What is the difficulty of Latin?

Latin is the language of ancient Rome and the originator of modern romance. Latin originated from the dialect of a small village on the Tiber River and spread to most parts of the world in the long river of history. In the Middle Ages, Latin was the medium of international communication and the language of science, philosophy and theology. Until modern times, knowing Latin was an indispensable prerequisite for any liberal arts education; Only in this century did the study of Latin decline and the focus shifted to the study of living languages. Roman Catholicism traditionally uses Latin as the official language and the language for river worship.

Around 1000 BC, immigrants from the north brought Latin to the Italian peninsula. In the next few hundred years, Rome appeared and occupied a prominent position, and Roman Latin became the standard language of the emerging Roman Empire. At the same time as classical Latin, there was a colloquial dialect that was brought to the whole empire by the Roman army. It completely replaced the languages that existed in Italy before the Roman Empire, as well as Gaul and Spanish, and the barbarians who carved up the Roman Empire in the fifth century were also happy to accept this language. As a result of further differentiation, modern Romanesque languages have emerged, namely Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian.

The Latin alphabet (or Roman alphabet) was created in the 7th century BC. It is based on the Etruscan alphabet, which comes from Greek. Among the first 26 Etruscan letters, the Romans adopted 2 1 letter. The original Latin letters are: A, B, C (for G and K), D, E, F, X (for zeta in Greek), H, I (for I and J), K, M, N, O, P, Q, R (although written as P for a long time), S, T, V (for U). Later, the Greek letter X was abandoned and replaced by a new letter G. After the conquest of Greece in the first century BC, the Greek letters Y and Z were adopted and placed at the end of the alphabet. Thus, the new Latin alphabet contains 23 letters. It was not until the Middle Ages that J (as distinguished from I) and the letters U and W (as distinguished from V) were added.

Latin lacks the diversity and flexibility of Greek to some extent, which may reflect the pragmatic character of the Romans. The Romans cared more about the government and empire than speculative ideas and poetic imagination. However, in the hands of classical masters, Latin is the language of any literature and poetry in the world.

The difficulty of Chinese is rare in the world, which scares foreigners, but some people say that Chinese can only rank sixth among the most difficult languages in the world, and I think it is probably the same.

The difficulty between Latin and Greek mainly lies in the accuracy of expression through complex forms.

For example, Latin has six verbs and six nouns. Verbs have several tenses, and nouns have six cases and three properties.

All these tenses, cases and genders are realized through the changes of suffixes, so the first level of learning Latin is to remember these suffixes.

The same is true of Greek.

When you see a sentence in Latin and Greek, sometimes you can't find the subject and predicate at all. First, you need to find the verb and see what the suffix is, then you can analyze the object, structure and so on of this sentence. In a word, it is tedious, but the difficulty of Chinese lies in the difficulty of writing and the lack of vocabulary. Writing is certainly not a problem for China people, but it is really too difficult and different for Indo-European people. The lack of vocabulary leads to homophones in Chinese.

Greek philosophy originated from the ancient Greeks' thinking about the operation law of everything in heaven and earth. They use their precise and complicated language to express the same precise and complicated ideas. Finally, the Greeks developed natural science theories such as physics, astronomy, medicine, zoology and botany from natural philosophy, which was not unrelated to their exquisite language. Looking back at China, China people's ambiguity, ambiguity and conciseness restrict people from expressing all kinds of subtle thoughts. China's philosophy gradually embarked on the road of ethical standard.