[ExI] chinese synthesis

[Dan]

Yeah, I'm not surprised. When I was in high school, I read _Cancer Ward_ by Solzhenitsyn. In the novel, one of the patients in the cancer ward reads his folder and it states "casus inoperabilis." For an English speaker -- and probably a French or Italian speaker -- it's quite easy to understand what this means. But for a native Russian speaker with no knowledge of Latin or of the aforementioned languages, it's opaque -- and that's the point in the novel: the patient can read it, but not have a clue what it means.

My guess would be Slavic languages would be, overall, not as influenced by Latin. Maybe some of them would have some Latin and Greek influence, but nothing like those of Germanic and Romance languages. Of course, the technical terms likely are similar in many cases, but they might alien to a native speaker without a technical background -- whereas an English speaker would be very likely to guess what "inoperabilis" means even if she never studied Latin and knew nothing about medical terminology.
 
Regards,


Dan



From: Alfio Puglisi <alfio.puglisi at gmail.com>
To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> 
Sent: Saturday, June 1, 2013 9:46 AM
Subject: Re: [ExI] chinese synthesis
 


On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 2:54 PM, Stefano Vaj <stefano.vaj at gmail.com> wrote:


>
>Passive English comes out of that practically for free, and you can leverage your Italian and Latin to quickly grasp the basic grammar and vocabulary of all neo-Latin languages. In turn, German provides you a sufficient root lexicon to learn to understand Dutch or Swedish by yourself, not to mention the fact that words with a Greek etimology are one and the same across the entire spectrum of European languages (I do not know how to say theatre, epathitis or philosophy in Czech, but am confident that I would recognise the words)

Let's see..


philosophy - filozofie

that looks easy, but then:

theathre - divadlo
hepatitis - zánět jater

Oops.
Languages in East Europe are in a class of their own :-)

Alfio
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