>But your point raises an interesting facet I never tho't of before:
Greek and Latin
>*are* "dead" languages insofar as they cannot change as drastically as
those we call
>"English," "French," etc.
Hmmmm... I thought Latin and Greek HAD changed, fairly
drastically--into modern Greek and into several Romance languages
(Italian being just the most obvious; cf. also French, Catalan,
Spanish, Portugese, Romanian...)
Or are you just celebrating a tautology? Classical Greek cannot change
or else it would not be Classicval Greek; ditto Latin.
Just to steer this OUTRAGEOUSLY OFF-TOPIC thread back a bit closer to
neuroscience: a smattering of Greek and Latin makes neuroanatomical
terms into something more than arbitrary "nonsense words" or "codes"
and thereby easier to remember.
For ex., antidromic, saltatory, thalamus, hypothalamus, epithalamus,
hippocampus, cornu Ammonis, indusium griseum, fasciculus retroflexus,
cortex, corpus callosum, etc., etc., etc...
F. Frank LeFever, Ph.D.
NYNG (also, Linguistics Section, NY Academy of Sciences)