h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The Romans' language--Latin--gave us lots of words, but fortunately not so much of its horrendous grammar. Word order seems so much easier to use (subject, verb, object as in English) than having to memorize a ridiculously large table of endings for different gender and case words but having the flexibility to stick them in any order you want (German is bad enough for me, thankyou).

Latin words sound a bit educated, but not as much as greek, and not as rude as anglo-saxon ones or as snobby as the french ones.

We also have the Roman alphabet, with a few letters added or taken away.

I'll see if I can find some interesting examples...

Ah, there are hundreds of examples. Especially in science. And in law.
Mutations comes from the Latin word Mutatus meaning change.
Science comes from scire (I think) which means to know.

The classification of all organisms is in Latin.

The Romans also effectively induced the phrase Veni Vidi Vici into our lives, as well as the name of the Caesarian Section. Ad Nauseum, Carpe Diem, Magna Cum Laude, Nota Bene (NB), Per Capita, Post Mortem, Per se and Non sequitur. To name a few famous ones.

And of course Post Scriptum [PS]...

Apart from the fact that without the Romans there would have been no "Asterix and Obelix" stories [], I would have had a complete different mothertongue as French is largely influenced by Latin...

Hmmmm.... No "Gladiators" on TV?!... Perish the thought...

We would not have the good old roman numbers on the grand fathers clocks either...



loup

Not to mention the wonderful "Yes Prime Minister" sketch:

"Tempus mutandis et nos mutandis in illis"

...

"I thought you'd be in favour of teaching the classics, Sir Humphrey"

"Well if one can't even use them in conversation with the Prime Minister..."

At least Latin is pronouncable.

Greek is full of impossible dipthongs and wierd letter combinations like pthalmus, gnostic and psyche.

I take Latin at School, and I have to admit, as much as I love it, I hate all the cases. I do find pronunciation a little hard, but I get by.
Alvilda

Hey Alvida - I can appreciate your difficulty - it was always the subjunctive that got me - not only where to use it but how to translate it - you need to be a linguist (from Latin lingua = tongue) to fully grasp the language - for a dead language it has an incredibly lively influence.

Can a dead language have a future tense?

And there's all that stuff having to do with the Catholic Church,
like the Vulgate and the liturgies and plain song and all that, isn't there?

Perhaps the future perfect is a more appropriate tense for a deceased language - although even though the is an ex language, Latin is not ready for burial yet - it is still around in so much of our language. Not only directly but also through French, Italian, and Spanish borrowings (they call the words we co-opted from those languages borrowings but I haven't noticed us giving them back)