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The influence of Latin on the World and Esperanto

de ceigered, 2010-marto-27

Mesaĝoj: 15

Lingvo: English

ceigered (Montri la profilon) 2010-marto-27 07:52:14

This is by no means a proper study, rather just some rough calculations based off of the amount of latin roots I've found in languages I've been interested, combined with the amount of people who can speak them (native and 2nd language combined), but going on what I've got I've pretty much come to finding that at least 3,000 million, approximately half the world, has had fairly decent exposure to Latin roots (with about 2 billion of that being heavy exposure, e.g. in English and the Romance languages).

So what do you know! Esperanto and Ido really are quite neutral word-root wise (well, the most you can really get in a world where just about half speak a European language, half speak some form of Chinese, and that other half we keep forgetting about speak something else - even then, those languages, like Japanese for example, are often perforated immensely by Latin and English neologisms)

Anyone else got better figures or similar/differing estimates? Or anybody currently trying to pretend to be a Latin hunter trying to imagine his tribe's language ruling the world eventually?

qwertz (Montri la profilon) 2010-marto-27 08:53:17

If somebody studies a medical subject (i.e. anatomy) latin language skills are a big advantage. Furthermore, I'm not sure, may be it is compulsory. So, Latin will be present in the future even it is not spoken and everybody holding a medical degree is a "Latin hunter" by nature. okulumo.gif

Roberto12 (Montri la profilon) 2010-marto-27 09:08:17

An interesting follow-up question is whether there's a language (or family) that's more internationally embedded than the Romance. I think the answer's no, so even if the spread of Latin is overrated, it's still the best choice for a base.

Having said this, among travellers and internationally-minded people, English must be the most known language, so for the active international community, maybe that language would be best, either as itself or in a simplified form.

ceigered (Montri la profilon) 2010-marto-27 12:26:00

In response to Roberto's great question: Internationally I'd agree, Chinese still hasn't really taken off yet, and English terms that have are mostly pseudo latin in ways anyway. Japanese is making a small impact technologically, but often based on English (based on Latin etc).

erinja (Montri la profilon) 2010-marto-27 14:31:34

ceigered, that's such an interesting finding. I have long felt that a lot of people must have some exposure to Latin roots, due to the legacy of colonial languages.

Colonialism was probably the best thing that could have happened to the Romance language family. European powers brought their languages with them as they colonized the world, and disseminated the knowledge of Latin roots worldwide. [not saying that colonialism was a good thing, just saying that its result was to disseminate knowledge of romance languages]

I'm sure that if China had colonized the world, our languages would have adopted lots of Chinese roots! And indeed, Chinese is the source for a lot of scientific and technical terms in many Asian languages, just as Latin is the source for these terms in English.

gyrus (Montri la profilon) 2010-marto-27 19:46:17

Japanese and Chinese are relatively free of Latinate words. Japanese has far more English-based words, but that depends on the semantic field.

andogigi (Montri la profilon) 2010-marto-27 20:20:42

gyrus:Japanese and Chinese are relatively free of Latinate words. Japanese has far more English-based words, but that depends on the semantic field.
What you say is very true. However, Chinese script could have easily been converted towards European languages without much effort, assuming that the Latin alphabet had never taken hold.

Take the phrase "My house is small".

Consider in Esperanto

Mia domo estas malgranda.

我a 家o 是as 不大a.

Where:
我 = I or Me
家 = house
是 = to be, is
不 = not
大 = big

I'm certainly not suggesting adding this level of complexity to Esperanto. I'm only stating that if Chinese script had spread much farther, it could have been accepted into European languages without much effort.

LyzTyphone (Montri la profilon) 2010-marto-28 04:45:03

andogigi:Take the phrase "My house is small".

Consider in Esperanto

Mia domo estas malgranda.

我a 家o 是as 不大a.

Where:
我 = I or Me
家 = house
是 = to be, is
不 = not
大 = big

I'm certainly not suggesting adding this level of complexity to Esperanto. I'm only stating that if Chinese script had spread much farther, it could have been accepted into European languages without much effort.
Intresting~

So I am here doing a thought experiment. What if, in the Ming Dynasty when Admiral Zheng Ho took to the high seas, he, colonised a tiny island in Europe. The people there then took up the Chinese roots but use them in a relatively indo-european way...

My house is not big
"Wode jia sxit bu dat."


Pater Noster (Catholic)
"Womende (-men: plural form) Fuh, de sxit zai tien..."

UDHR Article I
"Chwen ren sxit beisheng (bei: passive, sheng: bear) ziyou-de (-de: adjective affix) han pindeng-de yu zunyen han chwenlie. Tamen beigeh lisxing han liangsxin han yinggai bicu sxiongdi-bande (sxiongdi: brother , bande: -like) duidai"

completely without any Latin root now. But so mindboggling even to a Chinese, indeed...

Deserves attention though, is that just as the European languages, the Chinese phonology also evolved through time, though just by the writing there is no way to tell. But according to the study done by missionary Matteo Ricci‎, Chinese phonology in Ming Dynasty is already close to madarin of our day. That's why I chose this period of time.

ceigered (Montri la profilon) 2010-marto-28 06:55:52

That's pretty cool Lyz! What would have probably happened is you would have had all the Chinese words taking over the scientific and more "technical" words in English, so it might be easier to get an English sentence, single out all the French roots, and then replace them with "anglicised" chinese (remembering that vowel changes in English would have affected the chinese roots over time, resulting in things like "tamen" maybe becoming pronounced as /teim@n/. And that could affect the orthography too if the invaders only used their script and didn't use the Latin script like their subjects.

Interestingly though, one major reason English people don't speak a very heavily Englishly-pronounced version of Anglo-Norman French / Vulgar Latin (remember again, Anglo-Norman French was pronounced closer to Latin and Middle English than it was to French today as extensive nasalisation, sound changes, dropped letters and the guttural R had not yet taken total effect), is because the Normans did not mind the "natives" speaking their own language. If it weren't for that decision, we'd probably be speaking French (only more as it's written like Italian etc).

ceigered (Montri la profilon) 2010-marto-28 07:27:56

gyrus:Japanese and Chinese are relatively free of Latinate words. Japanese has far more English-based words, but that depends on the semantic field.
I've noticed Chinese tends to take the meaning of some words it would otherwise loan from Latin and uses existing vocab to do it. Japanese tends to borrow some scientific/sci-fi or technology related vocab from English, then Nihonise it (terebi, camera, kameriha (came(ra) rehea(rsal)), dejikame (digi(tal) came(ra)), and so forth, and in Chinese: "dianhua" = telephone, literally "eletric speech", which is translated from "Tele" and "phone")

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