That is to say, how many words comprise the Latin language?
We don’t know yet. New words are still being coined.
It’s a zombie language.
No, not because it’s a zombie, but because in some contexts Latin is still a living language. The main source of new Latin words is botanists and zoologists naming new species of plants and animals, because they all get new Latin names. However, I’d guess the OP’s question is about Classical Latin, which would not include most of those Latin names.
I would consider the continuation you mention to be, for lack of better words, a stunt.
I can’t shake the notion, that Latin does not have all of the parts of speech as current English. I’m not too sure I’ve ever seen or heard a Latin adjective, for example.
I wanted to ask a broader and less pointed question, hence a numerical value on the number of words in the language.
[nitpick]
How many words does the Latin language comprise.
[/nitpick]
You should write a book about your quest to find one. It could be your magnum opus. If you have the time to spare from your choir practice. You probably need an alter ego. The choir director won’t be happy you’re writing when you should be practicing your solo of ‘Gloria in excelsis deo’.
A “stunt”? It’s just as much a stunt as all the names that chemists give to new chemicals. What it illustrates is that the boundaries of a language are very hard to define, and so the number of words in a language is not an exact number.
Latin has far fewer words than English. Instead, its words tend to have a wider range of meaning than English words. Context therefore takes on more importance in determining what a word means.
Well, it doesn’t have any English adjectives. That is, non-Latin adjectives. :smack:
Could the discrepancy be from Latin being so inflected, declined, and other gramatical verbs unique to Latin I don’t know?
I remember that there are over 100 different words for “this” in Latin.
I remember that there are three words (masculine,feminine,neuter) for each of the 7 cases (ablative, dative,accusitive,etc), in each of the 5 declensions.
Do the math: 3x7x5= 105 different words (not just different suffixes tacked onto the same root word). And they all mean exactly the same thing : “this”.
(Or “that”–I think English is the only language which differentiates between the two.)
(Disclaimer: I escaped Latin when I switched schools at age 11 (4 decades ago), so my memory is a little vague)
Define “word”, for starters. Is rosae a different word from rosa, or not? If conjugations and declensions aren’t different words, several items currently found, defined and counted in English dictionaries should not have their own entries.
For that matter, are “ego” and “me” the same word?
And while Latin certainly has adjectives, it does lack articles. Given that English only has two or three articles, though, that’s not a very big hit in the vocabulary.
You have to define Latin first. Do you mean just Classical Latin, just Latin that is not regonizably French, Italian, Spanish, etc., or Latin and any of its descendants?
Rosa and rosae are different words, but the same lexeme. Same with ego and me.
Latin doesn’t have as many words as English, but that is, in part, because it has great flexibility in its affixes. So there are a number of prefixes and suffixes that can be attached to different root words to express shades of meaning if you can’t be precise enough with what you’ve got and the context.
Latin is not a zombie language for two reasons: 1) it never died as a spoken language and 2) it never died as a written language. The spoken langage changed into the vernaculars (for most speakers) and the pronunciation, vocabulary, and some grammar of Latin Latin (for want of a better term) changed in different regions over the course of the middle ages. It’s still Latin, though, and people are still writing it and, to a lesser degree, speaking it—just as a second language rather than a first.
Double post not there on preview: deleted.
IIRC - something I read, the latin as written in all the classical texts was already antiquated compared to street latin (vulgate?) by the time of Julius.
Also I think we underestimate the role of media and universal(?) literacy in fixing the vocabulary and grammar long term.
[quote=“chappachula, post:12, topic:653309”]
And they all mean exactly the same thing : “this”.
(Or “that”–I think English is the only language which differentiates between the two.)
/QUOTE]
certainly not true. Japanese has the KSAD structure for many positional words.
Kore = this thing right here
Sore = that thing over there
Are = that thing far away
Dore = which thing?
anyway kore = this and sore = that.
Back in 1939, a student named Paul Diederich did a doctoral dissertation that examined a corpus of approximately 202,000 Latin words drawn from Classical and Medieval Latin texts. I’ve only been able to read about it secondhand, but if the sources are correct, he found that a basic vocabulary of 1,471 words would enable one to understand 83.6% of the corpus, and that 13,798 words accounted for 96.8% of the corpus.
Latin does differentiate between "this " and “that”
Hic / haec/ hoc - this man here, the latter . ( has 30 forms, but many are the same. 15 unique forms)
Ille / illa / illud- that there / that famous man, the former ( again, 30 forms 16 unique ).
Is/ea/id - he/she/it, but can also mean "this/that/the aforementioned " when used as an adjective (30 forms, 15 unique )
Iste / ista / istud - that of yours, that thing near you, the defendant (or accused, I forget which ) ( 30 forms, 15 unique )
Possible "this " word forms - 30
Possible "that " word forms - 46