- cross-posted to:
- historymemes@piefed.social
- cross-posted to:
- historymemes@piefed.social
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Even with my terrible level in Latin, I’m glad to say I got that reference!
Explanation: The image is from a famous (if not entirely accurate) 19th century painting depicting the Roman conspirator Catiline (pictured) being harangued by the politician and famed orator Cicero.
Catiline was accused (almost certainly correctly) of attempting to overthrow the Roman Republic… but Cicero’s oratory is infamous amongst Latin students for taking forever to place the verb and stop filling up space with nested statements. DRAMATIC EFFECT
If Cicero doesn’t reach the damn verb in the next 15 minutes, Catiline’s coup is perfectly legal!
It’s the only way Roman law could stop Cicero from going on indefinitely. 😔
So it’s not only us Germans who delay the verb that much. Just be glad you don’t work as an interpreter for Ancient Latin
German: from you this is what I have learned!
More like “we the language equivalent of Gen X and millennials are, and we our woes on the earlier generations blame can.” :-P
(Both likely inherited it from Proto-Indo-European. Sanskrit also shows a similar system to Latin: SOV unless you want to emphasise something.)
In Latin you can avoid it; a VOS sentence like “mordet¹ lupum² ursus³” (the bear³ bites¹ the wolf²) is completely acceptable. And it sounds good, if the topic is the verb. (It’s like in German, when you shift some element into the first position, but in Latin you can do it even with the verb.)
But Cicero, the orator, known for allegories and alliterations, with a taste for turducken-like huge parenthetic expressions, who often used rhetorical devices and sentence structure abused, and huge lists with increasingly larger elements on each item, is who we talk about.
He did a lot like I just did in the previous sentence; and that’s for style, not grammatical requirements. He probably would’ve done the same with a VSO or SVO language, except people would complain he never reaches the object. For contrast, Julius “Stab me in the Ides of March” Caesar wrote way more clearly, even if he was also a cultured speaker of the times of Cicero. (Main difference is that Caesar was reporting things, while Cicero was trying to convince you. And I have a suspicion his turducken style actually works nicely when spoken out loud.)
Sounds a little like John Stewart Mill with his 2 page sentences.
Korean comes to mind as an SOV language.
There are many SOV languages, including Japanese and Turkish. In fact, SOV is the most common word order, followed by SVO and after a gap VSO.
The thing about German is that it can be both but the word order isn’t free either, as it is in Latin, but there are rules that aren’t straightforward at first glance. So short sentences often have SVO with a 1:1 translation to English but the more complicated the sentence, the more often you have SOV, especially when you count the content word and not the auxiliary. I can go into more detail how this so called “verb second” works if you want. But I think that that’s where the frustration comes from: easy sentences are intuitive and then – boom – out of the blue it changes.
Also: German is a Western European language so English native speakers are more likely to come into contact with it.
I’m a native German speaker. German is only strictly SOV in dependent clauses, in main clauses verb is is always in second position (V2) and if it’s more than one verb everything else is pushed to the end of the clause.
I’m also a native speaker and you said nothing that contradicts what I said. I even elaborated on the difference between auxiliary and content verbs. No one cares about the former.
I’m glad I started learning German way after Latin. By then, playing around word order was already intuitive; and even V2 gets easier to understand. (“So, SOV like Latin, but if V2 is empty I kick the last verb there. Got it.”)
