Sunday, January 20, 2013
Dumb linguists as usual
Benny Boy has written his first Tweet in modernized Latin. "Scholars" are saying the same old nonsense:
The Vatican daily L'Osservatore Romano threw its weight behind the initiative last week, with Manlio Simonetti, a professor of Christian history, telling the paper that Latin was well-suited to Twitter. "Latin adapts very well to the brevity demanded by new social networks, even better than English," he said.Bad generalization from a good fact. Latin, as a synthetic language, packs more grammar into each word than English does. But this makes an 'average' sentence longer in terms of syllables or characters. Because most noun inflections are repeated on article, adjective and noun, and verb inflections are often multisyllabic, you generally end up with more characters for the same meaning in Latin. English is mainly an isolating language, which means our grammatical functions are chiefly performed by separate words, and each word does its job exactly once. Oriental languages get the most mileage from Twitter because they're allowed to cheat. Each character in Japanese or Chinese represents a syllable. Twitter still allows 140 characters, even though the characters carry far more weight than Roman letters. (Strictly speaking, Unicode is the cheater. Unicode uses 32 bits for each visible character no matter how much meaning it carries.) Arabic and Hebrew have a more 'honest' advantage because they don't write vowels. Even if we were still using 8-bit ASCII, Arabic and Hebrew could pack about twice as much meaning into a tweet. ¶ 5:40 PM
