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To: boatbums
The native language of the Romans was Latin, an Italic language the grammar of which relies little on word order, conveying meaning through a system of affixes attached to word stems.

What would that language look like in English? Are there examples?

183 posted on 10/26/2013 9:57:21 PM PDT by GeronL
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To: GeronL
What would that language look like in English? Are there examples?

The grammar of Latin, like that of other ancient Indo-European languages, is highly inflected; consequently, it allows for a large degree of flexibility in choosing word order. For example, femina togam texuit, "the woman wove a toga," which is the preferred word order, could be expressed as texuit togam femina or togam texuit femina. In each word the suffix: -a, -am and -uit, and not the position in the sentence, marks the word's grammatical function. Word order, however, is generally subject–object–verb, although variations on this are especially common in poetry and express subtle nuances in prose.[1]

In Latin, there are five declensions of nouns and four conjugations of verbs (although some words are inflected according to irregular patterns). Latin does not have articles and so does not generally differentiate between, for example, "a girl" and "the girl": puella amat means both "a girl loves" and "the girl loves". Latin uses prepositions, and usually places adjectives after nouns. The language can also omit pronouns in certain situations, meaning that the form of the verb alone is generally sufficient to identify the agent; pronouns are most often reserved for situations where meaning is not entirely clear. Latin exhibits verb-framing, in which the path of motion is encoded into the verb rather than in a separate word or phrase; e.g., exit (a compound of ex and it) means "he/she/it goes out." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_grammar

I studied Spanish for several years in high school and college and it is one of those "Romance" languages that originated with Latin. Spanish also places adjectives after the noun it modifies such as la casa blanca (the house white) is translated as "the white house" in English. Conjugation of verbs is also tricky. That's why Latin was taught in schools when I was a kid because it was the basis of so many languages that came after it. English is said to be one of the hardest languages to learn for non-native English speakers and I think it is possibly due to the influx of so many other languages that became part of it. Oriental languages, to me, are what I would call especially difficult languages to learn because they don't use the same alphabets, sounds or root words.

185 posted on 10/26/2013 11:32:48 PM PDT by boatbums (God is ready to assume full responsibility for the life wholly yielded to Him.)
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To: GeronL

German. It would look like German, where words stretch for several paragraphs.

186 posted on 10/26/2013 11:33:20 PM PDT by BlueDragon (Perfect Love casts out all fear...)
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