Le 22/08/2013 17:56, Hendrik Boom a écrit : > On Thu, 22 Aug 2013 12:51:07 +0200, Ralf Mardorf wrote: > >> On Thu, 2013-08-22 at 18:53 +1200, Chris Bannister wrote: >>> On Wed, Aug 21, 2013 at 05:10:05PM -0600, Bob Proulx wrote: >>>> I have the misfortune of never having learned Latin. >>> >>> If you've ever seen the "graffiti scene" in 'The Life of Brian' then >>> you may use a word other than misfortune. :) >> >> As I already pointed out, this is true. Btw. this movie scene does show >> how Latin does work. Salve vocative et ablative and all the other nice >> stuff! > > If you like all that, try Sanskrit. It has eight cases, not just six, > three numbers, not just singular and plural, and more verb tenses than > you can shape a stick at. And Sanskrit (from some eras, anyway) has > German beat for compound words! > > And as for being a dead language (no native speakers, used as a second > language for communication), its important literature was written when it > was already dead. Quite wrong! Sanskrit seems to be an "artificial" language: we do not know, until now, if it was the mother tongue of a population... So the word "dead" is not usable. As for Latin, it is better to call it an ancient language, it is still the official language in Vatican. What to say of Greek? -- François Patte UFR de mathématiques et informatique Laboratoire CNRS MAP5, UMR 8145 Université Paris Descartes 45, rue des Saints Pères F-75270 Paris Cedex 06 Tél. +33 (0)1 8394 5849 http://www.math-info.univ-paris5.fr/~patte
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