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November 19, 2003
Speaking of Latin
There is no positional grammar. English has positional grammar; that is, word order changes meaning. For instance "The dog bit the cat" is a different sentence than "the cat bit the dog". In Latin, there is a preferred word order, (Nouns first, Verbs last) but it does not matter grammatically where words fall. The way a reader can tell who bites whom is to look at the way the words end. Monty Python's Life of Brian does a wonderful job of explaining this...
Well, that's not so odd, you say. Kind of Freeing, in its own way. Trythisnopunctuationandnospacesbetweenwords (Try this no punctuation and no spaces between words). The Romans didn't use those either. Hell, the ancient Hebrews didn't bother with putting vowels in their words (which I imagine makes "literal interpretations" of the old testament to be rather unreliable.)
So, try to imagine a whole page filled with letters. No periods. No spaces. No commas. No way of telling the sentences, paragraphs, or even words apart. And those guys still managed to write out a comprehensive system of laws...
So here is to that unsung hero who first looked at a line of text and thought to himself "this would be a lot easier to read if I could tell the words apart!"
(Further reading: here)
Posted by Andrew at November 19, 2003 10:52 AM
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