Warning: This post contains Serious Geekery. (Reader discretion advised.)

In our reading on the history of English, one paragraph in particular struck me as being monumental. The block of text under the heading "The Vikings Simplify English" is fairly modest, but it describes an event which has had a lasting impact not only on the way we write and speak, but also on the way we think.

English was once an extensively inflected language just as Latin, Ancient Greek, and some Romance Languages are, but it is no longer.

Take the English sentence, The dog bit the poet. If you were to rearrange at random the words in the sentence, you would get sentences that have different meanings (The poet bit the dog.) and sentences that make no meaning at all (The bit poet dog the.). This is because in English we do not inflect, or change the spellings of, nouns to signify how they function in a sentence. Poet is spelled poet whether he is biting or being bitten.

In Latin, the same sentence looks like this: Canis poetam momordit. But it could just as comprehensibly look like this: Poetam canis momordit, or even this: Momordit poetam canis, and it would still be readable (so long as you knew Latin). The inflected -am ending on poetam clarifies that the poet is the victim of the attack, no matter where in the sentence he tries to run.

The result is that in Latin, the order of the words has almost no bearing on their meaning, while in English we are dependent upon sentence structures and forms. Different languages are inflected to different degrees and have extremely different structures. I think it very likely that that these differences have an effect on how we associate ideas, even if we're not consciously making grammatical decisions in our thoughts.


To give another (gratuitous) example: Dixit, et ignotas animum dimittit in artes naturamque novat.

He said he turns his attention to the unknown things in nature and the arts, he shapes his mind anew.

In the Latin order it reads: He said and unknown things mind he turns attention in art nature and he shapes anew. Two distinct clauses, completely violated and mangled into one formless conglomerate. WTF Ovid!?