1. While my experience with Latin is limited to two years in middle school, this brought up memories. My own translations of Latin were rather of the "gruyère cheese" variety, with many holes in the sentences...
   
   On the other hand, I have a rather longish experience with the Latin of the Far-East, aka Classical Chinese. This language has its own difficulties, one among which is that there are no indications of number (unless you really want to be specific, which, alas, is not too often the case). You can read for pages and pages of the stuff, and have yet no idea how many warriors are crossing China back and forth on horses... Maybe it's just one, maybe 5, who knows, who cares? Gender too is sketchy, inasmuch as we Westerners come with a pretty open mind on who can join a profession. A blacksmith is a blacksmith is a man, of course, but in some other less obvious cases, of course, it's not that easy. And Classical Chinese can be terse and hermetical. Very. And has no punctuation. Up to you to find where the sentence starts and ends...
     posted by dda at 09:20:58 PM on February 08, 2004  
2. I feel horribly geeky for admitting this, but the first thing that came to mind while reading that quote was Scheme, where each program is just one big expression.
   
   I'm not proud of that. I'm afraid it's a sign that I'm thinking too much about programming.
     posted by Ian Bicking at 10:42:26 PM on February 08, 2004  
3. """I feel horribly geeky for admitting this, but the first thing that came to mind while reading that quote was Scheme, where each program is just one big expression."""
   
   Yes, I thought about Lisp as well. :-) The comparison isn't 100% accurate though, since translated Latin sentences typically go on and on, rather than being deeply nested. Maybe that observation is even geekier... :-)
     posted by Hans at 07:03:30 AM on February 09, 2004  
4. Classic Latin had no punctuation either. Fortunately, people thoughtfully inserted this into the old texts, so it's a bit easier to read.
     posted by Hans at 07:05:41 AM on February 09, 2004  
5. Right, it is *german* that can be deeply nested in a scheme-like way. ("Compare and contrast the ``Sentence Adjective'' construction (used to such great effect in Kafka's Metamorphosis) with ``lambda'' " :-)
   
   
     posted by Mark Eichin at 10:55:46 AM on February 09, 2004  
6. I think most languages can be deeply nested like that, we just don't usually do it because it's unreadable. (Which doesn't really speak for Lisp/Scheme, really... <wink>)
   
   Metamorphosis... is that Die Verwandlung? I read that book in high school... or actually, was forced to read it. Gregor Samsa and all that...
     posted by Hans at 01:04:35 PM on February 09, 2004