Classical Greek

Classical Greek (and maybe Modern Greek, for all I know) had a sentence structure very different from that of modern English. To some native English speakers it may be that Greek ReadsLikeGerman. Peter Jones speaks of TheMiracleOfAnd as the key differentiator between Greek and English syntax.

Modern Greek syntax is fairly close to the Romance languages.

That's interesting. It should be noted that Latin had a structure reasonably similar to that of ancient Greek, including the various sorts of inflections noted below, but this has been lost in the Romance languages descended from it. How similar have the developments of other Indo-European languages been? I know English used to be inflected, with a dual case like ancient Greek, but I don't think it was similar.

Old I-E languages (and PIE) are all inflection-rich. Most modern I-E languages from Western Europe are inflection-poor. Maybe this means there's a general trend towards less inflection. Then again, Slavic still has a case system. It could just be area-dependent; I don't know.

The examples in TheMiracleOfAnd mostly have to do with DanglingParticiples?, which are a common pitfall in translating classical into modern languages. Because English does not have a real CaseSystem?, the only clue for connecting a participial phrase with its referent is word order and punctuation. Example:

"Socrates, having departed from Delphi, spotted a goat walking around naked."

If I were saying this out loud and paused slightly between goat and running, it would be ambiguous whether Socrates or the goat is running around naked. To clear up this ambiguity you'd need to use subordinate clauses or something instead.

In Classical Greek, every noun and adjective is inflected to mark its grammatical role. I'll try to use a notation to show that. (Warning: Greek may be a bit faulty).

Greek: ho Sokratees ek Delphwn exeelthwn aiga gumnon peribainonta eskepseto. (w = omega, ee = eta)

English-with-grammatical-markers: subject(Socrates) prepositional-clause(out of Delphi) subject(having-departed) direct-object(goat naked walking-around) verb(he-spotted).

English with clauses: "After Socrates had departed from Delphi, he spotted a goat that was walking around naked."

Or alternatively:

Greek: ho Sokratees ek Delphwn exeelthwn aiga gumnos peribainwn eskepseto. (w = omega, ee = eta)

English-with-grammatical-markers: subject(Socrates) prepositional-clause(out of Delphi) subject(having-departed) direct-object(goat) subject(naked walking-around) verb(he-spotted).

English with clauses: "After Socrates had departed from Delphi and while he was walking around naked, he spotted a goat."

Classical Greek also has a very powerful participle system that English doesn't. Thus 'having been conquered' in English (3 words) would be only one word in Greek: 'nikeis'.

Classically educated people often get into the bad habit of making heavy use of participial idioms in English, despite English's poor support for them. The result is prose that's over-wordsy and a BigBallOfMud. Cf. Djikstra's famous putdown of BasicLanguage. On the other hand, participial constructions can be used heavily In Greek and Latin without loss of clarity and often with fewer words.

I can't prove it, but I think people with exposure to ancient languages tend to take more easily to LispLanguage and SchemeLanguage.

Modern German tends to be a PITA because it lies somewhere in between English and classical languages - articles and some adjectives are inflected, but nouns are generally not; yet you still have to rely on case in places where English gives clues from word-order or helper words. So there's all the work of learning a case system, but not nearly as much of the benefit. Perhaps German is the CeePlusPlus of natural languages?

See MultiParadigmLanguage, ZeekLand

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