statements, leading to misunderstandings. I don't struggle with those in Latin. The language is elegant. It doesn't take Cicero to communicate clearly because of the grammar. But in the hands of Cicero it's like fine art.

OK, if your aesthetic preference is such that you find languages with complicated noun morphology more beautiful than those with complicated word-order constraints, that's fine.

But if we're just talking about personal taste, there's no real reason to debate it with other people, since it's arbitrary.

> Its over-dependence on word order also makes it easier to construct grammatically ambiguous statements, leading to misunderstandings.

Now this, on the other hand, is an objective, quantifiable statement that regardless of taste is either true or false. Incidentally, I strongly suspect that it is not in fact true, and that you only believe English sentences are more likely to be ambiguous than Latin ones is because you speak and write English better than Latin and so are more intuitively aware of its weirdness.

> if your aesthetic preference is such that you find languages...But if we're just talking about personal taste...it's arbitrary

Again, I don't agree with your worldview. The reason I referred to the Sistine Chapel was to provide an analogy: it doesn't merely fit my preferences better than my sketch. It is objectively better. There is something in the painting that is real. The beauty is real.

But on your view, the beauty is unreal. It's only real if you can measure it. I disagree. Objectively. I think you're wrong and I suspect you think I'm wrong. And that means there is an objective philosophical truth even though we can't measure it.

ETA: not all truth is immeasurable, of course. There are plenty of measurable truths (for example, how many comments are on this thread, or the boiling point of water at standard pressure). But some truth cannot be measured in a laboratory, and that doesn't make it false or unreal.

Comparing English to Latin is not like comparing the Sistine Chapel with a sketch. It's more like comparing the Sistine Chapel with a modernist painting.

Is the Sistine Chapel objectively more beautiful than Mondrian's Broadway Boogie-Woogie?

That’s still a bit dubious IMO as it implies that Latin is the way it is because it reflects an older, “classical” style.

Which is not true at all (ask any historical linguist) and only appears to be true if you restrict yourself to looking at Western European language.

But in reality, there are ancient analytic/isolating languages (e.g., Classical Chinese), and contemporary highly fusional ones (e.g. Finnish, Navajo).

By the same objective measure by which a statue of Venus is more beautiful than a cube made of concrete (despite of the latter possessing more symmetry). The measure could be: the number of people saying so; the shape of the distribution of color in a brain scan of an observer, etc.

A statue of Venus took creativity and skill to create that a cube of concrete didn’t. There’s no meaningfully similar statement you could make about Latin vs. English.

I think that's a romaniticized view of Latin, probably helped by the fact that real Latin speakers are long dead.

For every Cicero and Virgil, there were a thousand who had said "Fuck I got shitfaced at that whorehouse and I'm fucking sure that bitch took my purse, if mom finds out I'm dead LOL FML," or something like that, except in impeccable classical Latin.

Primitive means, relating to, denoting, or preserving the character of an early stage in the evolutionary or historical development of something.

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.

Sophistication, on the other hand, is in the eye of the beholder. Which is more sophisticated, flowery descriptive speech or very simple speech that communicates complicated ideas? Arguments can be made for or against Jane Austen or Terence Tao as being more sophisticated.

Latin allows one to say little at great length while sounding very smart. Which a classical education teaches us to value. But when we say things simply we can think and express more complicated things. Which is more sophisticated?

Please put me on the side of Terrence Tao.

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.

> it is easy for a language to lose grammatical rules, but very hard to gain them.

Do you have any citations for this? As far as I know (though I'm not an expert), academic linguists disagree.

https://www.reddit.com/r/asklinguistics/comments/abiphn/has_...

Romance languages have gained inflections that Latin didn't have (from the above link: the future tense conjugations are an innovation in the Romance languages that didn't exist in Latin).

Funnily enough given your example, Chinese languages have gained morphology too: Mandarin has the aspect-marking suffix 了, whereas Classical Chinese didn't.

We can't reconstruct the history of language any further back than Proto-Indo-European, so there's no way to know whether it developed from some less-inflected language.

I have read articles on the topic but am too lazy to dig them up. However https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidirectionality_hypothesis indicates that there is indeed a preferred direction for language to evolve.

Incidentally Chinese did not evolve from Proto-Indo-European.

Things moving in one direction wouldn’t preclude the existence of cycles.

For example: a language has noun cases -> phonological changes cause the endings to merge together, requiring prepositions to disambiguate -> prepositions become more tightly bound to the words they modify and are eventually reanalyzed as case markings. Now we’re back with cases even if languages can only take each step in the given direction.

> Incidentally Chinese did not evolve from Proto-Indo-European.

You’re right, but I meant to imply that PIE is the oldest language whose grammar we know a lot about, not that it’s the ancestor of every modern language.

Mind blowing paper: Chang, T. T.(1988). Indo-European vocabulary in Old Chinese: A new thesis on the emergence of Chinese language and civilization in the Late Neolithic Age. In Sino-Platonic Papers eds Mair, V. http://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp007_old_chinese.pdf

I'm don't know enough about Indo-European reconstructions to make my own opinions on what's exposed on the this side and the paper is a bit dated but examples are very compelling.

I'm not convinced at all by that paper, he gives only by my count ~180 examples to relate two language families that by themselves have 10s of thousands morphemes. Especially since the reconstructed Indo-European rootwords and Ancient Chinese pronounciations are themselves dubious. I suspect you could probably get correlation of this level with pretty much any two language families taken at random.

> being inflected marks marks Latin as a primitive language, not a sophisticated one.

This doesn't sound right to me. Primitive and sophisticated isn't really how modern linguistics understands languages (for like at least like half or a full century). There's no straight path of progress for all languages. Note how it can also be reversed by a proponent (or native speaker) of an inflected language: English is so crude and primitive with its robotic Tarzan-like chaining of bare words, as opposed to the sophisticated, properly inflected forms that perfectly blend into the sentence according to their roles. (Which by the way would also be bogus.)

> The reason is that it is easy for a language to lose grammatical rules, but very hard to gain them.

Word order is also "grammatical rules", as it includes syntax too, not just morphology. English has tons of grammatical rules despite having very simple morphology.

Also, in Hungarian many suffixes were originally postpositions but became fused with the words and took on vowel harmony. E.g. "utu rea" (road + onto) from the first surviving written Hungarian text became útra in modern Hungarian, with the -ra/-re suffix meaning "onto".

> In a real sense, Chinese is the direction that all languages are heading.

In recent history, it seems. We don't know whether the trend will continue, do we? Do we even know why languages used to be less analytic?

The argument you suggested "The reason is that it is easy for a language to lose grammatical rules, but very hard to gain them." would not explain why a lot of languages used to have inflections in the first place?

I don't know about Chinese, but I thought that one argument about languages getting simplified involved lots of 2nd-language speakers. Different rules of evolution would apply to the language of an empire (like new-world Spanish, or Urdu) compared to a closed group.

I don't remember enough Latin to find the passage, but I recall reading the Aeneid in college and being amazed by the scene where Laocoön is killed by the serpents. Virgil weaves the description of the serpents and the struggling man together, so the words pertaining to the snakes are constricting those pertaining to the man.

Book 2 around line 215.

https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...

    Laocoonta petunt; et primum parua duorum
    corpora natorum serpens amplexus uterque
    implicat et miseros morsu depascitur artus; 215
    post ipsum auxilio subeuntem ac tela ferentem
    corripiunt spirisque ligant ingentibus; et iam
    bis medium amplexi, bis collo squamea circum
    terga dati superant capite et ceruicibus altis.

As others have written, many languages are like this.

My native Hungarian is also very powerful for poetry. It distinguishes between long and short vowels, allowing for close emulation of Greek and Roman poetry. Being agglutinative, it's also quite free in word order. Well, free is not the right word, because depending on the context and emphasis, only some orders are applicable. The point is, the word order carries higher level meaning, like intention and pragmatics instead of syntax.

There's also a huge amount of poetry written mostly in the 18th-20th centuries, but nobody except Hungarians can understand it so it's essentially unknown outside of Hungary.

Back when I was learning Hungarian I was frustrated when trying to figure out what the proper word order was. Then I learned that most combinations of subject,object,verb were just fine and the difference between them was emphasis. It became a lot easier once I had figured that out.

Hungarian was really great for allowing me to see language from a different perspective. I also liked the gender-neutral third-person pronoun, where the same pronoun meant he/she/it. That made things simpler.

I got far enough to have simple conversations, and I traveled around Hungary for about 6 weeks one summer practicing the language and seeing the different parts of the country.

> Then I learned that most combinations of subject,object,verb were just fine and the difference between them was emphasis.

That's true, but the options are often more limited than what one might think based on the above. While the same sentence could theoretically be reshuffled in many orders and yield potentially correct variants for specific, often very contrived contexts, when you have one particular context, you often have to pick one order so that you sound natural.

I would say Hungarian word order is fairly rigid, but it expresses not the syntax of the sentence but the pragmatics. Arguably Hungarian is a topic-prominent language [1], but historically scholars have described Hungarian grammar in terms of concepts from the highly-regarded European languages, like Latin and Greek and everything that doesn't fit that schematic was/is regarded as "fluff", "arbitrary" and "free". There's a lot of structured complexity in there, but it's not in popular grammars (e.g. those used in Hungarian elementary/secondary schools and books for foreigners) and Hungarians themselves won't be able to say why one version "sounds better" than another, because we never learn it ourselves. You're just supposed to pick it up, or if you're so inclined, dig up some academic papers from more recent years.

> I also liked the gender-neutral third-person pronoun, where the same pronoun meant he/she/it. That made things simpler.

Yep, good to be outside of all the gender pronoun drama.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic-prominent_language

But we can shuffle the order in other languages too, we just rely on explicit punctuation, right?

    Daedalus, meanwhile, on Crete's long detested
    exile, longing for his birthplace

Yes, and it is a key characteristic of a skillful translator that such features are kept in the translation.

This translation is very nice, but notice for example that the word "long" is itself now no longer long in the translation ("longumque" is longer, both syntactically and also when spoken, and that is made possible in Latin by the suffix "-que" that can be attached to words to mean "and").

Also, many passages cannot be translated so nicely, for example because the translation would become too long to fit the metre, or because too erratic the word order would in English become.

> too erratic the word order would in English become

But perhaps helped with that Yoda has. :-)

I just tried a quick translation now looking up the latin dictionary. My native tongue is Portuguese so maybe I'm more used to uncommonly ordered sentences.

My English vocabulary is limited, I had to lookup a better synonym for "long":

    Daedalus, meanwhile, on Crete's lingering detested
    exile, longing for his birthplace

lingering brings other ideas besides "long". something like "fading but still there". does not seem appropriate for the text

Doesn't "lingering" have a connotation of "lasting longer than it should" when associated with a negative aspect?

E.g. "lingering pain", "lingering stench".

Also lingering affection.

Afaik, it means mostly something like "still there, after all that time"

see: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/lingering

How's Portuguese any different in that regard from other Romance languages like Spanish or French?

I’m not familiar with Portuguese, but for what it’s worth, Spanish has much freer word order than French.

Random example: “I can’t do it” in Spanish can either be no lo puedo hacer or no puedo hacerlo. In colloquial French, j’peux pas l’faire is the only option (or, if you prefer the more standard/formal register: je ne peux pas le faire). This despite “le” and “lo” being direct cognates.

I studied Latin in high school, but I don't know much about its evolution.

When you say it's the "most powerful natural language" that you know, is that some late, cleaned-up version used by the best-educated? Or does that include earlier / common-use (vulgate?) forms as well?

I mean that Latin is the only language I know which provides this extreme flexibility of form, to match what you want to describe by means of the structure and features of the sentence itself.

This flexbility is available in various degrees in other languages too, but, at least in my experience, never quite to such extreme extent.

One thing is definitely true: The most powerful Latin poetry only occurs in dedicated works of art, and realistically, nobody would have been able to pull this off in realtime. And further, even the most educated Latin poets were quite differently skilled in the application of this technique.

Personally, the complete mastery of this technique is one of the reasons why I enjoy reading Ovid before all others: Ovid not only applies this technique in almost each individual verse, but even throughout entire books, for example by structuring them in such a way that the most central message occurs in the center of the book, that metamorphoses that take a long time appear many pages apart etc.

I've studied Latin in school (and plan to do it again in the future, I'd like to be able to read it semi-fluently eventually). I really enjoy the language but I'd be extremely wary of using qualifiers like "powerful" for languages. That generally leads us towards extremely bad linguistics. Being more synthetic doesn't mean that you're more powerful per-se. You haven't said that exactly of course but I encounter this sentiment a lot in English-speaking circles, with people saying things like English is "dumbed down" or simpler because it prefers analytic constructs to synthetic ones. I also remember a Brazilian fellow saying that Brazilian Portuguese was worsening because people favored the analytic future "vou comer" over the synthetic "comerei" (which is amusing because this synthetic future comes from an analytic construct "comer hei", it's not the Latin future tense).

As a sibling comment points out, these features exist in may other languages, for instance Slavic languages such as Russian or Polish. Besides, even though this flexibility is theoretically achievable, in practice the day-to-day language is filled with more calcified idioms and ways of speech. You could, in English, say "to you this book I give" instead of "I give this book to you" but I'm sure most agree that's rather slanted even though I believe this is perfectly grammatical. A poet could write the former, but if you say something like that in colloquial speech people are going to wonder if you're having a stroke.

Judging the "power" and flexibility of Latin through the verses of Ovid is like judging English through Milton's Paradise Lost. Only educated speakers would come even close to even understand properly that level of language, let alone construct it.

Of course that's just speculation on my part but given that modern Romance lost the case system almost entirely it seems like there wasn't a lot of friction here. If common Vulgar Latin speakers really valued word shuffling surely they'd have found a way to maintain the cases I'm sure. I could also point out that in Russian (a language I've been studying a lot lately) it's very easy to build a sentence that seems grammatically right but sounds off to a native speaker. For instance Russian speakers tend to prefer to put locative expressions at the beginning on the sentence, so they say "on the table is the fork" instead of "the fork is on the table" which may sound slanted or putting emphasis on a different part of the sentence.

Classical Greek is arguably more powerful. In fact, many Romans looked at Greek as the language of the educated and left Latin to soldiers.

> It allows you to express the content in such a way that the way you express it matches the content.

Which makes Latin poetry both intricately beautiful, but sometimes nearly impossible for students to read and make sense of ;)

That is thanks to Latin having declension, which many other languages have too. I don't speak it, but I've read that Finnish has 15 cases (compared to 5 in Latin). Nice thing with Latin is that it manages to be both powerful and very clean, with fairly simple rules that always apply, phonetic alphabet, etc. Latin is probably the language with the best balance between power and simplicity. For instance my native tongue Serbian/Croatian has phonetic alphabet and distinguishes cases, number and gender, so it gives you a lot of power to play with words, to make very long sentences that are still easy to understand and to be able to understand the meaning even when some letters or words are missing...but it's much more complicated to learn than Latin because of a lot of additional rules in play.

Classical Latin didn't have a phonetical alphabet, though. Long and short vowels were not distinguished, letter "u" didn't exist, and Greek borrowings were written non-phonetically (e.g. the "ph").

"On les peut mettre premièrement comme vous avez dit : "Belle Marquise, vos beaux yeux me font mourir d’amour". Ou bien : "D’amour mourir me font, belle Marquise, vos beaux yeux". Ou bien : "Vos yeux beaux d’amour me font, belle Marquise, mourir". Ou bien : "Mourir vos beaux yeux, belle Marquise, d’amour me font". Ou bien : "Me font vos yeux beaux mourir, belle Marquise, d’amour."

Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Molière

> If something is being described that is hard to do, then the sentence is structured in such a way that it is comparatively hard to understand, by using an unusual word order etc. If things are far apart, the words are themselves far apart etc. For quick things, words are omitted that cannot be omitted in other languages etc.

But why?

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