To think in Latin

[ChoraulaSilens]

Interesting, my experience is the opposite. I’ve been at it for over ten years now and I still don’t understand Russian fluently. On the other hand I noticed Latin came much easier to me after I started Russian. It was much easier for me to "think" in declensions, because that’s what Russian forces you to do all the time and you get a lot more exposure to this system than from Latin alone.

I think this is a great point, I tend to agree with it, but what bothers me is that I don’t know of any language that has evolved from prepositions to declensions. It’s always the other way around (correct me if I’m wrong).

The real simplification would be to simply juxtapose the possessed thing and the possessor, like in modern Arabic (trunk - the tree) and many other languages.

Currently, my level of Russian isn't fluent although, admittedly, I left it dormant for long periods. I'm at the stage where my best bet would be to watch films. One good thing about Russian I found is you can easily watch good films, on yandex with Russian audio. I have one on DVD called Noch Nastupayet (also with Spanish audio). This was about the tooth fairy that haunted those who see her face. The dialogue was all pretty basic vocabulary.
Highly recommended is Karnaval Dush (Carnival Of Souls) fully available in Russian on YouTube. A 1962 psych thriller that has a cult following.
Beyond that, living in the country will polish your Russian. Not that it's the same as in the 1990s.

 

[Godmy]

Just an addition to prepositions and cases from the point of view of linguistics and evolution:

The unstable and unfortunate state is when an originally case-built system ceases to be fully understandable and sufficient enough on its own for its native speakers and the prepositions (re)appear (but this time with cases). Case is a marker of meaning, the preposition is a marker of a meaning too. In an ideal world, you add just one marker that carries the information about the noun for example). When you have to duplicate the markers because the original marker becomes too polysemantic (one case ending having 20 loosely related meanings) and thus useless on its own, it's unfortunate (redundant, unstable). Then it's just a step away from getting rid of the case in favour of the semantically more distinct prepositional [caseless] phrase...

Having said that, my own language has resisted this instability & evolutionary shift for at least the last 2000 years. Proto Slavic (probably) and modern Czech use heavily both prepositions and cases (some cases at some instances are used on its own, some cases like locative, never) together and seems to have been doing that consistently for millennia even though that's semantically "redundant"...

 

[Godmy]

From the point of Czech, I can tell you that the case in a prepositional phrase has zero meaning for me, I just know it needs to be there lest it sounds weird. But the preposition is what actually gives the noun [phrase] the additional meaning, some semantic specification. The case changes just into a historical appendix there.

 

[Pacifica]

Yeah, with many/most prepositions, the preposition by itself is enough to communicate the meaning and whatever case comes after it is only there for historical reasons, as you say. An exception to that is when a preposition can take different cases to convey different meanings; e.g. in horto vs. in hortum. There the preposition and the case both contribute to the message. Do you have any of those in Czech?

 

[Godmy]

e.g. in horto vs. in hortum. There the preposition and the case both contribute to the message. Do you have any of those in Czech?

Yes, a few. Incidentally, we have a direct counterpart of this "in" thing. One goes with genitive (that one is a counterpart of the Latin in+ablative, the protoslavic ablative was merged with genitive [then lost], the other with accusative with the same meaning. And we have a counterpart of "sub+acc" or "sub+abl" as well (one goes with accusative, the other one with instrumental).

That is a good catch! It invalidates partially my previous statement that the case carries zero meaning in a prepositional phrase. It does help to determine the two meanings of a few prepositions actually. But the thing is that the context and the verb used is so different in each example (one is directional, another one is stative; e.g. once you use the verb " to go", another time "to be") that even if we used nominative in both cases (however wrong it sounds), the meaning would on 90+% be clear enough (and it is, when foreigners do that...). But a good catch!

 

[Godmy]

the protoslavic ablative was merged with genitive [then lost]

... actually, we lost the genitive. The ProtoIndoEuropean genitive mostly ending on "s" (or some kind of "os") (like in Lithuanian, Greek/Latin... Sanskrit(??)) was lost and we started to use ablative in its stead. Our current genitive is a repurposed ablative.

 

[Pacifica]

When you think about it, it's surprising how often grammar can be disregarded to a large extent with no detriment to clarity. "Me go store" is just as clear as "I'm going to the store".

 

[Godmy]

Btw. if you want a living IndoEuropean language that not only conserved most of the original grammar (like the Slavic languages) but even conserved most of the old IndoEuropean case endings and phonetics, look no further than Lithuanian.

The declension of "wolf" - vilkas in Lithuanian:

- notice the "s" nom.sg. (Latin second, third & fourth declension)
- "i" nom.pl. (Latin second second, partially historically the first declension: fēminai, fifth declension somewhat)
- "o" genitive <- probably repurposed ablative (latin "ō" in the second decelension), just like it happened in the Slavics.
- "i" dative (historical Latin second declension servoi, historical 1st decl. fēminai, third declension, fourth decl., fifth declension... all declensions)
- dat. pl ending with "s"
- acc. sg. having some nasalized(?) historical remnant of some "m/n" (most Latin declensions)
- acc. pl. back vowel (such as u/o) +s (also in most Latin declensions)
- voc sg.

Most Lithunian personal names sound like Roman names If you hear the language, the accent reminds you heavily of Russian (no wonder there), but it's a very different animal.

Lithuanians were pagans up *almost until 15th* century! The attempts for Christianization ended bloodily mostly.

Edit: *correction, they were converted about 100 earlier. (the end of the 14th century)

 

[Godmy]

When you think about it, it's surprising how often grammar can be disregarded to a large extent with no detriment to clarity. "Me go store" is just as clear as "I'm going to the store".

Yes, exactly! And that's why semantics is a king!

 

[Avunculus H]

... actually, we lost the genitive. The ProtoIndoEuropean genitive mostly ending on "s" (or some kind of "os") (like in Lithuanian, Greek/Latin... Sanskrit(??)) was lost and we started to use ablative in its stead. Our current genitive is a repurposed ablative.

This is true for the old o-stems, not for the other stems. Female -y, for example, goes back to PIE *-a:s (-eH2s) in a complicated history. I don't know whether Czech has male genitives in -u; these go back to the old u-stem genitive PIE *-e/ows; the i-stem genitive in -i goes back to PIE genitive *-eys. Actually, only the o-stems even had a separate ablative in PIE anyway; with all the other stems, it was identical to the genitive in the singular and the dative in the plural.

 

[Avunculus H]

Btw. if you want a living IndoEuropean language that not only conserved most of the original grammar (like the Slavic languages)

Baltic simplified the IE verbal system quite a lot, even more than Slavic did; it's only very archaic in the noun declensions.

 

[Godmy]

Baltic simplified the IE verbal system quite a lot, even more than Slavic did; it's only very archaic in the noun declensions.

I have to confess I haven't paid a lot of attention to verbs there...

Thanks for the additions on the ablative! Back then, when I was interested about these things, it was mostly the main masculine -o stem declension that caught my attention, but it's true that for example the Czech main feminine -a declension is often much more interesting with a distinct nominative, genitive and accusative singular! (in fact the only syncretism there being with dative and locative singular).

 

[interprete]

When you think about it, it's surprising how often grammar can be disregarded to a large extent with no detriment to clarity. "Me go store" is just as clear as "I'm going to the store".

I think that's how many Asian languages would say it.

 

[Clemens]

I think that's how many Asian languages would say it.

It's how (Classical) Chinese would express it, but there would be additional particles might establish mood, aspect, how to take the sentence, etc. Modern standard Chinese might use more morphemes than the Classical wording.

 

[Iáson]

The real simplification would be to simply juxtapose the possessed thing and the possessor, like in modern Arabic (trunk - the tree) and many other languages.

When you think about it, it's surprising how often grammar can be disregarded to a large extent with no detriment to clarity. "Me go store" is just as clear as "I'm going to the store".

I think that's how many Asian languages would say it.

I assume you're thinking of Chinese 我去商店。But it's not like this sentence has no grammar at all, or disregards grammar; you couldn't say 我商店去, or 商店去我, for example (at least on my relatively limited knowledge of Chinese). One has just replaced one way of expressing grammatical structure with another, equally rule-bound.

Equally, I would like to point out that juxtaposition might ʻsimplifyʻ grammar in the sense of not expressing (and thus deleting) structural information, but this doesn't necessarily make it easier to understand (or learn a language)—quite the contrary in fact. Compounding is a good example. In a compound, the amount of grammatical information provided is minimal, but this does not make "Rind-fleisch-etikettierungs-überwachungs-aufgaben-übertragungs-gesetz" easier to understand than "Gesetz zur Übertragung der Aufgaben für die Überwachung der Rinderkennzeichnung und Rindfleischetikettierung".

Surpassing German is another ‘Asian’ language, Sanskrit, where compounding is an alternative to using case markers, but is generally a marker of more sophisticated (and beautiful but challenging) literature. Here is an example from the हर्षचरित: कुलिश-शिखर-खर-नखर-प्रचय-प्रचण्ड-चपेटा-पाटित-मत्त-मातङ्ग-कुम्भ-स्थल-गलन्-मद-च्छटा-च्छुरित-चारु-केसर-भार-भासुर-मुखे केसरिणि, that is, "in the axe-point-sharp-claw-collection-vehement-blow-cleft-rutting-elephant-[frontal-globe]-place-dripping-ichor-mass-smeared-pleasing-hair-burden-terrible-faced lion", or as my Sanskrit teacher translated this particular example, "in the lion: his face horrifically shining with a mass of beautiful hair inlaid with streaks of ichor dripping from the the rutting elephant’s globes that he had split open with a violent blow of his claws sharp like the blade of an axe.” (I give you this example because I happen to have it to hand—even so it took me a while to write the literal translation of the compound—but I remember that when we read parts of the हर्षचरित it was largely made up of compounds of a similar length).

 

[Clemens]

I think the lack of inflections in Chinese makes it harder, not easier. Is this word a noun, a verb, or an adjective? It can be all three, but which on in this sentence? There's also a lot that can be left unmarked compared to other languages.

 

[interprete]

I assume you're thinking of Chinese 我去商店。But it's not like this sentence has no grammar at all, or disregards grammar; you couldn't say 我商店去, or 商店去我, for example (at least on my relatively limited knowledge of Chinese). One has just replaced one way of expressing grammatical structure with another, equally rule-bound.

The same structure can be found in Vietnamese and in Thai, where as far as I know you just say "me go X". I agree with you on the fact that the information is simply coded positionally instead of using endings, but to my mind, "me go store" is like degree 0 of grammar where there is none of it, as opposed to having to add some extra words to indicate a past or future tense, for example, where grammar becomes necessary.

I think the lack of inflections in Chinese makes it harder, not easier. Is this word a noun, a verb, or an adjective? It can be all three, but which on in this sentence? There's also a lot that can be left unmarked compared to other languages.

Interesting, I do think it makes it harder, but not for the reason you mention. To me it’s harder because syntax patterns become much more intuitive and the rules are much harder to pin down (I think Chinese grammar texbooks are testament to that difficulty), but whether a word is a verb, a noun or an adjective is usually pretty clearly determined by its position within the sentence, isn’t it?

 

[Clemens]

Interesting, I do think it makes it harder, but not for the reason you mention. To me it’s harder because syntax patterns become much more intuitive and the rules are much harder to pin down (I think Chinese grammar texbooks are testament to that difficulty), but whether a word is a verb, a noun or an adjective is usually pretty clearly determined by its position within the sentence, isn’t it?

Well, at least I can find it challenging. Maybe it's my need to resolve the ambiguity that's making it seem difficult; a native speaker might just go with it without needing to match it to my English-brain categories.