Re: Latin in the future?

Jonathan L Cunningham <spam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I asked him last night (my computational linguist friend), and slightly
to my surprise my first reaction was correct. Inflected languages *are*
easier to analyse, because the agreement(s) make it easier to
disambiguate which words go together. (English mostly relies on position
of the words in the sentece, which is less powerful.)

Especially because (with stress to disambiguate) we can mix word order
quite a lot. Also, buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.

He also commented that English was (currently) one of the least
inflected languages, as a result of a "collision" between two languages
some time ago, and that Korean is even less inflected than English.

The hell it is. Unless he calls what it has agglutination, which would
be reasonable but not necessarily useful in this context. Korean has a
bazillion verb endings for various levels of formality, conjunctive
purposes, and other reasons, and there's also a broad variety of noun
endings for case markers and prepositional purposes.

Possibly he meant Mandarin Chinese or something -- that's less inflected
than English.

Inflections come and go, as languages evolve. French and a couple of
other languages (I forget which) seem to be in the process of gaining
new inflections, as some clitics are becoming more attached to word as
inflections at the front of words.

Watching French do this is great.

In response to a question, he then said that many languages inflect at
the front of the word (unlike Latin which inflects at the end), Welsh
being one example, and that it is so common - and important - in many
African languages that it is *very* hard to decide how to organise a
dictionary! :-)

This is what French is starting to do.

Zeborah
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