The Last Post Game!!!!

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

Why not learn contemporary Greek?

Last _{I forgot you're German...} Post

[Griffin NoName]

Learn? What? Learn something new? No, I know enough already.

Last Post

[Swatopluk]

Does contemporary Greek still count as a language?

Last _{I already have my doubts about Italian} Post

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

Hmm, so according to you all romance languages are just crude dialects from latin?

Last _{and all slavic from old church slavonic?} Post

[Swatopluk]

No, church slavonic is just old Bulgarian.

And you are right about the 'crude' since those languages are derived to a large degree from vulgar Latin* not the 'classic' Latin we learn at school.
It's just a personal impression but both Italian and Greek seem to have degenerated (in a purely technical sense) most in comparision to the 'classic', while the others just got strong influences from Latin that got incorporated into the basic framework of the existing languages. A general sign for this decay (in case of Latin and Greek) is loss of grammatical complexity accompanied by a humungous growth of vocabulary. Early medieval Latin was a pure disgrace becoming unreadable in the more extreme cases (Merovingian Latin wears the crown there). Greek got the vocabulary growth in Byzantine times but otherwise kept up the standards for a long time. The decay of complexity set in (afaict) mainly after the fall of Constantinople in the centuries of occupation.
Interestingly it seems that languages that get isolated (often literally because they are spoken on islands) tend to change far slower and keep the higher degree of formal complexity (cf. Icelandic and Faroese).
Again, loss of complexity does not necessarily mean that the language loses 'quality' but it is an option.

As an aside, I have no idea why it is just classical Greek, German and Icelandic (with the related Faroese) that are able to do real compounding in Europe. Latin cannot which has always been a handicap. Plus Latin lacks the article, in particular the neutral one, so certain things cannot be expressed directly at all. Medieval theologians and scholars had to introduce deliberate changes to the language to cope with that (e.g. they had to invent the noun for 'to be' or 'being' resp.). Occam's razor (entia non sunt mupltiplicanda sine necessitate/praeter necessitatem) would not have been understood at Caesar's and Cicero's time while the Greeks built a whole philosophy on this grammatical peculiarity that their language contained in the starter kit.


*of course this does not apply to Greek, which (d)evolved independently.

---

The jab at modern Greek and Italian in my previous post should be taken with a grain of salt of course.

Last _{whom to imsult next?} Post

[Griffin NoName]

Sanskrit?

Last Post

[Swatopluk]

I do not know whether Sanskrit was ever a true spoken language (as in: spoke by commoners in the street not just by priests in the temple).

Last _{it's treated like a pure construct not a living thing} Post

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

Last _{the hypothesis of a pure language hasn't been confirmed yet} Post

[Swatopluk]

All language is impure.

Last _halitosis Post

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

Last _{tell that to C programmers} Post

[Swatopluk]

They will all get converted to LISP one day and there will be howling and gnashing of brackets

Last Post

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

If a cult must be erected it has to be xslt.

Last _{and lo, all compatible browsers transformed xml into beautifully formatted html} Post

[Swatopluk]

cults don't get erected, only their poles and certain members

Last Post

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

Last _popes? Post

[Swatopluk]

No, those just get elevated.

Last _{and occasionally beatified} Post