Friday, February 12, 2016
Sort of interesting
One of Polistra's favorite themes is decentralization or subsidiarity. Nature doesn't do top-down. Nature does modular. Another favorite theme is the power of linguistic FORMS. (Not VOCABULARY.) Are people and cultures shaped by the distinction between synthetic and agglutinative languages?
Toss both together and you get a pointless but interesting salad.
Antichrist Francine and Patriarch Kirill are meeting, which is (surprisingly) the FIRST EVER meeting of a Roman leader and a Russian Orthodox leader.
What's the main distinction between Roman and Byzantine? Centralization. Rome rules absolutely over all Roman Catholics. The eastern churches are much more fragmented, with no single leader for all cultural groups and no single set of rules.
Slavic and Latin are both synthetic languages, so agg doesn't get into the picture. But there's one strong distinction between the two families. Both started with a similar level of complexity in nouns and verbs.
Latin languages decided to simplify the nouns. French, Spanish and Italian lost all but a peculiar vestigial remnant of noun cases, and preserved IE verb complexity nearly intact. When verb forms fell together, Latinate languages REBUILT new verb forms. They HUNGERED for complexity in verbs.
Slavic decided to simplify the verbs while keeping the IE noun pattern nearly intact, and even adding a new 'second locative' to some nouns.
Think of nouns as places and verbs as rules. The Eastern tradition has many places and simple basic rules. (Each place has its own rules, some of which are more complex.) The Roman tradition has ONE place and a massively complex basic catechism.
Atrocious analogy but sort of interesting.
Labels: Grand Blueprint, Language update
¶ 4:21 AM
