“Similar” is a sliding scale, but I disagree that the structure is similar. Do you know Latin and one of the modern languages? Case is essential in Latin, and vestigial-to-non-existent in Spanish, Italian, and French. The daughter languages use “to have” for compound verb tenses in most verbs, while Latin does not. Prepositions have changed function, sometimes quite drastically (Latin dē vs. Fr. / Sp. / It. de / di). Latin uses enclitics (-que, -ne) which the modern languages do not. Latin does not use definite articles. This isn’t even considering participles and the ablative absolute. I would say “the vocabulary of Latin is similar to, though not identical with, the daughter languages, while the structure is occasionally similar but often wildly and completely different.”
Compare:
in principio creavit Deus caelum et terram. terra autem erat inanis et vacua et tenebrae super faciem abyssi et spiritus Dei ferebatur super aquas. dixitque Deus fiat lux et facta est lux.
Nel principio Dio creò i cieli e la terra. La terra era informe e vuota, le tenebre coprivano la faccia dell’abisso e lo Spirito di Dio aleggiava sulla superficie delle acque. Dio disse: «Sia luce!» E luce fu.
*
En el principio Creó Dios los cielos y la tierra. Y la tierra estaba sin orden y Vacía. Había tinieblas sobre la faz del océano, y el Espíritu de Dios se Movía sobre la faz de las aguas. Entonces dijo Dios: “Sea la luz”, y fue la luz. *
*Au commencement, Dieu créa le ciel et la terre. La terre était informe et vide, les ténèbres étaient au-dessus de l’abîme et le souffle de Dieu planait au-dessus des eaux. Dieu dit : « Que la lumière soit. » Et la lumière fut. *
This passage has fairly simple constructions, so it should be a good test. But already there are major differences: Notice how the Latin ferebatur, a passive, is rendered by an different active verb in the daughter languages (aleggiava / se movía / planait). Facta est is similarly rendered by a preterite verb (fu / fue / fuit, which would be fuit in Latin). The -que in dixitque is ignored. Super is translated by sulla superficie delle / sobre la faz de las / au-dessus des instead of the word-for-word descendants sopre acque / sobre aguas / sur eaux.
I am beginning to understand the complexities, but it still seems that Latin comprises a finite number of usage elements that should be convertible to other finite usage elements, no matter how specifically or conveniently they map item to item. It seems to me that much of the objection is that there aren’t simple mappings of word/phrase to word/phrase… but there are equivalent mappings of some greater complexity.
For example, does ferebatur have any other translations in those three languages, or is this just an example where the modern working verb does not stem from the same root?
No, the form in Latin is a third-person singular passive imperfect, meaning “was borne” or “was carried”. The modern languages use a different construction, similar to English in using two words, plus a preposition meaning “by”. In this example, the Latin clearly avoids saying how the Spirit of God was borne, while the Spanish uses a reflexive (“moved”, but with the se indicated in that the movement also originated with this spirit and not an outside force) and the French and Italian use straight-up active verbs (“wafted,” “hovered”). If you wanted to render ferebatur as literally as possible, you’d say est porté in French, which without context isn’t at all clear (it can map onto different constructions in Latin, and porter also has a bunch of meanings). Google Translate turns “est porté” into subtritus, “worn away,” and when I supply more French it suscitavit, “stirred up.”
Even more words gets “focused,” which isn’t Latin at all.
…which isn’t to say that I don’t think a half-decent automatic Latin translator is impossible. It would just have to be created especially for Latin and languages with similar complex inflexional morphologies, and even then it would still be subject to the same problems as all the others. Still, desigining one would be a cool exercise: any programmers want to help me create one?
Recently, I got suckered again into trying to read what turned out to be a Google translation of an English article into Latin. At this point in my studies, I generally lack only breadth of vocabulary to be able to read any Latin I pick up, except I am not sufficiently versed that if I see garbled nonsense, I know it as such without question, as I could in English. So I give myself a headache trying to make sense of gobbeldygook.
People, stop using Google Translate to render Latin. It’s not funny.
Recently, commenting on the abdication of the Pope, Stephen Colbert said, “Taurus facies.” I was able to register this immediately as “A bull a face” (possibly ‘two faces’) and that what he meant was “The shit of a bull” – faex taurī. Faex, by the way, is more like scum. It doesn’t even rate a mention in Adams in which even pōdex bears discussion because it possibly originally meant ‘the farter’. He couldn’t have asked somebody who knew?
People, a surprising number of people know better than Google how to render things in Latin. Even a first-year student can do better than Google Translate. Call somebody. Post about it on the Straight Dope (or as we call it rēs rēcta). Spread the word – software won’t do it, and a Latin dictionary requires the user to have a knowledge of what the information means.
Sorry, don’t get me wrong. I was merely taking the opportunity to remind people to spread the word not to use online translators for Latin. If you don’t want to get it right, then you don’t want Latin.
The joke doesn’t work if he’s accurate. Most intelligent english speakers can guess what was supposed to be meant by “Taurus facies”. “Faex Tauri” is a lot harder to guess unless you actually speak Latin.
The whole notion that the human mind works like a digital computer is wrong. They are entirely different systems. There are those that claim to mimic the real workings of the mind through what’s called neural networks, but these aren’t really neural systems. They’re just digital systems trying very inefficiently to mimic the workings of neurons in the brain.
What you’re thinking is something like the following: Computers must be a lot smarter than I am, since they can do a lot of things that I can’t do. I can learn languages, so learning languages must be easy for computers. The problem again is that your brain works in far different ways than a computer does, and so far we can’t mimic those ways in any computer very well. If you’re seriously interested in this you might want to read Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind by George Lakoff, which explains a lot about why trying to conceptualize language in terms of computer algorithms isn’t very useful.