Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by marginalia_nu 991 days ago
Latin is tricky though. Google translate is notoriously bad at latin grammar, much worse than most living languages.

Not exactly sure why, maybe small corpus, maybe because it's a pro-drop language without fixed word order and an very complex set of conjugation rules.

1 comments

> Not exactly sure why, maybe small corpus

That's probably most of the problem. The entire corpus of ancient Latin is on the order of 9-10M words. If you printed it at the same density as a typical English novel, it wouldn't even fill a bookcase.

Why would the corpus need to be limited to antique latin? The language was in use for much longer than antiquity. You've got everything from Thomas Aquinas to Isaac Newton to pad with.
Because they are almost different languages "modern" latin is quite different to "roman" latin.
Even roman latin changed during the millennium it was around though.