this post was submitted on 05 May 2024
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Yandex reverse image search often works considerably better than Google's.
And their translator too. I use it all the time for Latin. Google Translate was made mostly for Romance and Germanic languages, so it sucks at assigning the right case to Latin, and the word order is often a mess. Yandex was however made with Russian in mind, that is ~~syntactically~~ EDIT: grammatically* closer to Latin in those two aspects.
*case division is morphology in this case.
Oh you too are versed in the language of Romance?
Yes! Video related, that's me!
Serious now. It's just that I don't recall which Latin descendants Google supports, and I'm not going to check it.
I had 6 years of Latin in school and remember less than 1% of it. Talk about a waste of time. Bada bing bada boom shoulda learned Italian-English rather.
Sure. I'm not saying that Latin is useful for most people. It isn't; I don't expect most people to fuck around with Plautus, Cicero, Catullus etc. I'm saying that Yandex Translate is useful for me because of decent support for Latin, while Google offers better support for a handful of Latin descendants aka Romance languages (like Italian).
And it's mostly due to a coincidence - because the platform was made by Russian speakers and Russian happens to still keep a similar case system as Latin does.
(...anche parlo italiano, ma davvero per italiano non uso nessuno - se non so qualcosa uso dizionari. Dà meno lavoro.)
Fuhgeddaboudit
Sounds a little suss. All the propaganda I see about Latin mentions its free word order.
Word order in Latin is only syntactically free. As in, if you change the word order, you aren't changing who did what. However, you're still changing the topic (whatever we were talking about) and comment (the new info that I'm adding in).
I'll give you an example:
Note how I used articles to convey roughly the same meaning in English. That's because what Latin is doing with the word order is not too unlike what English does with articles. Sure, you can use "the boy", "a boy", or simply "boy", it won't change the basic meaning, but it's still not "random".
And guess which language happens to use a similar system? Russian. The only major difference is that by default (i.e. you aren't focusing on any element), Latin would put the verb at the end and Russian in the middle; but it's the same variability.