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From: hinsenk@cyclone.ERE.UMontreal.CA (Hinsen Konrad)
Subject: Re: Esperanto? The EU? (Very, very long)
In-Reply-To: Bruce McMenomy's message of 14 Mar 1995 22:46:32 GMT
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Date: Wed, 15 Mar 1995 20:02:30 GMT
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In article <3k56c8$rql@news.halcyon.com> Bruce McMenomy <mcmenomy@halcyon.com> writes:

     On a fairly objective basis, Latin can be considered to be a pretty
   regular language.  It has _very_ few irregular verbs (esp. compared to
   Greek, which is loaded with them) or English.  Its grammatical
   structures are stable and have very few exceptions.  No language is
   free from irregularity altogether, but Latin is a pretty good example
   of one that has minimal irregularity (and also a small vocabulary).

That must really be another Latin than the one I know. About the
only point I agree with are the "stable structures" - but they
are largely due to the fact that the Latin we know is only the
written language.

Although during the last centuries much effort has been made to
describe Latin in a most "regular way" (you can always turn
an exception into a rarely-used additional rule), my Latin
textbooks still have tables of irregular verbs that exceed
those for English. And the "regular" ones are of course bad
enough - even if a verb is regular, you have to remember which
conjugation system to use. Its vocabulary is certainly less chaotic
than that of modern English, but comparable to modern Romance
languages.

--
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