Linguistics for Objectivists

[kiaer.ts]

I have added some English, Greek and Latin cognates:

From the web:

The similarities between Sanskrit and Lithuanian are truly amazing,for example:

Sanskrit sunus (son)- Lith. sunus; English "son"

Sanskrit avis (sheep)- Lith. avis; English "ewe" Latin "ovis"

Sanskrit dhumas (smoke)- Lith. dumas; English "dim" & from Latin "fume"

Sanskrit viras (man)- Lith. vyras; English "were-(wolf)" & from Latin "virile"

Sanskrit padas (sole)- Lith. padas; English "foot"

Sanskrit vrkas (wolf)- Lith. vilkas; English "wolf" Latin "lupus" Greek "lykos"

Sanskrit aswa (horse)- Lith. asva; Old English "Eoh" (Eomer & Eowyn from LotR) Latin "equus" Greek "hippos"

Sanskrit antaras (second)- Lith. antras; German "anders" English "other"

Edited September 8, 2009 by Ted Keer

[Mikee]

Phil,

"Reason: It is the only single subject (9th and 10th grade) which made me much, much, much smarter (in only two years!) of everything I ever took. And I was not alone. For that reason, it should go back into the basic curriculum for multiple years. Especially for the college bound.

Pop Quiz 3: Can anyone guess why someone could plausibly make such an extreme, over the top claim, even if you don't agree (or never took Latin)? "

Two things (supporting your claim): 1. Since reading "Seeing Voices" [twice], recommended by Ted I am very certain that language acquisition is VERY important to our ability to think. Knowing the origin of our language conventions probably makes understanding the concepts we name with words easier to organize and recall therefore making us "smarter".

2. Persons I have known who have a more "classical" education, including Latin or a Catholic school education have seemed pretty damned sharp to me.

Pop Quiz 4 (hard!!): Of the commonly known ones, there are only two Latin words for which I can't think of -any- English word derived from them. Can anyone come up with an English word that comes from 'carpe' or 'hoc'?

Got nothin'

Pop Quiz 5: Adding to my five commonly known phrases, can anyone think of a sixth? Or seventh? Criterion: It has to be as well known (among most educated people) as the five I came up with.

QED (quod erat demonstrandum)

[Dragonfly]

Pop Quiz 4 (hard!!): Of the commonly known ones, there are only two Latin words for which I can't think of -any- English word derived from them. Can anyone come up with an English word that comes from 'carpe' or 'hoc'?

Carpet. Hocus pocus.

[kiaer.ts]

Pop Quiz 4 (hard!!): Of the commonly known ones, there are only two Latin words for which I can't think of -any- English word derived from them. Can anyone come up with an English word that comes from 'carpe' or 'hoc'?

Carpet. Hocus pocus.

Hocus Pocus is a British mockery of the Catholic Mass, wherein is said hoc est corpus "this is (my) body."

Carpet is cognate with harvest and karpos, and referes to the fact that one is woven or "plucked."

Edited September 8, 2009 by Ted Keer

[Dragonfly]

Pop Quiz 5: Adding to my five commonly known phrases, can anyone think of a sixth? Or seventh? Criterion: It has to be as well known (among most educated people) as the five I came up with.

Mutatis mutandis. In vino veritas. Quod non. Sic transit gloria mundi. Ars longa, vita brevis. Virgo intacta. Sui generis. In medias res. De mortuis nil nisi bene. Deo volente. De profundis. Intra muros. Perpetuum mobile. Quod licet Iovi non licet bovi. Memento mori. Mens sana in corpore sano. Casus belli. Cave canem. Si vis pacem, para bellum. Quo vadis? Odium. Nec plus ultra. Anno domini. Viva voce. Mirabile dictu.

Well, I think I can continue for hours, so I'll stop now...

[kiaer.ts]

Sic transit gloria mundi.

Due to a sick passenger, the train is going express

Ars longa, vita brevis.

Big ass, wide briefs

Virgo intacta.

It'll cost extra

Sui generis.

What Anne Heche did.

Edited September 8, 2009 by Ted Keer

[Xray]

Xray, I'm afraid that horse may have already left the barn and is in the next county by now. Although I hate to be a neigh-sayer. I'd love it if they could "Finnish" that discussion. If they don't it might end up being IgNordic.

LOL - funny puns!

You could always simply ignore that and not respond to every little provocation...is that an option?

I've opted for that many times, although they often were "not so little". 'Ad hominem' can be added to Pop Quiz question 5

Philip Coates:

Pop Quiz 4 (hard!!): Of the commonly known ones, there are only two Latin words for which I can't think of -any- English word derived from them. Can anyone come up with an English word that comes from 'carpe' or 'hoc'?

Carpet, (to carp I suppose is related too, maybe also 'carpal tunnel' because it has to do with the hand).

Pop Quiz 5: Adding to my five commonly known phrases, can anyone think of a sixth? Or seventh? Criterion: It has to be as well known (among most educated people) as the five I came up with.

Status quo, verbatim, per capita, rigor mortis, ad nauseam, vita in motu, conditio sine qua non, sine ira et studio, vice versa, ad infinitum, sapere aude, tabula rasa, manus manum lavat, pacta sunt servanda, subpoena, ad hominem - got a few of these at OL, , but I'll let R.I.P (requiescat in pace). Pick your battles is good advice, now what would that be in Latin - Carpe pugnas? No, that sounds like the opposite, but would fit for the Romans, since they weren't exactly 'picky' when it came to waging battles, were they. ;)

Edited September 8, 2009 by Xray

[thomtg]

[...]

Valkyrie does not "mean" female warrior, at least no more than it "means" fat opera singer in a helmet. It literally referes to the choosers of the valiant dead, female spirits that accompanied a warrior killed in battle to Valhalla.

Hahaha, good one! Now the image is stuck in my head.

[kiaer.ts]

Status quo, verbatim, per capita, rigor mortis, ad nauseam, vita in motu, conditio sine qua non, sine ira et studio, vice versa, ad infinitum, sapere aude, tabula rasa, manus manum lavat, pacta sunt servanda, subpoena, ad hominem

All these are fine Latin expressions, but I think Phil was looking more for sayings, no?

One of the best works of literature I have ever read is Walter M. Miller's Canticle for Leibowitz. It tells the story of the world after a nuclear war, a world in which a pre-Vatican two Catholic Church, using Latin, is a reservoir of culture. If you follow the link above it will direct you to a list of Latin phrases used in that book.

[jeffrey smith]

Although I went through the standard grammar parsing/sentence drawing routines in elementary and middle school, it was really high school German that taught me what I know about English grammar. (Although I never attained much proficiency in German. They never teach the important stuff, like "Where is the bathroom, please?") Learning the grammar and vocabulary of another language can dramatically improve one's knowledge of one's own language. (BTW, Bosley makes a similar remark about translation in his introduction to the Kalevala.)

Would I be right in thinking that harp (the musical instrument) is a cognate of carpet, etc. (which are all related to the Greek word for fruit, including (for XRay's benefit) carpal, according to my Webster's)? The same Webster's gives a history of the word "case" (as in briefcase, not legal case, which has a different entry) which suggests it might be related to carpe through caps-).

I thought "hock" as in debt or pawn might derive from legal Latin, but it seems to derive instead from a Germanic word meaning cage or pen (the sort one keeps animals in, not the sort one writes with). "Hock" meaning cough definitely has a Germanic root. As evidence, there is a Yiddish expression, huk a chaynik, which literally means banging pots or pans, but is an idiomatic way of saying "too noisy" or "too talkative". Other than hocus pocus, however, I can't come up with any words that might be directly related to hic/hoc. Are this/that cognate to hic/hoc in any way?

(final paragraph edited for clarity)

Edited September 9, 2009 by jeffrey smith

[Philip Coates]

Ted, thanks for the tip on Canticle. No, I wasn't looking for sayings...merely words or phrases which are now accepted parts of English which would be commonly known (or should be) by an educated person as opposed to technical terminology from law, medicine, etc. or less commnonly known....but you guys did a great job...see next post =>

[Philip Coates]

The resuits of Schoolmarm Phil's latest three "pop quizzes" on Latin are now in and the grading is complete --> Wow! I LOVE a thread where I learn a lot!!!

1) Mikee, Dragonfly, Ted, Xray, GREAT answers to my Pop Quiz #5. I was hoping for only a couple Latin phrases into common English, but you guys gave me dozens. Granted only a few would be "commonly known", as I stipulated...but hey why quibble?? Of all those phrases, there are at least 17 by my count that a high school or college student would have seen and presumably learned. VERY COOL! You dudes are certainly classical scholars, most of you probably having more years of Greek and/or Latin than I. I am at best (pun alert--duck x-ray!) a "half-classical" scholar.

1b) "Well, I think I can continue for hours, so I'll stop now... " Dragonfly, please don't stop with those phrases, if you are willing to continue - why should Ted have all the fun :-)...they are all -very- useful!! And there's a couple I don't know and will have to parse or look up.

2) Between them, Dragonfly, Ted, and Xray probably did as much toward answering Pop Quiz #4 as was possible--I dont think there are many words coming from carpe and hoc, for some reason. Except that I came up with one more English word derived from carpe: "escarpment". Something has been "taken away" from the level surface area by erosion or faulting.

3. Leaving Latin for a minute, Ted, in keeping with his EWL (Even Weirder Languages) fetish [just kidding, Ted!], pasted in a passage from an unknown language and challenged the list to guess the language and what the passage means. It's pretty clear to me from the words that look like French or Latin that it's -probably- "the Lord's Prayer". But the language also seems to have some constructions that seem Germanic (a language I have LTZ - less than zero - knowledge about!). The only ways or places in which I can see Teutonic and Latin forms mixing would be England. So I'm guessing some form of Old English/Middle English or whatever, after the Norman Conquest so the Latin parts come in. My backup guess would be Romanian because I know it is a Romance language which would explain the Latin parts. And maybe it had some teutonic stuff in there too?

4) Now we come to the *really important question* I asked about the value of Latin and how could it (only two years!--in contrast to all the math I've taken) possibly have made me much, much smarter than any other subject I've ever taken, and why everyone should take it in school.

Xray responded to my comment about Latin being a simple language by saying she found it difficult and cumbersome to learn with all that grammar. And she felt one could dispense with all that superfluity involved in taking a Latin course and learn the prefixes, suffixes, and roots. Mikee said: "1...I am very certain that language acquisition is VERY important to our ability to think. Knowing the origin of our language conventions probably makes understanding the concepts we name with words easier to organize and recall therefore making us "smarter". 2. Persons I have known who have a more "classical" education, including Latin or a Catholic school education have seemed pretty damned sharp to me."

Replying to X-ray, what I should have said is not that Latin is simple to learn, but that its concepts, its root works like capio, carpe, etc. are very simple concepts, the building blocks for more complex ones. Replying to Mikee, yes, the language skill that arises from learning Latin is a key part of why Latin made me smarter and one reason why it should be studied. But there is more to it -- much, much more!!! I will elaborate in another post (probably tomorrow) as this one has grown long, my brain is in meltdown, and I need a root beer float.

...(and Jeffrey has just posted one point which relates to my answer. Damn I can't keep up..could we please have fewer bright people posting on this thread!)

Edited September 9, 2009 by Philip Coates

[kiaer.ts]

We know directly from history that the language we now call English developed from the dialect spoken by the Angles and Saxons and other Germanic tribes of the North Sea coast who invaded Great Britain in the Fifth Century. We have written documents from a few centuries later until the modern day which show a continuity of development from Old English, through the Norman invasions (when for a time Norman French became the language of the court and law) up to today. But there is no real documentation of English or the Germanic dialects that produced it prior to that date. The earliest known Germanic inscription is a runic inscription on a horn ek hlewagastir holtijar horna tawido "I hlewagastir holtijar horn made." The Germanic people were known to the Greeks and Romans prior to this, and at first were confused with the Celts. So how do we know that English is really an Indo-European language? And what exactly is Indo-European?

Linguists proceed on the principal of uniformity. The processes of the past are assumed to resemble those of the present so long as there is no evidence to the contrary. We know that language changGes over time. We know that the resmblances of languages such as Spanish, French and Italian can be explained not as coincidence, but as a development from some common source. The correspondences in vocabluary listed aboved comprise only a very small ffraction of the evidence. There are, depending on how you define your terms, from one to three thousand roots reconstructed for common Proto-IE.

How do we decide whether a specific word existed in Proto-Indo-European? The earliest recognized branches of PIE were Latin, Greek and Sanskrit with their very similar ancient grammars, as well as Old Persian and the Germanic family of Languages, for which the Extinct Gothic can be taken as a stand in for proto-German, and Slavic whose Old Church Slavonic of early bible texts also stands in as a proto-language. Irish and Welsh (celtic) and other languages like Armenian and Albanian were soon recognized to fit. Correspondences not only in vocabulary, but also in the details of grammar, such as three genders, similar declensional endings for nouns and conjugations for verbs and so forth showed that the correspondences could not be chance, and were highly unlikely to be borrowings due to the huge number of matching minor details and the geographical distances. Finally, it was noticed that often even the irregularities matched. If you borrow a word from another language, you are likely to conjugate it or pluralize it as a regular verb or noun in your own language. That's why we mostly speak of forums in English when the plural in Latin is <i>fora.</i> Even when we do pretend to use a foreign irregular plural, we often get it wrong. Strictly speaking the plural of octapus would be octapodes, but we say octapuses or make up octapi. Irregularities simply aren't borrowed. Another example is the derivation of adjectives in English. We say blank, blanker, blankest. If we make up a new adjective like fly or phat we say fly, flyer, flyest, phat, phatter, phattest. What about the word good? If we had borrowed it from German "gut" we would have made it good, gooder goodest. But we say better and best, and the Danes say god, bedre, bedst and the Germans have gut, besser, best.

Confident that we have identified which languages are IE languages, we compared them to see if any were closer to the others. Germanic with its shifted consonants and simplified verbs stands by itself, but it does share unique innovations with Baltic and Slavic that indicate their early closeness and Baltic and Slavic are so close that many speak of Balto-Slavic. Originally Greek and Latin were thought to be close due to their conservative structures. But their similarities were not due to similar innovations, like the hard shells of lizard and bird eggs as opposed to the primitive soft shells of salamanders and fish. The similarities of Greek and Latin were retained primitive states like the four legs of salamanders and lizards as opposed to the wings and legs of birds. Retained primitive features don't show any real close similarity on their own. The four limbs of salamanders and lizards are also retained by mammals and lungfish. It is only common innovations that indicate common development. It tiurns out that Latin shares some unique developments with the Celtic languages, indicating an Italo-Celtic branch, and Greek is closest to Armenian, and these together are closer to Persian and Sanskrit.

So, let us imagine we find a word that exists only in Icelandic (a germanic language) and Hittite, an archaic extinct IE language of Anatolia? We can be certain that the word must have been found in the common PIE language. There is no way to explain it's existence by borrowing or by setting up a special Icelando-Hittite branch of PIE separate from the other daughter languages. The rule that is used is that if similar words can be found in two separate sub-branches, like a word in Latin (italo-celtic) and in Greek (greco-aryan) then it is likely common to the proto language. You have to be careful when the languages were in contact, like the Greeks and the Romans or the Romans and the Germans. When we find that two languages have the same word like Latin cattus and German Katze we can look at the corresponding sounds. We know that a Latin "k-" sound like in "canis" for dog we expect an "h-" in Germanic like "hound." Likewise Latin "t" should correspond to Germanic "th-" which is usually a "d" in modern German. So we know that cat is likely a borrowing. And history confirms this. The modern cat was introduced into Europe by the Romans from the Middle East. The cat, evolved in North Africa, was unknown to the Proto-IE peoples of the Russian Steppe.

[kiaer.ts]

Ted, thanks for the tip on Canticle. No, I wasn't looking for sayings...merely words or phrases which are now accepted parts of English which would be commonly known (or should be) by an educated person as opposed to technical terminology from law, medicine, etc. or less commnonly known....but you guys did a great job...see next post =>

Phil, based on your interest, Canticle for Leibowitz (amazon) is one of those books I would indeed tell you to drop everything else to read. The book is Roman Catholic in its metaphysics and historical in scope, and the story is somewhat tragic. But it is quite literary in all aspects, a wonderful book, on the top ten list of many, many people. Your local B&N should also have it, as well as any library.

Edited September 9, 2009 by Ted Keer

[kiaer.ts]

Although I went through the standard grammar parsing/sentence drawing routines in elementary and middle school, it was really high school German that taught me what I know about English grammar. (Although I never attained much proficiency in German. They never teach the important stuff, like "Where is the bathroom, please?") Learning the grammar and vocabulary of another language can dramatically improve one's knowledge of one's own language. (BTW, Bosley makes a similar remark about translation in his introduction to the Kalevala.)

Would I be right in thinking that harp (the musical instrument) is a cognate of carpet, etc. (which are all related to the Greek word for fruit, including (for XRay's benefit) carpal, according to my Webster's)? The same Webster's gives a history of the word "case" (as in briefcase, not legal case, which has a different entry) which suggests it might be related to carpe through caps-).

I thought "hock" as in debt or pawn might derive from legal Latin, but it seems to derive instead from a Germanic word meaning cage or pen (the sort one keeps animals in, not the sort one writes with). "Hock" meaning cough definitely has a Germanic root. As evidence, there is a Yiddish expression, huk a chaynik, which literally means banging pots or pans, but is an idiomatic way of saying "too noisy" or "too talkative". Other than hocus pocus, however, I can't come up with any words that might be directly related to hic/hoc. Are this/that cognate to hic/hoc in any way?

(final paragraph edited for clarity)

The root karp- must have meant pluck. It refers to "seize" in Latin, "fruit" in Greek, and harvest in Germanic. So the guess that the name of that instrument, which is plucked, comes from that root is very reasonable. Historically the name is found in Dutch and German as harp and Harfe. Finding harp instead of harf in Dutch is odd, you would expect an eff sound. I don't know if German has any other similar roots with an /a/ vowel either, since harvest is Herbst with and /e/. My dictionary doesn't want to commit itself to saying that the word is direcly related to that root. I suspect it is, but that the word was borrowed from another language at some point or influenced by another dialect. For instance, the femal for fox, vixen, should be fixen if you follow normal sound rules. What happened was that the word fixen dropped out of all the dialects of English except for the Somerset dialect which changes initial effs to vees. The word "vat" comes from the Somerset pronunciation of the word fat in the rest of English. (If we didn't know about that rule, people would probably wonder where the word vat came from, because it doesn't fit the normal correspondences.) So I would bet good money that harp does come from that root but with some historical twist we don't have a record for.

[Dragonfly]

1b) "Well, I think I can continue for hours, so I'll stop now... " Dragonfly, please don't stop with those phrases, if you are willing to continue - why should Ted have all the fun :-)...they are all -very- useful!! And there's a couple I don't know and will have to parse or look up.

My time is limited, but OK, here are a few more (it's not impossible that some of them have been mentioned before, I didn't check with all the previous posts):

Ex aequo. Alias. Alibi. Alter ego. Qua. Per aspera/ardua ad astra. Alea iacta est. Nomen est omen. Primus inter pares. Habeas corpus. De gustibus non est disputandum. Caveat emptor. Quodlibet. Non sequitur. Casus belli. Anathema. Divide et impera. Ad nauseam. Ignis fatuus. Credo quia absurdum. Via. Mirabile dictu. Noli me tangere. Pater familias. Camera obscura. Verbatim. In situ. (Summa) cum laude. Mea culpa. Ex cathedra. Pecunia non olet. Coitus (interruptus). Semen. O tempera, o mores! Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Sic. Addendum. Errata.

[BaalChatzaf]

1b) "Well, I think I can continue for hours, so I'll stop now... " Dragonfly, please don't stop with those phrases, if you are willing to continue - why should Ted have all the fun :-)...they are all -very- useful!! And there's a couple I don't know and will have to parse or look up.

My time is limited, but OK, here are a few more (it's not impossible that some of them have been mentioned before, I didn't check with all the previous posts):

Ex aequo. Alias. Alibi. Alter ego. Qua. Per aspera/ardua ad astra. Alea iacta est. Nomen est omen. Primus inter pares. Habeas corpus. De gustibus non est disputandum. Caveat emptor. Quodlibet. Non sequitur. Casus belli. Anathema. Divide et impera. Ad nauseam. Ignis fatuus. Credo quia absurdum. Via. Mirabile dictu. Noli me tangere. Pater familias. Camera obscura. Verbatim. In situ. (Summa) cum laude. Mea culpa. Ex cathedra. Pecunia non olet. Coitus (interruptus). Semen. O tempera, o mores! Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Sic. Addendum. Errata.

Quid? Vexari me?

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Mikee]

Phil: "1) Mikee, Dragonfly, Ted, Xray"

Oops, I would be the fly in your marmalade here. I know nothing of Latin and Greek or any language other than english. I took one semester of French in high school, eons ago but was kicked out of the class for playing chess with my buddy. Not the only class I was kicked out of.

I was surprised by one thing however. You identified one of Ted's examples as "The Lords Prayer". When I first looked at the second one of those two examples I immediately thought "Lords Prayer". I looked at it closely and other than "Amen" at the end I couldn't recognize a single word. I think my brain simply recognized the length of lines, patterns of some repeated words and the fact that it ended in "amen" to suggest that identification. The actual process is hidden to me. I do not know how my mind works. Of course, you could be wrong, perhaps it's NOT the lords prayer. I don't think Ted has weighed in on it yet. I've just always been a good guesser. In school I killed some of the tests they gave us. I didn't "know" any of the material. It made me feel guilty that I couldn't explain to anyone how I got the right answers. I guess from reading a lot of science fiction.

Edited September 9, 2009 by Mikee

[Dragonfly]

Can you figure out what language this is and what it means?

The name of your link gives it away...

Anyway, I saw the correspondence with the German version of Our Father:

Vater unser Der Du bist im Himmel, geheiligt werde Dein Name,

Dein Reich komme, Dein Wille geschehe, wie im Himmel so auch auf Erden.

etc.

Dangon must be Himmel (Heaven), nouson = unser (our), then Tawa must be Vater (Father); tu will be Du (you), twais = Dein (your) etc.

At school I had a Catholic teacher for Greek, so we had to learn the Lords prayer in Greek by heart. I still know a large part of it...

Πάτερ ημών

ο εν τοις ουρανοίς,

αγιασθήτω το όνομα Σου.

Ελθέτω η βασιλεία Σου.

Γενηθήτω το θέλημα Σου, ως εν ουρανώ και επί της γης.

Τον άρτον ημών τον επιούσιον δος ημίν σήμερον.

Και άφες ημίν τα οφειλήματα ημών,

ως και ημείς αφίεμεν τοις οφειλέταις ημών.

Και μη εισενέγκης ημάς εις πειρασμόν,

αλλά ρύσαι ημάς από του πονηρού.

Αμήν.

[kiaer.ts]

Yes, the excerpts are the Our Father in Old Prussian, an extinct Baltic language which happens also to be the one non-Germanic language that is the closest relative of the Germanic family.

Of course you get full credit for guessing the right answer based on the pattern. That is how unknown languages are deciphered. Old Egyptian hieroglyphs were figured out when it was noticed that certain repeated bold patterns resembled royal names such as ptolemy. And I did intentionally add in the second image with "amen" at the end as a clue.

The website Pater Noster provides the Lord's Prayer in hundreds of languages, and can be a lot of fun for those interested in word puzzles.

This is NOT Klingong:

Here's the transliteration:

Abwoon d'bwashmaya,

Nethqadash shmakh,

Teytey malkuthakh.

Nehwey tzevyanach aykanna d'bwashmaya aph b'arha.

Hawvlan lachma d'sunqanan yaomana.

Washboqlan khaubayn (wakhtahayn)

aykana daph khnan shbwoqan l'khayyabayn.

Wela tahlan l'nesyuna.

Ela patzan min bisha.

Metol dilakhie malkutha wahayla wateshbukhta l'ahlam almin.

Amen.

Here is a version in Khazar which is an extinct Turkic language

Atamis kim köktä sen

Algiszle bulsun sening ating

kelsin sening hanlechin

bulsun sening tilemegin neçikkim köktä allay ierdä

kundegi ötmackimismi bisge bugun bergil

dage iazuclarimisni bizgä bozzatkil

neçik bis bozzattirbis bizgä iaman etchenlergä

dage iecnik sinamakina bisni kuurmagil

bassa barça iamandan bisni kuthargil.

Amen.

Even though Turkish is not an Indo-European language, the first line is very familiar

Ata-mis kim köktä sen" is "Father-our who blue-in thou"

Ata has a cognate in "atavism," (from Latin atavus "great-grandfather')

Mis is like Russian my "we" or the verb ending -amus in Latin.

Kim is just like whom or Latin quem.

Kök-tä is trickier. The root keuk in PIE is found in the word cygnus and is the same as Turkish kök "sky blue."

Sen is similar to Greek su for thou and has a very common -n pronominal ending.

What does sening mean? What is the word ierda in the fourth line? Is it native Turkish, or was it borrowed from the Crimean Goths?

[jeffrey smith]

The website Pater Noster provides the Lord's Prayer in hundreds of languages, and can be a lot of fun for those interested in word puzzles.

This is NOT Klingon:

Here's the transliteration:

Abwoon d'bwashmaya,

Nethqadash shmakh,

Teytey malkuthakh.

Nehwey tzevyanach aykanna d'bwashmaya aph b'arha.

Hawvlan lachma d'sunqanan yaomana.

Washboqlan khaubayn (wakhtahayn)

aykana daph khnan shbwoqan l'khayyabayn.

Wela tahlan l'nesyuna.

Ela patzan min bisha.

Metol dilakhie malkutha wahayla wateshbukhta l'ahlam almin.

Amen.

Going by the script, I'm pretty sure it's Amharic or Geez.

Even without the alphabet, I know it's a Semitic language: too many words there that have visible cognates in Hebrew: enough that I could figure it out without recourse to English:

Avinu shebashamayim

yitkadesh shimcha,

tavo malchutecha,

yease retsoncha kebashamayim ken ba'aretz.

Et lechem chukenu ten lanu hayom,

uslach lanu al chataeinu,

kefi shesolchim gam anachnu lachot'im lanu.

Veal tevienu liy'dei nisayon

ki im chaltzenu min hara.

Ki lecha hamamlacha hag'vura

vehatif'eret leolmei olamim.

Amen.

Edit: I looked at the Christus Rex site after I wrote the above, and discover it's Syriac (which is why the alphabet looked familiar). Either Syriac differs from Rabbinic Aramaic (the form found in the Talmud, which tracks the dialect used by Jews in the early centuries CE) more than I thought, or the transliteration makes the differences seem larger. Probably the former, since Rabbinic Aramaic has been heavily influenced by Hebrew. (the version given as plain Aramaic by Christus Rex is really just Syriac, but the sculpted text given as the second image on that page is Rabbinic Hebrew--for instance, it has 'yitqadesh'(hallowed) instead of 'nethqadesh' in the second line

Edited September 10, 2009 by jeffrey smith

[Philip Coates]

Subject: Why Latin Should Be A Central Part of the Curriculum / How Latin Made Me *Much* Smarter

1. Conceptual thinking is the key to grasping reality on the human level, to being intelligent, to having knowledge. Concepts are grasped in the form of words. 65% of the words in English come from Latin. And its the -harder- two-thirds, not the shorter and simpler germanic words like I, you, and, go, come. It's the higher level abstractions, the multi-syllable words. Learning the Latin 'parts' better enables you to grasp the whole. Basic Latin concepts tend to provide simple ways to "xray" more sophisticated ideas. The example I gave: concept = 'taken together' is only an isolated example out of thousands. Being able to see English words, i.e., concepts, that you already knew or to analyze new ones through the prism of Latin makes you understand your own language many, many times better. That alone makes you smarter in a deeply fundamental way.

2. Another way Latin helps you understand English much better is grammar and syntax. We grew up understanding the structure of our language through imitation. That is one reason we find it boring to consider English grammar, parts of speech, transitive, intransitive, gerunds, appositives, etc. later on. "Hey, I already construct sentences grammatically." But knowing *the logical structure of your language* - propositions, paragraphs, sequences, etc. - is a vital part of being a great communicator...and before that, a powerful and precise thinker. And it is impossible to translate a passage of Latin in the classroom or for homework without more fully learning grammar and syntax - and how English and Latin grammar are both different and similar.

3. Mental skills, discipline, focus: Latin is probably the hardest subject you will take in middle school to high school in the language and humanities half of the curriculum. Math can't be done without learning a certain very precise mental discipline. Latin is the 'math' of the humanities. As we saw in my parsing of those two mottoes of Jeffrey and Ted, you simply can't translate Latin without a very exacting series of mental steps. Latin teaches great precision and a very, very precise series of steps. Otherwise you flunk! You can "BS" your way through history and lit classes in your school days. You can memorize biology. Algebra is pretty easy once you get the basic ideas. But Latin is always a strict mental challenge. Grammar + syntax + vocabulary + shades of meaning + context of the surrounding sentences!! But once you master it, you not only gain a great sense of what I will call "cognitive pride", you have learned a very important set of 'language' and thinking skills.

4. History and culture: The Latin writer and thinker Cicero said that the man who does not know history is forever a child. Latin courses immerse you in a world from which ours came. We are all Romans; we are all Greeks. It allows you to compare and contrast not only ways of thinking from which ours came, but ways which are very different. Someone who reads the Latin writers and sees how Rome developed - and how it fell for philosophical, economic, and other reasons - can see many, many parallels to today, many issues grappled with or not understood.

Those are the four biggest benefits of Latin in school. In each case - vocabulary expansion and command, structural language analysis and understanding, mental discipline and precision, cultural and historic knowledge - you don't get exactly the same benefits from any other courses. You don't get them from English 'language arts' because of the reasons above and because (as in the case of grammar I mentioned) you can function, you can "coast through" in English without them on a basic level. Latin forces you to operate on a more difficult, higher level. There is no coasting to get an A or B (or even a C)in Latin. You fully master your own language best through study of another (well chosen) language. (Even if your own language was not based on that language, some of those benefits apply.)

So why is Latin scorned or unappreciated? People who haven't taken Latin don't know how powerfully it changes your language and thinking skills. That's even true for those who -have- taken this subject! I took Latin in 9th and 10th grade and I was not able to look back at the changes; they were subtle. I stopped after Latin II because it was very hard, tiring, all those declensions and syntax and vocabulary and translations. Hated that! And I simply didn't see how it was helping me.

In fact, it was only in the last few years that I was able to look back. When I was in 8th grade, before my two years of Latin, I was so-so in my thinking skills, in my conceptual ability, in my writing and language facility. By 11th grade, I was a National Merit Scholarship Finalist, an A student, my SAT's were in the 99th percentile, and I was a much better writer (and reader), especially with difficult material. The thing that made me smarter -- it really was like I was a different person between 9th grade and 11th -- was the two years of Latin. And the heavily disciplined, effort-filled understanding of my own language - built largely on Latin in hundreds of ways - that resulted.

In the years since, I have indirectly used that Latin base or what has been built on it (it is often automatized and instant, subconscious or instinctive, operating beneath the surface)tens of thousands of times. Since it seldom realized, that is why people (even those who have benefited enormously) so often don't fully realize how valuable it can be, just like in math they don't realize since they don't ever use it directly - how useful learning algebra was to developing their minds.

Edited September 10, 2009 by Philip Coates

[kiaer.ts]

I concur wholeheartedly, Phil. You should use that as an inaugural post for a blog, and should publish it on other fora.

Jeff, I'm quite impressed!

Everyone, this has been a wonderful thread.

[Xray]

Although I went through the standard grammar parsing/sentence drawing routines in elementary and middle school, it was really high school German that taught me what I know about English grammar. (Although I never attained much proficiency in German. They never teach the important stuff, like "Where is the bathroom, please?")

"Bathroom" here is a euphemism for 'toilet', so if you translate it literally and ask Germans "Wo ist das Badezimmer?", you might be sent to their 'bath'room where is a washbasin/shower/bathtub, but no WC.

Would I be right in thinking that harp (the musical instrument) is a cognate of carpet, etc. (which are all related to the Greek word for fruit, including (for XRay's benefit) carpal, according to my Webster's)?

It looks like "harp" is of Germanic origin, the Old English verb being "hearpian".

Proto-Indoeuropean for carpet is *kerp- "to gather, pluck, harvest"

Proto-Germanic for harp is *kharpon-

But maybe *kharpon- itself does go back to the (proto-)Indoeuropean *kerp-?

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=harp&searchmode=none

Edited September 10, 2009 by Xray

[Brant Gaede]

I subjectively value Xray a lot more when she isn't talking about subjectivism.

--Brant