Latin vs. Greek

Great Debates
21

Steve Wright, thanks for your thoughtful and informative post. I still have one or two questions, though.

Since it sounds judgemental to say one language is “superior” to another, let’s just ask whether it can be more “effective” (which might incorporate both “efficiency” and “expressiveness”). Furthermore, the standard for effectiveness is a given language ability to communicate ideas.

If we think of it in these terms, can’t we still say that one language can be more effective than another in discussing certain subjects like theology or political science?

I still tend to think of a language as an extension of society, and I believe the closer that a foreign society is to one’s own, the more effective its language will be in expressing the ideas of one’s own society. And for the language of a given society to begin to incorporate the ideas of a foreign society, I submit that the language itself must evolve and become something different from what it was before. Let me ask you this: presumably, Inuktitut is a very old language. If you took a well-educated Eskimo who lived 100 years ago and transported him to the present day, would you he be able to read that computer manual?

Now you may protest that this is unfair, since an American or Brit from 100 years ago would have a hard time (though maybe not quite as hard) understanding a present-day computer manual. But doesnt that get to the point of this thread? Latin and classical Greek are dead languages, and have stopped evolving. So can’t we say that there are aspects of our modern society that are better suited to discussion in Latin (such as law), and others better suited to discussion in classical Greek (such as taxonomy)?

I realize that George Orwell wasn’t a linguist, but I still keep thinking of his “Principles of Newspeak”:

Now, aren’t/weren’t most pre-industrial societies in the position of the postulated Newspeak, with the difference being that instead of politically sensitive words having been actively culled from the vocabulary, those words instead never developed to begin with?

22

Collounsbury, please see Steven Wright’s post above, and be “enlightened” by the fact that his post is (1) respectful, (2) informative, and (3) demonstrates a level of thoughtful expertise–features that your post characteristically lacks. You may want to take this as a model for future study, since I don’t intend to converse with you any further until you rise above your persistent attitude of smirking self-congratulation.

23

I think I see where you’re coming from - and I think most linguisticians would agree that a language (any language) can’t be divorced from the social context in which it’s used.

There’s a phenomenon called diglossia which may be relevant here; basically, it’s the situation where people use one language for one set of social circumstances, and another language for others. It used to be common in the old Soviet Union, where many people would speak some local language in their homes, but use Russian for all “official” purposes, and, within the appropriate context, would be equally fluent in both. But I don’t think anyone would claim that Russian is in itself a better language for filling out forms than, say, Azerbaijani.

Strange as it might seem, I think the 100-year-old Inuktitut speaker might have less trouble than an English speaker - the reason being (if I remember the Guardian article correctly) that Inuktitut is an agglutinative language; one in which words can readily be combined to form new ones (so an Inuktitut speaker will recognise the derivation of words s/he hasn’t met before). Shifting to the safer ground of languages I actually know: I’d expect a 200-year-old German speaker to grasp the meaning of “Fernsprecher” (“far” + “speaker”) quicker than an English speaker would get “telephone”. German forms new words by agglutination, English, on the whole, doesn’t - but this certainly doesn’t mean that English is slower to accumulate new concepts than German; English has a lengthy history of either forming Graeco-Latinate neologisms (like “telephone”) or co-opting foreign-language words (like, um, “bungalow”, or “anorak”).

I don’t think we can really go that far. To be sure, modern jurisprudence owes a lot to classical legal principles, and it’s part of the tradition of the law to retain a lot of Latin as a consequence - but there is no absolute advantage to using, say, ultra vires rather than “exceeding their authority”. For that matter, to what extent are Latin phrases like ultra vires co-opted into the English language? Would a Roman understand the phrase in the same way that a modern lawyer does? (He certainly wouldn’t pronounce it the same way - A. P. Herbert wrote an entertaining piece on exactly this issue.)

It’s a neat idea, and Orwell is one of several writers who’ve explored it (I particularly enjoyed Jack Vance’s The Languages of Pao - similar theme). But it’s instructive, I think, to consider the differences between 1984 and the real world. Orwell posits an absolute and all-pervading totalitarian state, in which every aspect of individual life - including language - is subject to regulation. In the real world (thank God), we don’t have this - and language is defined by the way people use it; English has no central authority regulating it, and even where there is one (as the Academie Francaise claims to regulate French), it’s widely ignored by the actual language users.

In all but one crucial respect; unlike in the Ingsoc totalitarian state, there is nothing inhibiting the development of the concepts behind those words, and, where the concepts exist, the language will change to express them.

24

Don’t hold back, folks. If we’re going to have another knock-down-drag-out about Noam Chomsky, let’s do it in Great Debates where people can say what they really think.

bibliophage
moderator, GQ

25

I dunno what’s there is to have a knock-down drag-out about, because Noam Chomsky was just a side issue for me. However, I would like to pick Steve Wright’s brains some more on this subject:

I’ve seen sort of the same thing in Taiwan, where people would speak Taiwanese at home but Mandarin at school and when dealing with any goverment offices. But now there’s sort of a movement toward “Taiwanization” at all levels of society. Would you consider diglossia to be an inherently unstable linguistic set-up? It seems to presuppose the language of some conquerer being enforced from above.

That’s interesting, because I’ve always thought that the morphemes in Chinese were also much closer to the surface, especially if you consider the characters: the characters for “telephone” read literally as “electric speech”, and “movie” reads literally as “electric shadows”. But Mandarin seems to be very slow to incorporate loan words; most foreign expressions are literally rendered in terms of the original morphological set-up. That is, in Mandarin, you can’t just indicate the entertainment box in the corner by using a Sinicized pronunciation of the English word “television”.

This seems quite unlike the Japanese, who really seem to go to town on loan words. I ask my Japanese friend, what’s the word for grape? “Gray-pu”. TV? “Tereh-bee”. Work overtime? “Ar-buy-to” (from German Arbeit). But as far as I know (which is admittedly not much), Japanese morphology doesn’t appear nearly as transparent as Chinese (except in the cases where Chinese kanji were deliberately borrowed.)

I imagine you could do a dissertation on the question of the relative adaptivity of Chinese vs. Japanese, and the relative openness of those two societies to influences from the West. Do you think there’s a tradeoff between adaptability versus morphological clarity?

So it all comes down to language as a function of the underlying society, is that right? Just as an aside, I’d point out that we might not see any societal inhibition of such concepts now, but I think that you can find historical examples. I’ve read about Chinese translators who attempted to translate English newspapers for the benefit of Chinese officials back in the 19th century, and they had a terrible time trying to explain parliamentary procedure, for example. (There were MPs who opposed the King? Why didn’t he cut their heads off and kill their families as an example?) I suspect that the Imperial Chinese establishment didn’t exactly encourage widespread understanding of the concepts required to understand such attempts at translation.

26

Personally, I prefer Esperanto.

27

Doghouse Reilly

First, I think your friend should stop drinking so much grape flavoured Fanta (called “Fanta guraipu”): the Japanese word for “grape” is “budoo”.

Japanese is much more morphologically transparent, because foreign words have their own alphabet. There are 3 alphabets in Japanese: hiragana, which is basic Japanese; kanji, which is borrowed from China; and katakana, which is used for foreign words or emphasis. If you see anything written in katakana, you can sound it out to a foreign word. Interestingly during WW2 when anti-Western sentiments in Japan were high, foreign words were given a Japanese name. America was no longer “Amerika” but became “rice country”. In Chinese, its always been “beautiful country”.

In Mandarin, trade mark owners go through the arduous task of trying to find characters which sound like their foreign language trade mark, and convey the correct image of what they are selling. Coca Cola in Chinese sounds like “Coca Cola” but, unless I’m missing something obvious, has no connection to a brown fizzy drink. My law firm’s name is “Deacons” - in Chinese, the characters are pronounced “di-kun” and mean “target near”. I gather it looks odd, but by themselves the characters are not obviously a Western surname. In Japanese, the katakana alone would make that clear.

I’ll give some thought to your trade off question: I actually think that there is something to that.

28

The classic diglossia example I heard was that of Swiss Germans, who use standard High German in writing or formal use; but speak a dialect called Schweizerdeutsch or Allemanisch in everyday life. I don’t know a lot of German, but I can follow standard German but Swiss German seems as different as Dutch is from High German.

29

But that’s just what I mean–not only do Japanese use loan words for concepts introduced by the west, they adopt (admittedly slang-ey) loan words when they already have perfectly good native words at their disposal! It seems like a trendy or cool thing to do, to the extent that young people have developed a patois that is Greek to their elders. (Sorry.) See your own example–why isn’t it “Budoo no Fanta”?

Not arguing, just interested.

30

So here I am. :wink:

This is the standard old-world view of Latin and Greek that equates effectiveness with variety of grammatical and syntactic structures. As several other posters have mentioned, it has been since exploded. There is nothing in Plato’s Republic or Aristotle’s Physics than cannot be expressed as eloquently and clearly in, say, Gothic, Frisian, or Anglo-Saxon.

Greek is typically lauded is for its flexibility for four main reasons.

First, in contrast, to Latin, Greek has four verbal moods as opposed to three. In Latin and English, verbs are found in the indicative, imperative, or subjunctive. Greek also adds the optative, a mood even farther removed from “reality” than the subjunctive. This additional mood permits more nuanced speculation and a more precise apprehension of time simultaneously, as logical and causal relationships in both present, past, and future tenses can be expressed with tremendous clarity.

Second, Greek is bursting with particles. Particles are typically one or two letter words with a wide variety of meanings: for, indeed, moreover, nevertheless, etc. Greek authors scatter them about to guide the reader very carefully and methodically through his throughts, his sentences, and his paragraphs. While Latin has quite a few particles of its own, their depth and variety is not as compelling as their Greek counterparts.

Third, Greek has a positively enormous poetic and prose lexicon. Recall that Latin was but one minor tongue on the Italian peninsula before the rise of Rome, and while it shares deeply in its Etruscan and Oscan roots, it lacks a certain geographical diversity. Greek, on the other hand, was spoken from western Ionia to Macedonia, and thus a tremendous amount of regional variation and a wide vocabulary can be incorporated into literary works. Greek authors were able to draw on such diverse kinds of writing as Homer, the Ionian pre-Socratic rationalists, early occasional poets like Pindar, and Hesiod, all accomplished masters. The Romans were not quite as satisfied with their literary tradition: the Atticizing Romans regarded the great master Ennius as a creator of “rough verse.”

Finally, the Greek participial phrase can be employed in maybe a half dozen different ways. It can express cause, purpose, time within which, etc. It is much more flexibile than the Latin ablative absolute construction, and hence is ideally suited to poetry as it can be substituted for more standard syntactic structures both cause metri and because it yields a slightly different nuance.

I happen to be a Latinist, so I think that all of the above reasons are horseshit. Because Greek has more linguistic variety, Latin writers, in my opinion, have to be even more subtle and sophisticated if they want to express concepts at the same intellectual level as their Greek counterparts. They can and they do. It just requires more work and an open mind to bring them out when reading Latin.

As I have always said, the better you learn Greek, the easier it becomes to read. But as your Latin improves, reading becomes more difficult.

MR

31

Hmm. Of course, Greek is almost another example of diglossia these days, isn’t it? With the workaday demotic form being notably different from the formal katharefousa (aaarrgh… really not certain of the Romanized spelling of that one…), which is supposedly close enough to Attic Greek that Socrates could read it.

I was going to say something along the lines of “well, this is an instance of diglossia arising, not from the imposition of another language by a conqueror, but from simple linguistic conservatism”… but then Maeglin’s post got me wondering; did this linguistic conservatism, itself, arise as a response to the absorption of Greece into the Roman Empire? A deliberate effort to preserve Greek literature against the incursions of western barbarians?

(Oh, and thanks a bunch, Maeglin. After nearly twenty years of dedicated drinking, I’d almost succeeded in repressing all memory of the optative mood. And along you come and rake it all up again…

32

Indeed, though by the 3rd century BCE there was already a serious dichotomy between classical and koine Greek.

The same is true with literary and spoken, often called Vulgar, Latin.

Dunno about that. The Atticizing Romans were able to appropriate, integrate, and ultimately preserve Greek literature to an astonishing degree. If anything, the conservative Greeks were allied with the conquering Romans. I am not sure how many Greeks truly believed that Rome was somehow threatening the autonomous Greek literary tradition. If anything, they placed even more importance on the value of a classical Athenian education than the Greeks themselves. There is a strong undercurrent in writers on education, especially Cicero, that insinuates that Greek culture and education are in fact wasted on actual Greeks.

So I have years of drinking to look forward to? My future is getting brighter every day. :wink:

MR

33

Just a little plug for a neat site called “Orbis Latinus”:

http://www.orbilat.com

Which is probably the best information on general vulgar latin history, as well as grammar and vocabulary overviews of the various romance languages. There are also accompanying histories. It’s not 100% complete, but there’s quite a bit there. It’s pretty fascinating stuff.

34

I blame the Coca Cola Company. :wink:

I have asked for “budoo Fanta” and the cheeky boy behind the counter corrected me with “Fanta guraipu” (and a look which suggested he thought his English was better than mine).

I have had an argument with a Japanese person who was convinced the word “pinku” was native Japanese: the word for “pink” in Japanese is “momoiro” (“peach-coloured”).

American culture is very trendy, and I guess that this flows onto the adoption of English.

35

What’s curious is how some Japanese seem to mix the use of loan words with a touch of xenophobia, at least according to what I’ve heard. I have a friend who’s a flight attendant at a Japanese airline, and she tells me that when she asks a passenger if he would like some “tomato juice” (pronounced the English way), he looks a little miffed, as if he’s thinking, “don’t you think you’re hot stuff, pronouncing it that way”. More often then not, he will correct her by enunciating slowly and clearly: “toh-MAH-toh joo-ee-SOH”.

And of course there’s the rumor that Japanese people are generally atrocious at speaking any foreign language.

36

If the Japanese are bad at foreign languages, that may simply be because Japanese is a language with few relatives - so acquiring any foreign language means a steep learning curve.

(This article gives an outline of Japanese and discusses its relationships with other languages.)

37

Just as quick question. What is the big deal with the “R” and “L” sounds? Many Asians I know (including my wife) have severe problems with these sounds, any idea why? The odd thing, to me anyway, is that Thai has as many R and L sounds as English. Of course, this works both ways. She fails to understand why the 5 Thai tones aren’t glaringly obvious to me.
(Mucho apologies for the hijack.)
Thanks.

Testy.

38

I’m not sure there’s a quick answer… but I’ll give it a shot.

Basically, the human vocal tract can produce a huge range of different speech sounds. However, not all of these sounds are used in every language. So, when you, as a child, learn your first language, you learn to distinguish between the ones that are used in your language, and either lump the ones that aren’t into the closest matching category (like, English speakers often can’t distinguish between “u” and “u-umlaut” in German) or just ignore them (English speakers don’t figure the click-sounds in Xhosa as speech sounds).

In English, and most Indo-European languages, the approximant “r” sound is distinguished from the lateral approximant “l” sound. So, we learn that distinction and pick up on it. But the actual difference in sound between the two, if you look at it (on a sound spectrograph, for instance), is tiny - so, if you’re brought up with a language that doesn’t make that distinction, you’re not going to find it easy to learn.

(This is somewhat oversimplified, of course… particularly with regard to the letter “r”, where English phonology insists that approximant “r”, tapped “r”, and trilled “r” are all the same phoneme, even though they’re significantly different in production.)

39

[hijack]Steve, what’s the A.P. Herbert story? Is it in “The Common Law”?[/hijack]

Doghouse Reilly asked:

I don’t know if this is what you’re thinking of, Doghouse, but I’ve noticed one difference along these lines between English and French.

By way of background, in Canada the federal statutes and federal judicial decisions are published in both English and French, in parallell columns on each page for easy comparison between the two versions.

In the statutes, the French version of a section is often shorter than the English version. By contrast, in a judicial decision, the English version of a paragraph is often shorter than the French version

I think that what this says is that French tends to be a more concise language, when expressing a very specific concept, such as a statutory provision. On the other hand, English seems to be more concise when dealing with a general discourse of some sort. (Statute provisions have to be very precise; judicial decisions often have a bit more, well, vagueness sounds harsh…)

Has anyone else any experience along these lines?

40

<sound of rusty brain-gears grinding…>

The A.P. Herbert story is in… ummm… one of the two “Uncommon Law” omnibus volumes… I think it’s the first one, but I’m not absolutely sure. The sub-title is “The Dead Pronunciation”; it features a newly-qualified barrister who’s been taught Latin using the “modern” pronunciation (i.e. our best efforts at determining how the Romans would have pronounced it) - as a result, he has serious problems communicating with the judges.