Illusion 1: Latin and Greek are the “best” languages

A. Lowth and Murray thought that Latin and Greek were “better” than English because of their complex case endings. Actually, languages without endings, such as Chinese, are complex in other ways, including their tones, classifiers, sentence-final particles, and so on.

B. Thus, we are taught that Billy and me went to the store is “wrong” because me is a subject. However, only sometimes do languages neatly assign pronouns according to the subject/object distinction.

1. Latin was one of those languages, where the subject I was ego and the object form was mē, and never would mē be used as a subject.

2. But in a great many languages, two forms share the subject position, depending on the type of sentence. In French, one would say Guillaume et moi sommes allés au magasin, with the object form, not Guillaume et je sommes allés au magasin. No one complains about this in French.

3. Even in English, it is impossible to apply the “subject” rule consistently. If someone asks “Who did that?” and you know that it was two people on the other side of the room, when you point them out you say “Them!” not “They!”, even though it is they who did it, and thus, we are dealing with subject form.

مواضيع ذات صلة

Word by word

Finale—Master Class Introduction

Finale—Master Class

Sign language

Artificial spoken languages

Artificial Languages

Predictions

The success story

Obstacles to keeping 6,000 languages alive

Language revival movements

Language Death—Prognosis

What happens to a language when it is dying?