Some Reflections on Latin

The first thing I did upon my return to Portland was to meet my friend Leeor, to chat and to debrief him from his 7-month trip to Germany and Europe. He studied German extensively and is now proficient, if not fluent in the language. We went to a park, sat on some swings that were slightly too small for us, began talking about language.

I was particularly struck by his description of German grammar. It is highly regular, with few exceptions to its rules. However, the rules themselves are a disordered disaster. Despite its extensive inflections, German has rigid and highly complicated word order. The rules governing this feature also don't appear to have a great deal of logic to them. An already messy verbal system is convoluted futher by the word order rules. For example, the auxiliary verbs used to form compound tenses can be scattered around a sentence depending on the other words in the sentence.

At the same time, I was comparing the German linguistic wreckage to the experience of my amateur attempt to learn Latin. Latin has this strange reputation of being an insurmountably difficult language, but I find it to be incredibly logical and orderly. It is certainly no more complicated than German. The only real work in learning Latin is memorizing all of the stupid declensions and conjugations, but pure memorization is easy if time-consuming. For all its morphological complexity, Latin has surprisingly few rules that seem as truly arbitrary as German. To be honest, I find the freedom of Latin and all those inflections to be very pleasant. It makes each sentence like a little logic puzzle, which depending on the order of things, can give so many interesting shades of meaning with such economy of words.