Any typological features common to Greek and Latin can be explained by geographical and cultural proximity, and that would explain practically every point you're trying to raise in your post.
While it is possible to determine which group branched when, at least relatively, I don't think you'll find that Greek and Latin are as close as you suggest.
Furthermore, you appear to believe that just because there is no strict word order in a given language, there is also no preferred word order. You are, naturally, completely wrong. Yoda-speak translates to Croatian very easily, and I imagine it would translate to nearly any language in the world. You can always mangle the word order into something funny.
Furthermore, I think you might find interesting that the Latin alphabet is just an adaptation of the Greek alphabet, which has its origins in Semitic alphabet systems; nothing more, nothing less. The detailed development of the Latin alphabet actually constitued most of my first Greek lesson in college.
Therefore, much as you do raise some interesting points, Latin and Greek remain no more closely related than Latin and Sanskrit - at least not significantly. Most of the similarites you mention are not based on genetic relation, but rather on geographical (and, hence, cultural) proximity.
This was actually a nice chance for me to revise some things for my exam on Thursday... it's quite a pity my college is so strong on Indo-European linguistics, and far weaker on other linguistic areas... Ah, well...
Latin and Greek are not related any closer than Latin and Hittite or Latin and Sanskrit (which should really be spelled Sanskrt).
While certain things in Latin culture have been borrowed from Greek, the languages themselves are not related, apart from belonging in the Indo-European family.
Latin is a member of the Latin/Faliskic group, while Greek has no close relatives.
Furthermore, Romance languages are not that heavy on flection as Slavic ones, for instance... translation is so much more than 'knowing where to put the words', although I've stopped expecting most people to realise that - if it were just that, computer translators would be much more efficient, for one thing.
Whatever the reasons are for intelligence going up (and I'd guess it's the increased information flow that does the trick), the only reason for a person's average knowledge going down are crappy school systems nearly worldwide.
I'm quite sick and tired of governments that have the money for weapons, but not the money for schools, just as I'm tired of incompetent bloody politicians that want to please the parents by reducing the strain put on the poor children by the horrible schools.
School is not too hard and it was not too hard. If you could take it, than we could've also; if we could take it, the kids of now surely can. [/my everlasting rant on this subject. Sorry.]
IME intelligent people flame just like the other kind; they only use bigger words properly.
Not much of a difference, if you ask me.
Even the ancient philosophers, whom we mostly percieve as dignified and wise, flamed each other quite the same way we flame today... it's just that there were not that many of them.
Languages generally fall into one of two categories: word ordered languages, and declined languages
Not quite right.
Languages generally fall into one of the following categories: isolative, aglutinative, flective or incorporative.
Isolative languages are languages like Chinese and Vietnamese, where words have one form and one form only. Such languages have no grammar as such, at least not the tenses/cases/etc. kind we're used to.
Aglutinative languages are languages like Hungarian and Turkish, where every grammatical affix carries exactly one meaning - therefore, if you want to designate the 2nd person in plural, you need two affixes just for that. In these langages, more than ten suffixes on a single stem are not at all uncommon; in fact, it's the most intriguing word formation process I've ever seen, and I guess these languages would be easy to parse (my computer linguistics classes all come in later years, though, so I'm just guessing).
Then there are the flective languages, like Latin and most Indo-European languages. These languages use complex affixes that carry more than one meaning (for example, one affix is enough for 'nominative case, 1st person, singular, female gender' or '3rd person, plural, past').
Now, I say 'most Indo-European languages' because of English, primarily: it seems that languages pass through these phases regularly as they develop: isolative, aglutinative, flective, then isolative again. The English grammar is getting less and less morphological and more and more syntactical, which is a characteristic of isolative languages (so you did get it right, generally speaking).
The fourth kind of languages are the incorporative ones; they look like ultra-aglutinative languages, since one word can express the meaning of a sentence (for instance, in Inuit you can say one word that means 'I want to buy a big boat').
I really don't know whether English is a difficult language to parse solely because of its word order, which sometimes helps and sometimes impedes, or because of its complex phraseology... Croatian, my native tongue, is, for instance, purely flectional and word-order-independent (the only difference between SVO - the default - and SOV or OSV or OVS word orders is marking/style); however, that may cause a lot of confusion in non-standard (marked) sentences. There are no such problems in English - change the word order and you've changed the meaning.
(I do hope someone finds this interesting... I only aced the relevant exam yesterday;))
Oh, yes... Gnome 1.4 is the reason I still couldn't care less about KDE...
Detachable menus, switchable window managers, a config button next to each menu entry, lots of applets that I haven't been able to find in the new Gnome...
I'm using Gnome 2.10 presently - I started using it out of habit and I just *hate* what they've done with it, and I'll switch to E17 as soon as it's a bit more developed: it's fast, has a lot of eye-candy and epplets (or whatever they are called now), which I like a lot... and is configurable as hell. *And* I can change the resolution whenever I want to; I prefer the standard Unix desktop zooming to this Windows-like re-arranging of desktop and every single panel - when I change resolution, it's because I have an old machine and things like CrackAttack work better in 640×480 than in 1600×1200.
Don't get me wrong, Gnome is great for newbies and I still prefer Gnome's design to KDE's... I just never expected to become so nostalgic so soon...
And don't get me started on applictions... the games that were great are now crap - not just SameGnome, but also AisleRiot... every single thing I'd found an advantage in Gnome over other DEs was stripped, Nautilus is a memory hog and Metacity is one of the worst WMs ever. The one and only reason to use Gnome are the panels which, frankly, isn't that much any more.
Having said all that, I'll probably upgrade to Gnome 2.12, if nothing else, out of bizzare curiosity... that, and the feeling I have to test all the desktops before I decide which ones I'll install when I buy a new machine and take the old one to college as the first Linux machine there. I just want to see the face of the guy that said 'Why put Linux, only you know how to use that crap...' when he sees any of the configured desktops.;)
Damn you, dotgain! I gave up my mod points because of you! Damn you, you... insensitive clod!;) (Someone else, please mod parent +1 Nostalgic):)
Well, from what I've been able to gather about Americans, they (you?) are a pretty paranoid bunch. That, however, doesn't necessarily mean that there isn't anyone out to get you;)
Here in Croatia there has also been (and there still is, though limited) quite an artificial paranoia - make the people afraid of this or that internal or external enemy and nobody has the time to watch your sleight of hand as you safely deposit other people's money on your Swiss bank account.
Furthermore, never attribute to malice what you can attribute to stupidity - AFAIK some viruses were made by accident; one was supposed to prevent illegal disk copying...
Furthermore, I'd guess that anyone good enough to create such a virus in this day and age probably isn't malicious enough... any of his work would probably be well recognised (and paid) well before that.
Anyway, most viruses were made as pranks; deleting the Internet is hardly a prank. The worms of today are more malicious...
Any virus writer that has read anything by Stanislaw Lem would know how to make a perfectly evil virus... it would only have to do two things:
1. Replicate so that every single infectable $OS-based computer in the network is infected.
2. When 1, do $MALICIOUS_ACTION.
It is that simple; no attempts to re-install itself from the Registry would be necessary since even if it is deleted, since as the ratio of infected vs. clean computers grows, the likelihood of re-infection grows towards 1.
The smaller and simpler the code, the more efficient it is... a patient and malicious virus writer could in fact wait years until the conditions are just right.
And now, paranoia time: what if this kind of virus sits in most computers already, as a part of some game or a utility program that everybody likes and uses? (OK, so it's a trojan in this case... but bear with me.) If it isn't in a signature database, no heuristics can detect it - it is completely dormant apart from sending a small message to the server when the program searches for updates, and then recieving another, containing either a 'sleep until further notice' or 'deploy at $DATE' instruction.
Joker paranoia time: As above, except that 2+ programs have to be installed on the same computer for the virus to do anything.
I recall having an AI program installed, but I can't recall its name...it should be in the Debian repository somewhere, but it's nowhere to be found in Gentoo...
Anyway, I showed it to a friend once. We sat down and talked to it, and when it started spitting our sentences back at us, we started swearing and insulting.
It took us about 15-20 minutes to bring it to the IQ level of a common Usenet troll... if I still had the program, I'd be using it to generate replies to morons.
I recall Apple's OpenDoc, being announced as the OLE killer and all that...
I was quite sad when I heard it was killed - and I was just a kid at the time.
Actually, it is one thing I'd like to see on Linux... although I like OO.o, it is still a monstruously large application; a modular office app that would only load the tools it needed would be much faster and, for those 80% of the users that use 20% of the functions, infinitely more simple.
Now, if only I found someone with enough free time and coding knowledge... or had the time to learn coding myself...
Slashdot Mirror
While it is possible to determine which group branched when, at least relatively, I don't think you'll find that Greek and Latin are as close as you suggest.
Furthermore, you appear to believe that just because there is no strict word order in a given language, there is also no preferred word order. You are, naturally, completely wrong. Yoda-speak translates to Croatian very easily, and I imagine it would translate to nearly any language in the world. You can always mangle the word order into something funny.
Furthermore, I think you might find interesting that the Latin alphabet is just an adaptation of the Greek alphabet, which has its origins in Semitic alphabet systems; nothing more, nothing less. The detailed development of the Latin alphabet actually constitued most of my first Greek lesson in college.
Therefore, much as you do raise some interesting points, Latin and Greek remain no more closely related than Latin and Sanskrit - at least not significantly. Most of the similarites you mention are not based on genetic relation, but rather on geographical (and, hence, cultural) proximity.
This was actually a nice chance for me to revise some things for my exam on Thursday... it's quite a pity my college is so strong on Indo-European linguistics, and far weaker on other linguistic areas... Ah, well...
If my knowledge of Greek still serves me: 'agamos' - in a free translation, 'without a sexual partner'; 'parthenos' - a virgin.
If my room wasn't such a mess, I'd be able to find the exact ordering of seven or so categories... but I think I made my point anyway.
On a sidenote, as a non-native English speaker, I have to ask: where would you put 'I ain't got no nose'?
Geographically, I mean.
Ouch, ouch, ouch.
Latin and Greek are not related any closer than Latin and Hittite or Latin and Sanskrit (which should really be spelled Sanskrt).
While certain things in Latin culture have been borrowed from Greek, the languages themselves are not related, apart from belonging in the Indo-European family.
Latin is a member of the Latin/Faliskic group, while Greek has no close relatives.
Furthermore, Romance languages are not that heavy on flection as Slavic ones, for instance... translation is so much more than 'knowing where to put the words', although I've stopped expecting most people to realise that - if it were just that, computer translators would be much more efficient, for one thing.
*Whew* I was almost worried.
I'm quite sick and tired of governments that have the money for weapons, but not the money for schools, just as I'm tired of incompetent bloody politicians that want to please the parents by reducing the strain put on the poor children by the horrible schools.
School is not too hard and it was not too hard. If you could take it, than we could've also; if we could take it, the kids of now surely can.
[/my everlasting rant on this subject. Sorry.]
IME intelligent people flame just like the other kind; they only use bigger words properly.
Not much of a difference, if you ask me.
Even the ancient philosophers, whom we mostly percieve as dignified and wise, flamed each other quite the same way we flame today... it's just that there were not that many of them.
I mean, it's a Re: frist post
I find it an excellent comment on this topic.
If you can't see the joke here... OK, so it would be lame usually, but here and now I find it quite funny.
I wish I didn't spend my last point yesterday.
Only if it fails critically.
Would that be Max?
Isn't.
Whatever.
Only the YOU DO NOT KNOW FUCK part is.
Which is kind of amusing, your post considered.
... people may actually move to Linux.
Languages generally fall into one of the following categories: isolative, aglutinative, flective or incorporative.
Isolative languages are languages like Chinese and Vietnamese, where words have one form and one form only. Such languages have no grammar as such, at least not the tenses/cases/etc. kind we're used to.
Aglutinative languages are languages like Hungarian and Turkish, where every grammatical affix carries exactly one meaning - therefore, if you want to designate the 2nd person in plural, you need two affixes just for that. In these langages, more than ten suffixes on a single stem are not at all uncommon; in fact, it's the most intriguing word formation process I've ever seen, and I guess these languages would be easy to parse (my computer linguistics classes all come in later years, though, so I'm just guessing).
Then there are the flective languages, like Latin and most Indo-European languages. These languages use complex affixes that carry more than one meaning (for example, one affix is enough for 'nominative case, 1st person, singular, female gender' or '3rd person, plural, past').
Now, I say 'most Indo-European languages' because of English, primarily: it seems that languages pass through these phases regularly as they develop: isolative, aglutinative, flective, then isolative again. The English grammar is getting less and less morphological and more and more syntactical, which is a characteristic of isolative languages (so you did get it right, generally speaking).
The fourth kind of languages are the incorporative ones; they look like ultra-aglutinative languages, since one word can express the meaning of a sentence (for instance, in Inuit you can say one word that means 'I want to buy a big boat').
I really don't know whether English is a difficult language to parse solely because of its word order, which sometimes helps and sometimes impedes, or because of its complex phraseology...
Croatian, my native tongue, is, for instance, purely flectional and word-order-independent (the only difference between SVO - the default - and SOV or OSV or OVS word orders is marking/style); however, that may cause a lot of confusion in non-standard (marked) sentences. There are no such problems in English - change the word order and you've changed the meaning.
(I do hope someone finds this interesting... I only aced the relevant exam yesterday ;))
Horcruci? ;)
Detachable menus, switchable window managers, a config button next to each menu entry, lots of applets that I haven't been able to find in the new Gnome...
I'm using Gnome 2.10 presently - I started using it out of habit and I just *hate* what they've done with it, and I'll switch to E17 as soon as it's a bit more developed: it's fast, has a lot of eye-candy and epplets (or whatever they are called now), which I like a lot... and is configurable as hell. *And* I can change the resolution whenever I want to; I prefer the standard Unix desktop zooming to this Windows-like re-arranging of desktop and every single panel - when I change resolution, it's because I have an old machine and things like CrackAttack work better in 640×480 than in 1600×1200.
Don't get me wrong, Gnome is great for newbies and I still prefer Gnome's design to KDE's... I just never expected to become so nostalgic so soon...
And don't get me started on applictions... the games that were great are now crap - not just SameGnome, but also AisleRiot... every single thing I'd found an advantage in Gnome over other DEs was stripped, Nautilus is a memory hog and Metacity is one of the worst WMs ever. The one and only reason to use Gnome are the panels which, frankly, isn't that much any more.
Having said all that, I'll probably upgrade to Gnome 2.12, if nothing else, out of bizzare curiosity... that, and the feeling I have to test all the desktops before I decide which ones I'll install when I buy a new machine and take the old one to college as the first Linux machine there. I just want to see the face of the guy that said 'Why put Linux, only you know how to use that crap...' when he sees any of the configured desktops. ;)
Damn you, dotgain! I gave up my mod points because of you! Damn you, you... insensitive clod! ;) :)
(Someone else, please mod parent +1 Nostalgic)
Oh, my...
Here in Croatia there has also been (and there still is, though limited) quite an artificial paranoia - make the people afraid of this or that internal or external enemy and nobody has the time to watch your sleight of hand as you safely deposit other people's money on your Swiss bank account.
Furthermore, never attribute to malice what you can attribute to stupidity - AFAIK some viruses were made by accident; one was supposed to prevent illegal disk copying...
Furthermore, I'd guess that anyone good enough to create such a virus in this day and age probably isn't malicious enough... any of his work would probably be well recognised (and paid) well before that.
Anyway, most viruses were made as pranks; deleting the Internet is hardly a prank. The worms of today are more malicious...
1. Replicate so that every single infectable $OS-based computer in the network is infected.
2. When 1, do $MALICIOUS_ACTION.
It is that simple; no attempts to re-install itself from the Registry would be necessary since even if it is deleted, since as the ratio of infected vs. clean computers grows, the likelihood of re-infection grows towards 1.
The smaller and simpler the code, the more efficient it is... a patient and malicious virus writer could in fact wait years until the conditions are just right.
And now, paranoia time: what if this kind of virus sits in most computers already, as a part of some game or a utility program that everybody likes and uses? (OK, so it's a trojan in this case... but bear with me.)
If it isn't in a signature database, no heuristics can detect it - it is completely dormant apart from sending a small message to the server when the program searches for updates, and then recieving another, containing either a 'sleep until further notice' or 'deploy at $DATE' instruction.
Joker paranoia time: As above, except that 2+ programs have to be installed on the same computer for the virus to do anything.
Programming as an art form :)
Even though it's a virus, I can more readily appreciate the art in it than in most of modern art.
Go figure.
Anyway, I showed it to a friend once. We sat down and talked to it, and when it started spitting our sentences back at us, we started swearing and insulting.
It took us about 15-20 minutes to bring it to the IQ level of a common Usenet troll... if I still had the program, I'd be using it to generate replies to morons.
I was quite sad when I heard it was killed - and I was just a kid at the time.
Actually, it is one thing I'd like to see on Linux... although I like OO.o, it is still a monstruously large application; a modular office app that would only load the tools it needed would be much faster and, for those 80% of the users that use 20% of the functions, infinitely more simple.
Now, if only I found someone with enough free time and coding knowledge... or had the time to learn coding myself...
But I've spent all of my mod points, so now I can only rant...
8,230,000 for Elvis.