A Question about the Latin Language

[alcuin18]

As this is not specifically about the use of Latin in the church, I put it here. I am considering studying Latin, but one issue I have with it that makes it seem very confusing to me is its inflection. As a native English speaker this seems very foreign and difficult to me. I understand how it works, but two things I don’t get are:

1. Why are there so many declensions instead of just having endings by gender and case in common for all words? For example, why not just have one declension for all feminine words that covers their endings for each case and plural, one for masculine and one for neuter?
2. How do you deal with the tendency of Latin inflection to have the same endings for different cases within a declension, and sometimes the same ending for separate declensions? It seems like it would make it very confusing. For example, if there is a Latin word ending in -us in the first declension vocative case, and the same ending in the dative case, and the same ending in the nominative case of the second declension, if you see the word in a sentence, how do you know what case it’s supposed to be?

I find inflected languages interesting and am considering learning another instead of Latin, such as German or Polish, as to me inflection seems to lend a lot more order and organization, but as I said it also seems much more difficult and confusing than non-inflected grammars like English or French, often needlessly complicated. Thank you for your help. God bless.

 

[tee_eff_em]

As this is not specifically about the use of Latin in the church, I put it here. I am considering studying Latin, but one issue I have with it that makes it seem very confusing to me is its inflection. As a native English speaker this seems very foreign and difficult to me. I understand how it works, but two things I don’t get are:

1. Why are there so many declensions instead of just having endings by gender and case in common for all words? For example, why not just have one declension for all feminine words that covers their endings for each case and plural, one for masculine and one for neuter?

Do you believe the Latin system of declensions to prescriptive?

1. How do you deal with the tendency of Latin inflection to have the same endings for different cases within a declension, and sometimes the same ending for separate declensions? It seems like it would make it very confusing. For example, if there is a Latin word ending in -us in the first declension vocative case, and the same ending in the dative case, and the same ending in the nominative case of the second declension, if you see the word in a sentence, how do you know what case it’s supposed to be?

And yet, babies in ancient Rome were able to learn the language.

I find inflected languages interesting and am considering learning another instead of Latin, such as German or Polish, as to me inflection seems to lend a lot more order and organization, but as I said it also seems much more difficult and confusing than non-inflected grammars like English or French, often needlessly complicated. Thank you for your help. God bless.

I don’t understand. Which one dominates? Do you find a heavily inflected language ordered and organized? Or difficult and confusing?


tee

 

[John_Lazarus]

As this is not specifically about the use of Latin in the church, I put it here. I am considering studying Latin, but one issue I have with it that makes it seem very confusing to me is its inflection. As a native English speaker this seems very foreign and difficult to me. I understand how it works, but two things I don’t get are:

1. Why are there so many declensions instead of just having endings by gender and case in common for all words? For example, why not just have one declension for all feminine words that covers their endings for each case and plural, one for masculine and one for neuter?

You realize that Latin – pretty much like all other languages – developed through usage, over centuries, and not through the efforts of a logical planning committee.

Besides, look at English. Our nouns decline for number (usually). One house, two houses. One ox, two oxen. One man, two men.

But it isn’t necessary. We can indicate number with an auxiliary descriptive word: “One fish, two fish.”* We can do the same with, say, the dative case. “I gave two fish to George.”

Of course the dative case can be signified by word order: “I gave George two fish.”

alcuin18:

1. How do you deal with the tendency of Latin inflection to have the same endings for different cases within a declension, and sometimes the same ending for separate declensions? It seems like it would make it very confusing. For example, if there is a Latin word ending in -us in the first declension vocative case, and the same ending in the dative case, and the same ending in the nominative case of the second declension, if you see the word in a sentence, how do you know what case it’s supposed to be?

I am not sure. I don’t really know Latin. I know you have to memorize your paradigms. And I guess you have to look at the word in context. I know the Romans could do it.

I mean, look at “fish”. Based on the ending, is it in the nominative singular case? Accusative plural?
Vocative? (“O, fish!”)
Or is it a verb? (“Go fish!”)

alcuin18:

I find inflected languages interesting and am considering learning another instead of Latin, such as German or Polish, as to me inflection seems to lend a lot more order and organization, but as I said it also seems much more difficult and confusing than non-inflected grammars like English or French, often needlessly complicated.

Yes, because English is straightforward, elegant, and logical.

English is non-inflected mostly, but we makeup for it by having more strict word-order. For example, “Love conquers all” is not the same as “All conquers love”; but “Amor vincit omnia” IS the same as “Omnia vincit amor” (and, incidentally, “Omnia amor vincit”, and pretty much all the other permutations), thanks to case.

It’s really only confusing because you look at Latin with English eyes. Maybe if you were Finnish, which has apparently 15, you’d think Latin was ridiculously uncomplicated – or maybe vague and inexact. (“Look, Tuukka, those silly Romans use the same word for the allative case as the illative – they can’t tell if you put the book**** in the house or on the house! Ha!”)

German? Their *articles *decline, for gosh’ sake.

Oh, and you’re talking about noun declension – you haven’t mentioned verb conjugation, yet. Bona fortuna with that.

My knowledge of Latin is limited to trying to parse it out word-by-word with a copy of Wheelock’s and a dictionary at my elbow.

alcuin18:

Thank you for your help. God bless.

Hope I haven’t made it worse.

*Red fish, blue fish.

 

[jimmy]

Context, and often word order tell you the part a word plays in the sentence. The object (accusative case) is normally at the beginning of the sentence. The subject (nominative case) is normally at the end. But that can change depending on emphasis. So you have to pay attention to context. The dative and ablative usually have the same endings so you have to go by context to determine the meaning and how the word is being used.

 

[MPat]

As this is not specifically about the use of Latin in the church, I put it here. I am considering studying Latin, but one issue I have with it that makes it seem very confusing to me is its inflection. As a native English speaker this seems very foreign and difficult to me. I understand how it works, but two things I don’t get are:

1. Why are there so many declensions instead of just having endings by gender and case in common for all words? For example, why not just have one declension for all feminine words that covers their endings for each case and plural, one for masculine and one for neuter?
2. How do you deal with the tendency of Latin inflection to have the same endings for different cases within a declension, and sometimes the same ending for separate declensions? It seems like it would make it very confusing. For example, if there is a Latin word ending in -us in the first declension vocative case, and the same ending in the dative case, and the same ending in the nominative case of the second declension, if you see the word in a sentence, how do you know what case it’s supposed to be?

I find inflected languages interesting and am considering learning another instead of Latin, such as German or Polish, as to me inflection seems to lend a lot more order and organization, but as I said it also seems much more difficult and confusing than non-inflected grammars like English or French, often needlessly complicated. Thank you for your help. God bless.

I guess that, in a sense, your second question answers the first. It is likely that, when there are many different declensions, the words end up differing more one from another. Then, while it is harder to learn the language, it is easier to avoid misunderstanding what is being said.

Also, if the use of the same form of word in two cases leads to problems, they can be corrected. For example, in Russian the accusative case (“Винительный падеж”) has two different questions: “Кого? Что?”. The first one is meant for “alive” things and coincides with Genitive (“Родительный падеж”, “Кого? Чего?”), while the second one is used for “inanimate” things and coincides with Nominative (“Именительный падеж”, “Кто? Что?”). Why? Well, there was a time when this case completely coincided with Nominative. But that lead to problems when one had to write something like “John defeated Peter.”. That would have been written “Иван победил Петр.”. That was ambiguous (who won?). Thus it was changed and now the same thing is written as “Иван победил Петра.” (that example is taken from slovarfilologa.ru/72/).

 

[Tarpeian_Rock]

This discussion is so far over my head, all I can add is that time-honored poem that I used to write on my Latin notebook each year of high school:

Latin is a dead language,
as dead as dead can be.
It killed the ancient Romams,
and now it’s killing me.

 

[ProVobis]

I find inflected languages interesting and am considering learning another instead of Latin, such as German or Polish, as to me inflection seems to lend a lot more order and organization, but as I said it also seems much more difficult and confusing than non-inflected grammars like English or French, often needlessly complicated. Thank you for your help. God bless.

My native language is Polish and because I learned language the “inflected” way Latin was probably easier to learn. In fact I find that Latin translates much better into the Polish than into English even though there are fewer cognates in the Polish. But then Polish is a descendant of Slovanic, another Christianized language.

Latin, though, as any other language, can be as difficult or easy as you want it to be. There are many nuances which are unique to a particular language, so probably the more languages you study, the more you’ll see a pattern of developing cultures as well.

One of the better books I’ve read is Latin Alive: The Survival of Latin in English and the Romance Languages by Solodow. I highly recommend it.

 

[alcuin18]

Thank you all very much for your comments. It is particularly intriguing to me the similarities between Latin and the Slavic languages, both of which are highly inflected. As I said in my original post I’m also considering learning a Slavic language instead (Polish probably being the easiest for me as an English-speaker because it uses the Latin alphabet) so I greatly appreciate your comments on those languages.

I think my difficulties arise primarily because I only know English, which is quite different grammatically from Latin and other inflected languages. Sad that I didn’t know Old English, then it would be much easier! But, I can certainly see the benefits of an inflected language; it seems to simplify and organize the use of the language, particularly in speech, where one’s idea seems to be easier to communicate clearly and precisely, rather than in English where we often have to phrase things a certain way or even repeat ourselves to be clear.

 

[Petergee]

Thank you all very much for your comments. It is particularly intriguing to me the similarities between Latin and the Slavic languages, both of which are highly inflected.

Actually ALL of the Indo-European family of languages (including French) are highly inflected. It is English which is the odd one out, having lost most (but not all) of its inflections.

The grammar and vocabulary of classical Latin is actually much simpler and more logical than those of English. and Church Latin is even simpler.