Translating Latin/Greek into Slavic languages

[Wayles Browne]

At 16:59 -0800 1/9/05, Polly, Polly Metis, Metis wrote:
>Dear SEELANGS members,
>
>I actually study classics, not Slavic languages, but I
>have a question you might be able to help me with.
>Greek and Latin are inflected languages, and the word
>order is relatively free.  In English, of course, word
>order determines grammatical meaning, and so it is
>impossible to translate works of Greek and Latin
>literature into English and retain the original word
>order.
>
>As I understand it, the Slavic and Baltic languages
>are inflected, and the word order is fairly free, so I
>was wondering if, in those languages, it is possible
>or desirable to translate Greek and Latin in a way
>that preserves the original word order.
>
>Thanks,
>Christina Skelton
>

You can preserve the original order to a greater extent than you can
in English,
but still not completely. "Free" word order in Slavic means not that
you can put words
just anywhere, but that you put them in different places for specific
purposes: to show
what the sentence is about (its topic), to emphasize one word more
than another and
the like. In Latin, for example, Horace could get away with writing
"Quis multa gracilis te puer in rosa...urget"
but Serbian or Croatian would not be able to put the words in a
convoluted order like this:
"Koji mnogih vitak te dec^ko usrijed ruz^a...ljubi" wouldn't work.
--

Wayles Browne, Assoc. Prof. of Linguistics
Department of Linguistics
Morrill Hall 220, Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853, U.S.A.

tel. 607-255-0712 (o), 607-273-3009 (h)
fax 607-255-2044 (write FOR W. BROWNE)
e-mail ewb2 at cornell.edu

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