Conference thebay::joyoflex

    Re .0:
    
    	"Chinese boasts many more native users (around one billion) but
    	 has few second language speakers."
    
    Also, while written Chinese is intelligible to all (literate) native
    users of Chinese, isn't it true that spoken Chinese is divided into
    many mutually unintelligible dialects that are, therefore, on the verge
    of being separate languages?  (I don't know the technical distinction
    between a dialect and a language, but I thought it was based on
    intelligibility.)  If you considered only spoken language and ranked
    all the Chinese dialects separately, I imagine Spanish would jump from
    third to second place.
    
    Earl Wajenberg

    The article quoted in .0 said that it was not counting dialects.
    
    If you count dialects, then the number of native speakers of Mandarin
    is still close to the one-billion mark, and then the number of
    non-native speakers becomes non-negligible.
    
    Also if you count dialects, then the number of languages on the verge
    of extinction grows much larger.
    
    Also if you count dialects, then every Chinese dialect lacks writing!
    
    But anyway, even not counting dialects, I'm not so sure what the
    problem is with the gradual recovery from a situation which, even
    to an agnostic, suggests that maybe Babel's tower really once fell.
    Who mourns the loss of Latin?  Who loses sleep over the disappearance
    of other ancient languages?  Even the average participant in this
    conference would have trouble communicating with Chaucer.
    
    -- Norman Diamond

    Re .2
    
    Counting dialects, every Chinese dialect does *not* lack writing.  They
    are all written in the same characters - a given pictograph has the
    same meaning but is pronounced differently in the various dialects. 
    This is a product of using pictographs, which are not phonetically
    based but rather represent visual or mental images.  Western languages
    do something of the same thing with international road signs - for
    example, a circular red sign with a horizontal white bar means "do not
    enter" to English speakers but "Eintritt verboten" to Germans.
    
    I once read that there were 237 dialects of Chinese.
    
    And I mourn the loss of Latin.

    	Loss of a language with significant literature is a loss to the
    whole human race. Loss of any language may be a loss in understanding
    how the human brain does or might work.

    Count me in as a mourner (Sumerian, Pelagasian, Etruscan,
    Luvian, Livian, Elamite, Ancient Egyptian, to name only a few).
    
    It may be natural and inevitable, but I don't have to like it.
    
    		-John Bishop

    Phew, I'm not alone - though I have to admit to being slightly
    relieved at not having to teach my son Latin (because he's been
    accepted by one of the few state-run schools in England not run
    by vandals and philistines). But there's still my daughter.
    
    And good point (.4); hear hear. (Or should that be `there there'?)
    
    b

    .6
    
    It is one of the great philosophical sadnesses of my life as a parent
    that my son never learned Latin.  My daughter studied it for two years;
    and the benefit to her understanding of, and ability with, English has
    been immeasurable.  She remembers few specifics of the Latin, but its
    influence was mighty.

    My study of French in high school helped my understanding of English,
    even though I've forgotten most of what little French I learned.
    
    Now in fact, doesn't some portion of English remain from something that
    was spoken by some aborigines before Rome invaded?  Might a student's
    understanding of English also be helped by studying some of those
    languages, instead of Latin rules like not ending a sentence with a
    preposition or noun or anything other than a verb :-0.5) ?
    
    -- Norman Diamond

    re .8
    
    > doesn't some portion of English remain from something that
    > was spoken by some aborigines before Rome invaded?
    
    Descendants thereof, certainly.  Germany was home to Germanic tribes;
    and English is structurally a Germanic language.  Italy was home to the
    Etruscans, and there are remains of Etruscan that filter through Latin
    to enter English; similarly with Gaul and Britain and the Celts, but
    with less Latin interference than in the case of Etruscan.
    
    I contend that studying *any* language other than one's own is
    beneficial because it offers the opportunity to break through the
    barriers of provinciality imposed by any one given language's rules and
    formations.
    
    > Latin rules like not ending a sentence with ... anything other than a
    > verb
    
    As for studying Latin rules like this, well, English is not a romance
    language despite its preponderance of Latin-derived words.  In Latin,
    it's not a "rule" that prepositions don't go at the ends of sentences,
    it's a syntactic oxymoron to put them there given the highly inflected
    and essentially nonpositional nature of the language; the only way to
    attach a preposition to its object is to require that it precede its
    object, albeit sometimes with an interpolated modifier.  For example,
    consider this English sentence:
    
    	I have a box to put eggs for sale in.
    	(I have a box into which to put eggs for sale.)
    
    There are three words in English's objective case here: box, eggs, and
    sale.  Box is the direct object of have and also the object of the
    preposition in.  Eggs is the direct object of to put.  Sale is the
    object of the preposition for; together they form an adjectival phrase
    modifying eggs.  Formulating this sentence into colloquial Latin gives
    this (English lined up below the Latin):
    
    Arcam    pro     ova   venalia   inserere     habeo.
    [A] box  for/to  eggs  for sale  to put into  I have.
    
    There's only one preposition, pro, and its object is the verb inserere,
    which functions as a gerund (for putting in) despite its being an
    infinitive.  In gets buried in inserere, and the for that's associated
    with sale gets buried in the adjective venalis which modifies eggs
    (neut. accl. pl. == venalia).  To stretch the point, I could also
    formulate the sentence this way to accommodate the parenthesized
    English above:
    
    Arcam    in    quam   ova   venalia   inserere       habeo.
    [A] box  into  which  eggs  for sale  to put [into]  I have.
    
    But there's still only one preposition; this time it's in, whose object
    is the accusative pronoun quam, referring to the box.  And to stretch
    the point one step further, I could also formulate the sentence this
    rather formal and stilted way:
    
    Arcam    in    quam   ova   inserere  ut       ea    vendam        habeo.
    [A] box  into  which  eggs  to put    so that  them  I might sell  I have.
    
    And so on.  Still there's only one preposition - this time, for gets
    transmogrified by use of the adverb ut, which introduces a subjunctive
    verb.
    
    As for the interpolated modifier I mentioned, there is a form,
    widespread in Latin, called hyperbaton; it consists in placing the
    modifier before the preposition; thus, the English phrase "at this
    time" is rendered in latin "hac in hora," which translates positionally
    as "this in hour."
    
    The bit about not ending sentences with *anything* except a verb is
    simply a usage convention, and in fact it had largely broken down by
    the early Middle Ages.  Examine Church Latin documents, and you will
    find sentences ended with nouns and other nonverb parts of speech.  But
    not prepositions.  :-)
    
    In fine, the net result is that you simply cannot map Latin onto English
    one-for-one, and formulating a Latin linguistic imperative into a rule
    for English is asinine, to say the least.