|
|
Latin is easy?
<<,This statement reveals your intelligence >>
This statement reveals (and offends) your prejudices (fore-assumed ideas) paradigm problems, mac?
ferfi Wed Jan 28, 2009 8:43 pm GMT
More Germans can speak fluently Latin than Italians, thats a fact This is stupid I'm Italian and Latin is not difficult if you are intelligent and love languages __________________ Did you learn Latin? Can you read Caesar´s de bello gallico or do you even speak Latin? How can you say that Latin is not difficult to learn for an Italian?
Did you learn Latin? Can you read Caesar´s de bello gallico or do you even speak Latin? How can you say that Latin is not difficult to learn for an Italian?
I learnt German, Hungarian, Russian, English, Portuguese, Latin is not more difficult than these languages. By the way I teach Latin and ancient Greek at school :-)
<,I learnt German, Hungarian, Russian, English, Portuguese, Latin is not more difficult than these languages. By the way I teach Latin and ancient Greek at school :-) >>
See, that's the difference--you are linguistically inclined, and you have already become familiar with a few case-having languages, like German and Russian. But for the average Joe Italian in Italy it is a different story. Don't be so Socratic.
<<case-having languages>>
"case-possessing" sounds better. I was in a rush
like German and Russian.
German cases are a breeze compared to the Russian ones. In additin Romance verbal morphology is much more complex than the German one: every serious linguist can confirm this. So the Germans don't have a flair for foreign languages, not to mention Latin.
Remembering my studies, as Italian I can say to have a vantage because Italian and Latin words are generaly the same, but grammar is completly different. I think that learning Latin is easier for a Sardinian guy.
but grammar is completly different
This is not correct. Latin verbal system and the romance one is pretty similar. Of course, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese have lost some tenses but they have got some new tenses which did not exist in Latin, like the conditional mood, present and past, many compound tenses and so on. On the other hand, Romance languages have lost Latin passive and other tenses. Case have disappeared in the Latin languages, but they 've got a rich system of articles, for instance French and Italian have definite, indefinite and partive articles and a richer system of prepositions.
<<but grammar is completly different
This is not correct. Latin verbal system and the romance one is pretty similar. Of course, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese have lost some tenses but they have got some new tenses which did not exist in Latin, like the conditional mood, present and past, many compound tenses and so on. On the other hand, Romance languages have lost Latin passive and other tenses. Case have disappeared in the Latin languages, but they 've got a rich system of articles, for instance French and Italian have definite, indefinite and partive articles and a richer system of prepositions>> Grammar is not Verbal Conjugations. Yes, Romance languages have managed to preserve and/or mimmick Latin's verbal conjugations, but that is not enough. Sorry to disappoint your Latin-'wanna-be'-passions. Latin is a verb final (SOV) language [more spec. SIDAV]--this is what is meant by syntax. It also made heavy use of cases (6 in all), and possessed 3 distinct genders: both German and Latin are fusional languages. "verbal system" HAHA
Verbal conjugation is also grammar. Some latin languages have got more endings than German. Morphology is composed of verb conjugation, noun and adjective declention and so on.
I am French and never managed to learn Latin in school properly - in the biginning I thoght it would be easy because of Romance and French being successors of Latin. But this thought was a big obstacle because I was not aware that learning Latin would cost big efforts. When I realized that Latin was completely differen from French it was too late...:-(
Latin is a verb final (SOV) language
Romance languages use the SOV structure too. Germanic tongues do not.
For me, Latin was pretty easy.
I had the best of both worlds when starting Latin, since I natively spoke Italian and Croatian - so in one hand, I had the vantage of lexical similarity (thanks to Italian) and in the other hand, the vantage of structural similarity (thanks to Croatian, which is more inflected when compared to Italian, has cases, etc). I think that the main difficulty with Latin is syntax (for example, remember those lengthy sentences from Cicero where it took you a while to decipher which sentence is the main one and how are the others related to it?) and not morphology. @ Guest: Romance languages usually use SVO structure, not SOV as Latin, consider these: Latin: (Ego) puellam video. Italian: (Io) vedo una ragazza. French: Je vois une fille. |