Sounds a little suss. All the propaganda I see about Latin mentions its free word order.
Comment on Japan anon complains about Google
lvxferre@mander.xyz 7 months agoYandex reverse image search often works considerably better than Google’s.
And their translator too. I use it all the time for Latin. Google Translate was made to service Romance and Germanic languages in mind, so it sucks at assigning the right case to Latin, and the word order is often a mess. Yandex was however made with Russian in mind, that is syntactically closer to Latin in those two aspects.
lars@lemmy.sdf.org 7 months ago
lvxferre@mander.xyz 7 months ago
Word order in Latin is only syntactically free. As in, if you change the word order, you aren’t changing who did what. However, you’re still changing the topic (whatever we were talking about) and comment (the new info that I’m adding in).
I’ll give you an example:
- Puer puellam amat - boy loves girl; but more like “the boy loves a girl”.
- Puellam puer amat - boy loves girl; but more like “a boy loves the girl”.
- Amat puer puellam - boy loves girl; but more like “speaking on love, the boy loves a girl” (hard to convey in English).
Note how I used articles to convey roughly the same meaning in English. That’s because what Latin is doing with the word order is not too unlike what English does with articles. Sure, you can use “the boy”, “a boy”, or simply “boy”, it won’t change the basic meaning, but it’s still not “random”.
suction@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Oh you too are versed in the language of Romance?
lvxferre@mander.xyz 7 months ago
Yes! Video related, that’s me!
Serious now. It’s just that I don’t recall which Latin descendants Google support, and I’m not going to check it.
suction@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I had 6 years of Latin in school and remember less than 1% of it. Talk about a waste of time. Bada bing bada boom shoulda learned Italian rather.
lvxferre@mander.xyz 7 months ago
Sure. I’m not saying that Latin is useful for most people. It isn’t; I don’t expect most people to fuck around with Plautus, Cicero, Catullus etc. I’m saying that Yandex Translate is useful for me because of decent support for Latin, while Google offers better support for a handful of Latin descendants aka Romance languages (like Italian).
And it’s mostly due to a coincidence - because the platform was made by Russian speakers and Russian happens to still keep a similar case system as Latin does.
(…anche parlo italiano, ma davvero per italiano non uso nessuno - se non so qualcosa uso dizionari. Dà meno lavoro.)