Or where I go to roll about in my feels about Catullus. How do I have feels about a two thousand year old poet. Waaaaah. Also: cool thing: my cousin, Caroline Alexander, is the first published (that we know of) female translator of the Illiad. Which is really freaking cool IMO, and I saw her give a talk on it recently. And her translation is very good, too.
-camps on the sidelines bc they have absolutely no knowledge about latin or greek but they heard the stories- -and every day is a good day for stories-
Alright, so, this isn't a story about like, actual Latin authors, or whatever, because I still need to do more research (but holy shit, Catiline, anyway), this is about the structure of the language itself. So there's this case called the locative. I know that a fuckton of modern languages that aren't english have cases, but for those of you who don't know what those are, they're different forms for nouns depending on that noun's position in the sentence, and adjectives, pronouns and articles and the like also have case, as well as gerundives and some perfect passives, at least in Latin. (all that's really left of case in english is singular/plural, so, "goose" is the singular and "geese" is the plural, for example. everything else in english is told entirely through word order, which is a lot more fluid in latin though there is some generally accepted syntax (for example subject adjective verb. unless you're Cicero, because Cicero is allergic to simple language, especially when he's yelling at Catiline) So the most common cases in Latin are the nominative (subjects), genitive (position, plus some grammatical forms which are also translated as "of [x]" often in English), dative (to/for clauses, so giving things, indirect object, plus some verbs that specifically take the dative, plus some obscure grammatical forms), accusative (direct objects of the subject, plus some obscure... you know what every case except nominative can add "plus some obscure grammatical forms") and ablative (everything else, especially in terms of describing movement away, and being in somewhere.). Also, the ablative and accusative both are taken by various adverbs, for example "in" (which means "in" or "into") takes the accusative, "sine" (without) takes the ablative, I think, and all that wonderfulness. (Ancient Greek, incidentally, does not have an ablative, because it uses the dative, genitive and accusative instead for the various functions of the ablative (ie. "with" clauses, or time clauses, that sort of thing) (though superincidentally, Homeric Greek does in fact have an ablative, because Homeric Greek is Really Fucking Old, and the poet, whoever they actually were, used forms in their poems which were old and obscure and archaic even then so that the lines would fit the meter better, though the ablative there is used maybe... twice? I'm not sure, I haven't actually studied Ancient Greek at all in any sort of non-me-googling-stuff-at-2am-or-bugging-R form)) But, and this is going back to the original point of this post, there is a sixth case (and anyone who's studied latin is already groaning really really loudly here) called the locative. And it is proof that the ancients were just fucking with us, because not only does Ancient Greek, which is older and therefore should be more bullshit, not have one (except again in homeric greek because aforementioned meter reasons), but the locative barely even exists anyway. So, all nouns, barring some obscure, sorta bullshit indeclinable ones and the supines and the gerunds, have all five cases. They use all of them. There are some that don't always make sense to be in the nominative, and the forth declension neuter is basically just entirely made of "u"s, but they usually do in fact appear somewhere in each of these cases. The locative is almost entirely only used, and only even rarely used at that, because you can literally just use the ablative for a lot of these, for (and take notes, because this is just amazingly bullshit) cities, towns, small islands, and the verbs "domus" (which is bullshit anyway because it's a n forth declension noun and those are beautifully horrendous abominations against nature), "rus" and "humus" (which means dirt, by the way, and literally Pliny the Younger writes a sentence at one point I think that describes someone as "falling in the dirt" or "being in the dirt" which is just. Heh). So, you think, why does this exist, and the answer is, who the fuck even knows, why is "enough" spelled "enough" instead of "enuff" or "enuph" But actually, apparently, and I just found this out, the locative actually used to have seperate endings? So now, the locative looks indistinguishable from the genitive in the first and second declension and from the ablative in the other three declensions, but apparently it used to be an entirely independent thing, and that's so incredibly cool to me? And yes, the entire point of this entire long ramble is that the locative used to be more different than it currently is, and that it only even really existed in old latin, ie Cicero's latin, anyway, and fell out of use eventually (cause latin was actually spoken in "vulgar" form way into the first millenium AD, we even have terrified grammarians writing books about how the language of today is degrading, these children have no culture!!! (and doesn't that sound familiar) And that is your long, excited ramble about Latin for today.
Yeah, I decided to learn Latin because it was supposedly so logical and regular and all that, and haha nope. First and second declensions were okay for the most part, but third is a mess, and why do we bother having fourth and fifth? We already have a (mostly) feminine declension, (mostly) masculine one, and a dumping ground. Anyway, a lot of commonly-used words are irregular in many languages, since those tend to get mangled due to people trying to get the most use out of them. The less-used words get regularized because nobody cares enough to object and remain regularized because nobody uses them enough to want more efficiency out of them, but commonly used words (think like: to be, to go, the main set of pronouns) end up awful mishmashes of old grammatical relics and entropy-encoding-type nonsense.
@peripheral I contend that for something that bills itself as a case, the vocative is entirely more pointless than the locative. I mean, it's on all the charts, and it is only actually different from the nominative in the second declension. the hell kinda useless bullshit. "oh, geez, men are so important that they gotta have an extra-special case that we only use when addressing them directly!!! yeah!!!" I mean, unless there's another use of the vocative that I never learned?
Have you ever heard of the verb "fio, fieri, factus sum"? Its a semi deponent verb that acts as the passive form (sort of) of a different verb. It's entirely active in meaning because you can't have the passive of 'become'
I am pretty sure there isn't, yeah. I think its important sorta cause it's a clue to how people legit talked, but I feel like trying to figure out spoken Latin from the texts we have is like assuming people in Elizabethan times spoke in perfect blank verse.
ahahahaha fieri. god semi-deponents are terrible. although I should point out that at least part of the trouble here is caused by English's shortcomings, and that as verbs go facere is a pretty good one for which to create an entirely new verb for the passive, because at least we have a word in English that's not "to be done" and still has roughly the meaning of "to do," you know? it is still pretty terrible, though. and, I mean, yeah, the vocative is indicative of actual speech, but it's just such a pointless part of the language. that can be said about a lot of Latin, but.
Yes I agree. You do not need the vocative unless you are, for some ungodly reason, rereading yet again the catilinian speeches. Which are actually hilarious but yeah Oh my English is bullshit, so bullshit. "About to have been doing" ffs future participles.
This is also where I say I think Latin should have had middle voice. Don't tell my greekling friends that though
no middle voice is the devil. I am 100% sure of this even though I actually don't have a very clear idea of how it'd translate into English. how would it translate to English? I just don't want to have to learn any more verb forms. I already don't know the active or the passive and the idea of having a whole other voice to forget is distressing in the amount of ignorance it would encompass.
I took a year and a half of it, but then I left the school I was at and I haven't had a chance to continue. I still have the textbooks tho so maybe eventually I can go back to it. Latin is ok but it's not Greek.
The thing is the more nonsensical a language is the more I want to learning. See my life goal of learning Klingon.
guess you're fond of Greek, then? I think it's interesting, but mainly just for its connections to English and maaaaybe Latin. tbh Latin is mainly interesting to me because I can go, "oh! cognate!" and also translating is usually a fun puzzle.
Eso continues to inflect a perfectly good internet drama/shitpost thread with his unfunny Classics jokes, news at 11.
