Latin is the most powerful natural language I know.
The key phrase is "I know". Latin is not the only one.
As much as you may like this feature, being inflected marks marks Latin as a primitive language, not a sophisticated one. The reason is that it is easy for a language to lose grammatical rules, but very hard to gain them. By this measure French is more modern than Latin because it is no longer inflected, and English is more modern than French because it has lost gender.
In a real sense, Chinese is the direction that all languages are heading. In English we still conjugate differently depending on how many, past/present/future, and so on. These are all vestiges of an inflected past. Chinese doesn't do that.
> being inflected marks marks Latin as a primitive language, not a sophisticated one.
This doesn't sound right to me. Primitive and sophisticated isn't really how modern linguistics understands languages (for like at least like half or a full century). There's no straight path of progress for all languages. Note how it can also be reversed by a proponent (or native speaker) of an inflected language: English is so crude and primitive with its robotic Tarzan-like chaining of bare words, as opposed to the sophisticated, properly inflected forms that perfectly blend into the sentence according to their roles. (Which by the way would also be bogus.)
> The reason is that it is easy for a language to lose grammatical rules, but very hard to gain them.
Word order is also "grammatical rules", as it includes syntax too, not just morphology. English has tons of grammatical rules despite having very simple morphology.
Also, in Hungarian many suffixes were originally postpositions but became fused with the words and took on vowel harmony. E.g. "utu rea" (road + onto) from the first surviving written Hungarian text became útra in modern Hungarian, with the -ra/-re suffix meaning "onto".
Romance languages have gained inflections that Latin didn't have (from the above link: the future tense conjugations are an innovation in the Romance languages that didn't exist in Latin).
Funnily enough given your example, Chinese languages have gained morphology too: Mandarin has the aspect-marking suffix 了, whereas Classical Chinese didn't.
We can't reconstruct the history of language any further back than Proto-Indo-European, so there's no way to know whether it developed from some less-inflected language.
Things moving in one direction wouldn’t preclude the existence of cycles.
For example: a language has noun cases -> phonological changes cause the endings to merge together, requiring prepositions to disambiguate -> prepositions become more tightly bound to the words they modify and are eventually reanalyzed as case markings. Now we’re back with cases even if languages can only take each step in the given direction.
> Incidentally Chinese did not evolve from Proto-Indo-European.
You’re right, but I meant to imply that PIE is the oldest language whose grammar we know a lot about, not that it’s the ancestor of every modern language.
Mind blowing paper: Chang, T. T.(1988). Indo-European vocabulary in Old Chinese: A new thesis on the emergence of Chinese language and civilization in the Late Neolithic Age. In Sino-Platonic Papers eds Mair, V. http://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp007_old_chinese.pdf
I'm don't know enough about Indo-European reconstructions to make my own opinions on what's exposed on the this side and the paper is a bit dated but examples are very compelling.
I'm not convinced at all by that paper, he gives only by my count ~180 examples to relate two language families that by themselves have 10s of thousands morphemes. Especially since the reconstructed Indo-European rootwords and Ancient Chinese pronounciations are themselves dubious. I suspect you could probably get correlation of this level with pretty much any two language families taken at random.
> In a real sense, Chinese is the direction that all languages are heading.
In recent history, it seems. We don't know whether the trend will continue, do we? Do we even know why languages used to be less analytic?
The argument you suggested "The reason is that it is easy for a language to lose grammatical rules, but very hard to gain them." would not explain why a lot of languages used to have inflections in the first place?
I don't know about Chinese, but I thought that one argument about languages getting simplified involved lots of 2nd-language speakers. Different rules of evolution would apply to the language of an empire (like new-world Spanish, or Urdu) compared to a closed group.
Primitive means, relating to, denoting, or preserving the character of an early stage in the evolutionary or historical development of something.
Being inflected is a mark of a language that hasn't yet become positional. It is therefore an objective mark of primitiveness in the language.
Sophistication, on the other hand, is in the eye of the beholder. Which is more sophisticated, flowery descriptive speech or very simple speech that communicates complicated ideas? Arguments can be made for or against Jane Austen or Terence Tao as being more sophisticated.
Latin allows one to say little at great length while sounding very smart. Which a classical education teaches us to value. But when we say things simply we can think and express more complicated things. Which is more sophisticated?
Primitive is like prototype, they clearly communicate that it is meant to be improved.
> Being inflected is a mark of a language that hasn't yet become positional. It is therefore an objective mark of primitiveness in the language.
This assumes that positional languages work better or are more efficient, but that is not clear to me.
"flowery descriptive speech" a la Jane Austen communicates complex ideas. It is just that different subject have different concept of what constitute useful complexity.
Both Terry Tao and Jane Austen could have written their works in almost any language with little impediments.
In particular here one of the scientific advantages of English is not its simple morphology but its permissive lexicon, where creating new word for new concept is a common occurrence.
If by historical accident we happened to speak Latin to this day it is likely that the major loss (compared to English) would be puns.
Well I don't agree with the modernist/empiricist worldview that question stems from.
I think some things are qualitative, and other things are quantitative. The Sistine Chapel is beautiful, but my sketches aren't. If I were to design an experiment, I might learn what molecules are moving or how many people agree with me, but that wouldn't change what I know about the elegance of the paintings (or languages).
Latin is the same way. Having spent a fair amount of time in it, I can see its beauty and sophistication.
Modern English is great. I love it, especially the size of the vocabulary. But it's a comparatively clumsy language, and it frequently abuses prepositions. Its over-dependence on word order also makes it easier to construct grammatically ambiguous statements, leading to misunderstandings. I don't struggle with those in Latin. The language is elegant. It doesn't take Cicero to communicate clearly because of the grammar. But in the hands of Cicero it's like fine art.
I think that's a romaniticized view of Latin, probably helped by the fact that real Latin speakers are long dead.
For every Cicero and Virgil, there were a thousand who had said "Fuck I got shitfaced at that whorehouse and I'm fucking sure that bitch took my purse, if mom finds out I'm dead LOL FML," or something like that, except in impeccable classical Latin.
OK, if your aesthetic preference is such that you find languages with complicated noun morphology more beautiful than those with complicated word-order constraints, that's fine.
But if we're just talking about personal taste, there's no real reason to debate it with other people, since it's arbitrary.
> Its over-dependence on word order also makes it easier to construct grammatically ambiguous statements, leading to misunderstandings.
Now this, on the other hand, is an objective, quantifiable statement that regardless of taste is either true or false. Incidentally, I strongly suspect that it is not in fact true, and that you only believe English sentences are more likely to be ambiguous than Latin ones is because you speak and write English better than Latin and so are more intuitively aware of its weirdness.
> if your aesthetic preference is such that you find languages...But if we're just talking about personal taste...it's arbitrary
Again, I don't agree with your worldview. The reason I referred to the Sistine Chapel was to provide an analogy: it doesn't merely fit my preferences better than my sketch. It is objectively better. There is something in the painting that is real. The beauty is real.
But on your view, the beauty is unreal. It's only real if you can measure it. I disagree.
Objectively. I think you're wrong and I suspect you think I'm wrong. And that means there is an objective philosophical truth even though we can't measure it.
ETA: not all truth is immeasurable, of course. There are plenty of measurable truths (for example, how many comments are on this thread, or the boiling point of water at standard pressure). But some truth cannot be measured in a laboratory, and that doesn't make it false or unreal.
Comparing English to Latin is not like comparing the Sistine Chapel with a sketch. It's more like comparing the Sistine Chapel with a modernist painting.
Is the Sistine Chapel objectively more beautiful than Mondrian's Broadway Boogie-Woogie?
That’s still a bit dubious IMO as it implies that Latin is the way it is because it reflects an older, “classical” style.
Which is not true at all (ask any historical linguist) and only appears to be true if you restrict yourself to looking at Western European language.
But in reality, there are ancient analytic/isolating languages (e.g., Classical Chinese), and contemporary highly fusional ones (e.g. Finnish, Navajo).
By the same objective measure by which a statue of Venus is more beautiful than a cube made of concrete (despite of the latter possessing more symmetry). The measure could be: the number of people saying so; the shape of the distribution of color in a brain scan of an observer, etc.
A statue of Venus took creativity and skill to create that a cube of concrete didn’t. There’s no meaningfully similar statement you could make about Latin vs. English.
The key phrase is "I know". Latin is not the only one.
As much as you may like this feature, being inflected marks marks Latin as a primitive language, not a sophisticated one. The reason is that it is easy for a language to lose grammatical rules, but very hard to gain them. By this measure French is more modern than Latin because it is no longer inflected, and English is more modern than French because it has lost gender.
In a real sense, Chinese is the direction that all languages are heading. In English we still conjugate differently depending on how many, past/present/future, and so on. These are all vestiges of an inflected past. Chinese doesn't do that.