@JoonasIlmavirta I've already called the police.

@SebastianKoppehel I felt gerundives weren't as unusual as phrases like ab urbem conditam meaning "from the founding of the city." While it's fairly natural for me to construct the Latin in this way now, I do not try to square it away with the English anymore.

@JoonasIlmavirta I think it is very common in most languages! It just happens in different contexts.

> The dead senators he read about in the papers scared him enough to flee the country immediately.

> The city captured, we were forced to surrender.

> With many people leaving, we had nothing more to do.

The are all common dominant contructions.

Or was that not what you meant?

@cmw That must have been an interesting emergency call...

@Sebastian: Are you sad at the passing of Merkel? Faust? Did he look into the "abyss", for too long? Not content with looking, didn't he make a deal with it?

@Adam: Your Q., on the abyss, seems to have really started something!

@tony I love getting a good conversation going!

@cmw They haven't showed up at my door yet. But I'll keep a suitcase packed just in case.

@Cerberus I'm not sure. But it's certainly close!

Things like metonymy are common in all languages, but their use in Latin really requires me to use a different mindset than in English or Finnish. It's hard to put my finger exactly on what it is, though.

It's also things like summus mons being both "the highest point of the mountain" and "the highest of the mountains".

@JoonasIlmavirta Yes, each language has its typical patterns of metonymy.

English does have things like the upper atmosphere.

It does not mean the upper one of the atmospheres.

@Cerberus True! Finnish uses prefixes, so we have something like a super-atmosphere, 'yläilmakehä'.

Makes sense.

English has the exosphere.

@Cerberus Do you happen to know if there's an accessible description somewhere of some common metonymy patterns in languages? I'd be interested in 1-3 pages of text, not a whole book or such. I don't think I've ever read on the concept, but I have accumulated some scattered thoughts that might benefit from context and conceptualization.

@JoonasIlmavirta I've always been curious: with your keyboard, do you need to do extra typing to use ä versus a? Using an English language keyboard, I have to press and hold the a key in mac OS to see other options for the vowel.

The Finnish word for a university is something like 'super-learnery', if 'learnery' makes sense as a place of learning.

@Adam We use a local keyboard layout that has the letters åäö. Same as in Swedish.

That means that some of the special characters cannot be accessed by a single button, making some programs clumsy to use. But it's better to have all the actual letters directly accessible.

@JoonasIlmavirta So you actually have extra keys on the keyboard for those?

@Adam Yes, but that comes at the price of losing some other keys. I think the square brackets [ and ] are keys on the US keyboard, but they're not here. We need alt+ctrl to get them.

@JoonasIlmavirta Yea, I was just noticing that I have those instead

@Adam Imagine a software where [ is a shortcut for an action but shift and control do something entirely different and the hotkeys are not customizable...

I've seen that at least in games. It's a bit (but not horribly) odd to have some features inaccessible due to one's keyboard layout.

@JoonasIlmavirta I don't!

Maybe ask on Linguistics or Literature.

A term to keep in mind is conceptual metaphors.

@Adam I press a followed by `` for ä.

And a// for á, etc.

No holding down keys.

I use Autohotkey.

And Ā is A-=-.

Etc.

@JoonasIlmavirta Haha a lovely word.

@JoonasIlmavirta Autohotkey can most probably solve that.

Hmm really?

I don't think it's a language thing, though, but a shared communication among the nations now?

It's very difficult, maybe impossible, to quantify or describe in any real detail. Just my feeling over a few decades of reading.

@cmw I'm sure we have some kind of Sprachbund!

@Cerberus Yes, that's what I'm thinking.

@cmw Could you give an example of a pattern of thinking that is common to European languages?

@Adam I really can't. :(

I never felt I had a good example. It's more than one or two particular things, though.

I had a much easier time just sitting and reading French than Latin, even though, at the time, I had only learned basic French and had spent years studying Latin.

@cmw Interesting

I wonder if the differences in French and Latin are the same differences in English and Latin.

English owes as much to French as it does directly to Latin, though, so maybe not the best example

@Adam Fair, but I've noticed it somewhat in German and Russian, too.

@cmw Word order?

@Cerberus I can't type a / without holding down a key. Nor `. Nor =!

@JoonasIlmavirta I can!

I hate holding down keys.

@Cerberus Maybe some good holding music would ease you into it.

You mean on the phone?

My favourite.

@cmw I share the same uncanny feeling. The ancient flow of thought is somehow different, perhaps not all that much related to the language the thought is expressed in.

Using Latin with modern thought patterns strikes me as a hallmark of neo-Latin. And that's not an accusation; my own writings certainly fit in that category.

@Cerberus What happens if a person goes to hell and a devil is temporarily unavailable? Do they get holding music?

Charon will just let them wait in the cold and dark.

@Cerberus With French, certainly, so. But not only word order. And it's not even things like SOV v. SVO.

@Cerberus It could also be that the vocabulary feels ambiguous because the semantic categories were different then.

@Cerberus And silent? The horror!

@cmw I feel that word order plays a big part in the Germanic and Romance languages.

I don't know any Slavic.

@JoonasIlmavirta This may apply when discussing modern topics.

Consider also that what we normally read is highly literary and/or poetic.

When you read the Vulgate, does that not come closer to reading a modern language?

@Cerberus And certainly applies occasionally between modern languages, too. It can be confusing and frustrating that a language you're learning can't make the distinction between a fiancee and a girlfriend, for example.

Hah.

Or between a cousin and a cousine.

Then again, Dutch does not distinguish between cousin and nephew/niece...

The mother tongue certainly has an effect on how we draw boundaries between things, even if we think of them non-verbally. That's a big part of how learning a new language can be liberating.

@Cerberus Very true. The sample of ancient literature we have is not as fully representative as one might hope.

Well, hope?

We read it because it is so literary, or it would be less interesting!

@Cerberus True, it makes it enjoyable. If we had a wider spectrum, I'd probably be most interested in the end of it that we have now. I was referring more to extant literature as a historical source.

@Adam Almost every country in Europe has its own funny keyboard layout. These were also more or less the typewriter layouts before computers, so key combinations were not workable.

Fun fact: the Swiss keyboard layout is supposed to accommodate all four national languages, but when it was designed, they decided German speakers could do without ß. German/Austrian typewriters had ß though, so the orthography diverged, and Swiss people niw spell lots of words different from the other countries (even in handwriting).

@SebastianKoppehel Fascinating. You have to wonder how many other changes in languages throughout history occurred because of something separate from the language itself.

@tony I believe Mrs Merkel is alive and well and plans to remain so for a while (in fact, there was a small political brouhaha about the fact that she'll have an office with nine employees at the taxpayers' expense).

After her term has ended?

@Cerberus Retired presidents often get some kind of a publicly funded office with some staff. Size and style depends on the country, but it's not unusual from what I've understood.

Do they also have (minor) official function?

@Cerberus Nothing official in a technical sense, but they certainly retain some of their status in the eyes of the people.

@Cerberus Yes, like Joonas said, it's not so unusual, however the parliament decided in 2019 that "future chancellors" shall have no more than five employees, but by then Merkel was already in office, so now she says that doesn't apply to her. You can see why some people are irritated...

Hmm.

We don't have that here.

But it seems a rather minor issue.

@Cerberus it will blow over, what are nine salaried employees in relation to the German federal budget?

Seems like splitting hairs to me, five versus nine.

@SebastianKoppehel It's always about the "principle," by which I mean minor political stunts to score points against an opposing political points.

@SebastianKoppehel Exactly.

@cmw That wouldn't be something we have a lot of experience with here stateside at all, no sir

@Adam Not to get too political, but it's the chief game of at least one political party here these days.

@cmw That and the fact that "well, I could use two drivers too but I don't get them!"

@SebastianKoppehel She gets two drivers? The outrage!

I don't even get one! I should have tried to become Chancellor.

@cmw At least not litter carriers, you have to grant that.

@cmw Hah, no matter the hypocrisy, even.

@SebastianKoppehel What about lictores armed with fasces?

@cmw I could use a dozen of those for the coming Christmas shopping season. Slightly unfortunate associations with the fasces nowadays, but we should be forward-thinking and open-minded.

By the way, I recently learnt that after the fascists had restored the mausoleum of Augustus in 1940, they added a Latin inscription ending in ... ANNO MDCCCCXL A F. R. XVIII ... where a f. r. = a fascibus restitutis

Since the restoration of the imperium of the fasces?

Did Mussolini come to power in 1922?

Ah, yes, he did.

Then it makes sense.