Latin vs. Greek

Great Debates
1

I’m not looking in a lesson in either, just a little basic info. First, here is something I read:

Greek is considered by many to be the most effective and admirable means of communication ever devised. Its lucidity of structure and concept, together with its seemingly infinite variety of modes of expression, render it equally suitable to the needs of the rigorous thinker and the inspired poet.

Latin lacks somewhat the variety and flexibility of Greek, perhaps reflecting the practical nature of the Roman people who were more concerned with government and empire than with speculative thought and poetic imagery.

These blurbs were taken from Kenneth Katzner’s The Languages of the World, the format of which gives an example of a language’s orthography, a translation, and a couple of paragraphs of information, probably supplied by an expert in that language.

I know that languages have different ways of doing things, but what aspects are the aforementioned quotes referring to. (Obviously, I am not conversant in either, so I don’t have anything for comparison.)

2

I am not a linguist, but my high school and college experience with Romance languages suggests two things: The development and widespread use of descriptors such as adjectives and adverbs, that add shades of nuance to simple nouns and verbs, and the widespread use of idioms, which are perfectly clear in one language, but translate poorly into another, and which indicate culture-specific ideas, concepts, etc.

I don’t know enough about Latin vs. Greek to offer ideas about grammar, structure,syntax, etc., but they could be a factor, as well.

3

Hey, Maeglin! You’ve got Greek, I’ve got crap.

If he doesn’t pop in here to offer his insight, then I’ll try my untrained hand at it.

4

I don’t know squat about Latin or Greek, being mostly illiterate in the one and totally illiterate in the other.

However, I do know that in the 18th and 19th century in England, virtually everyone who went to school had to learn some Latin, whereas only the better schools taught Greek. Knowing (ancient) Greek was the mark of a gentleman and a scholar.

So there may be a trace of snobbery involved here. Indeed the quote you supplied tends to back that up. Government and empire…how plebian!

5

Mjollnir, are you looking to learn one of them, or just curious?

I did Latin A Level (that’s up until the age of 18 for the Yanks), and I’ve dabbled in Greek. Apart from learning the alphabet, Greek is a slightly easier language to learn.

On the subject of which is better though? There’s no answer to the question. All languages have things which they express better or worse than the others. Once learnt, no language is less expressive than any other.

If you’re going to learn one, I guess you should decide whether you’d rather read Greek or Latin literature.
Alex

6

This may be true, but it’s another matter whether Greek is the most effective means of communication ever devised. A similar oft-made claim is that French is somehow uniquely logical and this specific version is nicely addressed by Anthony Lodge’s contribution to Language Myths (ed. by Bauer and Trudgill, Penguin, 1998). To quote from his conclusion:

“The idea which people seem to find hard to grasp is that languages cannot possess good or bad qualities: no language system can ever be shown to be clearer or more logical (or more beautiful or more ugly) than any other language system.”

The book is a popular collection of articles by professional linguists directly questioning such widely held myths. Hardly definitive, but expressly designed as a corrective to this sort of claim about languages that we hear glibly expressed all the time.

7

First, I wholeheartedly agree with the last two posts. No spoken, natural language is any better or worse than any other language, although they can be vastly different in how they do so.
Feeding into the perception of Latin and Greek, however, is the nature of the ancient texts in those languages that we still have with us today. While more (though certainly not exclusively) matters of philosophical nature were treated in the earliest Greek texts, Latin was used as the language of (for certain periods very efficient) administration. This then led to differences in the dominant written styles in the two ancient languages – and the common view of the two today, as stated in the OP.

8

I have a fairly good knowledge of both Latin and Greek, having studied both languages from high school through university.

In my opinion, both languages are capable of very high expressivity. Just read Horace and Sappho. I’m partial to English, and there you have Shakespeare. I also read Old and Middle English, Old German and Modern German, and various versions of Italian, and I have found great poetic ability in certain writers in all of these languages.

It is the poet, not the language that counts.

Alas, I also studied French for a couple of years in high school and university, but I never found brilliance there.

9

No languages are better or worse than others? Oh, come on! I read recently that the Greek language was a big boon in antiquity to the Greek peoples whose influence was encroaching on users of another big language of the day, Aramaic. I read more specifically that Aramaic is simpler and more limiting - so that for example in Aramaic you can’t make part of a sentence dependant on another part. So you couldn’t say “If I wasn’t so tired I would keep traveling”, you’d have to substitute “I am very tired. I will stop traveling.” In other words you can’t express quite the same ideas. (I hope my example captures correctly the thing the author was claiming Aramaic couldn’t do, but he was certainly making a point somewhat like this.)

10

I’d be suspicious of something that sounds so much like an item of political catechism. Academics often have an ideological agenda of one kind or another, since that’s their best hope of getting noticed.

A language is a product of its society, and sometimes there are ideas and concepts which a particular society hasn’t yet incorporated. In order to have a meaningful discussion of such a concept, the language itself must evolve. I’m sure that there are spiritual concepts in Sanskrit or Tibetan, for example, that are very difficult to discuss in English.

And I’d certainly argue that English’s very mongrel nature is in itself a good quality. If for some reason Tantrism ever becomes a hot topic over here, I’m sure that English speakers would have no difficulty adopting Tibetan terms for their own. Whereas the French are still struggling with “le Big Mac”.

11

Actually, it is generally accepted by linguists that one can express all the same ideas in all languages, just in very different ways that may be more or less complex. Using two sentences that follow each other can be just as effective as a dependant clause and there are many other ways to express that chain of thought as well. Many so-called “primitive” languages have mind-boggling complicated ways of saying the same things.

In my experience, unusally complex structures in certain aspects of languages are balanced out by simpler structures in other aspects of the same language. English, for example, has no grammatical gender but has a very complicated tense and aspect system. German, conversely, has 3 genders (masculine, feminine and neuter) but a relatively simple tense system. Non-native speakers of English often confuse the lack of endings in English with simple grammar. But very few ever master the tense system.

As far as aesthetic appeal is concerned, I’m sure that is in the eye and ear of the beholder.

12

Of course academics have all sorts of ideological biases, but turn the question around. Isn’t it odd that the languages past Western academics have identified as good are precisely those closely related to the traditions and cultures they’ve been working in ? How come they never suggest Zulu or Tibetan as a candidate for this super-clear language ?

13

Well, Aramaic was good enough for Jesus Christ and the Apostles…

14

I’m yet to hear of any language which was not IDEALLY suited to express all the depths and nuances of human idiocy.

15

You put it better than I did.

16

Two wrongs don’t make a right.

17

Rather than being suspicious, study some linguistics. And perhaps some non-Indo-European languages. It can be rather enlightening.

18

I’m not at all familiar with Greek or Latin, but would guess that both languages have something of value to offer the user.

I’m studying Swedish (my wife is a Swede) and Mandarin (we live in China) and know Japanese (I used to live there).

Aside from the tones and difficult character alphabet, Mandarin seems to be a very straight forward and comprehensible language. Because of the tones, I sometimes think it can sound like someone singing (although Tagalog sounds even prettier, in that respect).

Swedish is more familiar to me, but has that nasty gender identifier system. The famous up and down lilts, though, are very pleasant.

Japanese can be quite formal, but for that reason dry sarcasm in Japanese seems to be really funny.

Aesthetically and subjectively, all three languages have much to commend to them, and I suspect that’s the situation for all languages.

19

Reading (oh, let’s say) Noam Chomsky is supposed to convince me that academics in this field have no ideological agenda?

And why do you assume that I haven’t done either?

20

Hmmm. I know Latin, and still retain a small amount of Greek (though it’s very rusty), and, for that matter, my first degree was in linguistics…

I think the idea that any one language is intrinsically “superior” to others has been investigated and pretty thoroughly exploded. Certainly, there are some languages where it’s easier to express some concepts - Eskimoes have all these different words for snow, English has all these technical terms for computers, and so forth. However, it’s possible for an English speaker to describe snow in just as much detail as an Eskimo - it just takes the English speaker more words to do it. And, for that matter, I recall an informative article in the Guardian a few years ago about computing terminology in Inuktitut.

Grammatical constructions also differ between languages, but it’s hard to claim any actual superiority here either. For example, English has two numbers, singular (one person) and plural (more than one). Greek has three: singular, dual (two people) and plural (more than two). So, if you want to specify, say, that you went for a walk with one other person, in English you would have to say “The two of us went for a walk”, whereas in Greek the fact that there were two of you would show up in the verb ending. Does this make Greek a better language than English? I doubt it.

As to specific points raised; yes, Noam Chomsky has (forcibly expressed) political views, but that doesn’t necessarily prevent him from being scientifically objective. (And it would be a mistake to assume that Chomsky’s views, either on politics or on linguistics, are universally shared by all linguisticians.) And I don’t know Aramaic, and for all I know it lacks specific verb forms for the subjunctive mood - but if you want to tell me that that means you can’t express conditionals in Aramaic, I will raise a stonily sceptical eyebrow at you. After all, we English speakers get along just fine without the dual. Or the aorist tense. Or the iterative aspect (no, I don’t recall which languages do have an iterative aspect, but, as an English speaker, I don’t feel the loss.)

I agree with Neurodoc - it’s not the language that counts, it’s the person using it.