On 09/03/2011 05:22 PM, opinali wrote:
up to the point that Sanskrit poets had the advantage of being allowed
to rearrange the words of a sentence in any order they wanted because
it would never change the meaning, as the role of each word and the
relationships between words in a sentence are always clear from
inflection.
I don't know Sanskrit to make a quantitative comparison, but in Latin
too you can rearrange in any order - _usually_ without changing meaning,
but in some cases opening the door to some ambiguity. A classic school
example was:
"Ibis redibis non morieris in bello"
which was traditionally the Sibyl's response to a soldier's query before
going to a war. Unfortunately, the sentence can be translated both "You
shall go and come back, you shall not die in war" or "You shall go and
not come back, you shall die in war". This is pretty simple, of course,
and more interesting examples could be made in longer sentences.
As the other cited neo-latin languages, Italian has got a lot of
inflection too. I understand that it can be quite a mess to learn, but
the positive side is that lots of inflection give more freedom to poets.
Italian, French, Spanish, etc... greatest poets wouldn't be the same if
they wrote in a language with less inflection. At least pronunciation is
simpler, since every letter is always pronounced in the same way, with
very few simple exceptions.
--
Fabrizio Giudici - Java Architect, Project Manager
Tidalwave s.a.s. - "We make Java work. Everywhere."
java.net/blog/fabriziogiudici - www.tidalwave.it/people
fabrizio.giud...@tidalwave.it
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