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moonraven · Joined: 24 Mar 2004 Posts: 3094

SS:

Maybe this time you can try understanding MY point?

My original comment indicated that Latin had not been all THAT useful. Note the qualifier--in caps this time and in the original post.

By that I was saying that its usefullness was limited--and in comparison to French, Spanish (the language in which I do most of my writing and teaching), Italian, Portugese, German and English (my first language)--it has been. For ME. If you--who has never studied the language--believe that it is more useful than others, you are welcome to your opinion.

thelmadatter · Posted: Thu Dec 16, 2004 6:16 pm Post subject: language family

whoa.... none of the Germanic languages (including English) are "derived" from Latin. The Latin and Germanic families do have a common ancester "Indo-European"(western Indo-European at that) but they are cousins. Linguistic families are based on history (however, the Holy Roman Empire was not Roman but in fact Germanic) and grammatical similarity... vocabulary has nothing to do with it. In fact, over 60% of English vocabulary is borrowed from other languages (mostly Latin and Greek).

English is no more derived from Latin as it is from Sanskrit (another ancient Indo-European language).

Latin may not be useful for communicative purposes any longer (although it was for a LONG time even after the fall of Rome) but its study can be useful for things like understanding the English system of using Latin and Greek roots to create new words. There are two inroads grammatically that Latin made into English 1) plural "s" and 2) use of infinitive in place of or along with a gerund ("I like to fish." and "I like fishing.") Both if these are the result of huge French influence and academic attempts up to about Shakespeare's time to "improve the language." At that time, English was a little backwater nation - considered completely uncultured even by the English themselves.

moonraven · Joined: 24 Mar 2004 Posts: 3094

Thelma, calm down! No more fancy footwork to cover up your lack of reading skills, please.

Nobody said that German was "derived" from Latin. However, the sentence structure in written German was taken from Latin during the period of the Holy Roman Empire, when Latin was the language of writing.

ShapeSphere · Joined: 16 Oct 2004 Posts: 386

moonraven · Joined: 24 Mar 2004 Posts: 3094

SS:

Missed the point again, didya. Could only respond with insults and disingenous comments about how I disdain education, huh.

I have never poo-pooed education, having been a professional educator since 1968, so turn your insulting propaganda elsewhere.

I probably have found and still find more uses for Latin than 99.9% of the folks on this forum--as my previous posts indicate--but I still don't find it all THAT useful. Nor do I find Gaelic all THAT useful--probably you didn't take me on about that because you didn't know I was referring to the Irish language.

With my morning coffee and picadita I was reading an interesting article in Letras Libres about the redemption of the poet Ezra Pound--now there was a guy with an affinity for languages: Greek, Latin, Chinese, and a host of others. He was an extraordinarily skilled translator--and he wrote poems in many languages. He found them to be very useful when he had to spend 16 years locked up in a dementia facility. Did some of his best writing there. (It was that or a firing squad--which would you choose?)

ShapeSphere · Joined: 16 Oct 2004 Posts: 386

Moonraven,

So glad you have remained civilised and rational in this debate.

moonraven · Joined: 24 Mar 2004 Posts: 3094

SS: I didn't notice that you had any views. And as for this "conversation", it is over.

ShapeSphere · Joined: 16 Oct 2004 Posts: 386

I agree with the second part. Best to agree to disagree.