Re: Latin a loglang? (was Re: Unambiguous languages (was: EU allumettes))

Philippe Caquant said:
> I doubt that Latin can be teached as a modern
> language, or rather, the problem is: the texts we
> studied were literary texts, not everyday spoken
> Latin, of course. So, reading Cicero as if it were a
> today article in the Sun seems a little bit difficult
> (especially without the photographs). If the Romans
> had left us newspapers, it would probably be much
> easier to read them than pieces of academic eloquence.
>
> Latin literary sentences usually look as if a horse
> had kicked into them and scattered the words all over.
> You have to lead a police investigation to gather
> clues and try to put the words back together. I bet
> this was not the case when a Roman told his wife,
> well, you again forgot to tell the slave to wash my
> toga, guess you were gossiping with the senator's
> wife, huh ?

People should start with Medieval Latin, for which there is many orders of
magnitude more corpus material to work with (only some of which is
over-eruditely opaquified) than for the classical or ancient spoken
language. Once they can read most forms of ML fluently, they can expand
their knowledge to deal with Cicero's syntactic extension of his manhood,
if that's what they want to read. (Me, I'm happy to stick with Cusanus and
Hildegard.)


-- Mark