Ok but that doesn't mean it's impossible to say that sentence in the vice-versa form. correct?
But you have to be very careful. In English you can't reverse "Dogs eat snails." You can't even totally reverse "I like dogs." You have to say something on the order of "Dogs, I like."
Ah ok so a way to remember Latin structure is to remember the way Yoda speaks?
The point I was trying to make is that since Latin is such a highly inflected language, the fine points of word order that we have to observe faithfully in modern languages is practically absent. To a large extent you can mix up the words in a Latin sentence any way you want without losing meaning. Obviously you have to keep an adjective near its noun, but you can rearrange subject, verb and object in any order to stress your point.
Yoda's quirky speech was crafted to be understandable to anglophones. "This you shall have" sounds odd but we get it. A Roman could say "this shall have you" without ambiguity.
Not true. Have you ever seen fully conjugated Spanish verbs? The first person conjugation for the verb controlar (to control) in pluperfect is había controlado (no I don't use when I speak Spanish because I don't know how that form is used, I just looked that up in my book of fully conjugated Spanish verbs. I bet it's used in Spain though.)
That's not a true pluperfect. It's the past perfect, using an auxiliary verb. In Latin the pluperfect tense is expressed by its very own series of suffixes.
Does everyone in the Vatican City speak Latin or just the priests?
There isn't much to Vatican City except religious institutions where everyone who works there has had a religious education in a Catholic school and is fluent in Latin. It is the official language of the city, and residents are expected to know it. I'm sure the janitors and chefs don't all speak Latin, but they probably commute from Rome, which completely surrounds it.
He probably told you "Două zeci de grame", which means the stamps were good for letters up to twenty (două zeci = two-tens) grams. However, I can totally understand how an untrained ear will take "două" for "do", since the final two vowels are rather soft in that word.
No, he said
do. The minimum postage rate was for ten grams, not twenty. I had studied enough Romanian to recognize the word
două.
Well, I lived for many years in Romania and never met anyone able to speak Esperanto fluently. Or at least anyone advertising his abilities as such.
I did not mean to imply that there were Esperanto speakers in every building so you would hear them talking in the street. You had to wear the green star and hope to encounter someone who recognized it, and that only happened to me a couple of times, once in Hungary and once in Czechslovakia. But the movement was much stronger in eastern Europe than the west, perhaps because under communism they needed very inexpensive hobbies. I still have more pen pals in eastern Europe than the entire rest of the world.
At the time I had one in Romania, but for reasons I don't remember we did not visit her. I've lost touch with her over the years. Frankly many of my old correspondents were older than me and have died. I haven't been very active in the movement so I have not replaced them with new ones.
You could walk around in a larger-than-life full-body green star costume in America and in your whole life you'd probably never meet anyone who even knows what it stands for.
So I'm somehow surprised by your claim that Esperanto is more widely spoken in Eastern Europe (Romania included), since my personal experience tells me that it is rather an exotic subject at best.
Not as exotic as it is in America, where very few people have even heard of it. In our country you can drive for four days and still end up in a place where everyone speaks English--even if you happen to be in northern Mexico. In eastern Europe you only have to go a couple of hundred miles to encounter a language that makes no sense to you at all.
The reason for having an international language is stronger there than elsewhere.
If anything, I'll rather bet that out of a random group of people in the streets of Bucharest, the ratio of those who have not a clue what Esperanto is to those who are actually able to say "Hello" in it, is at least 50-to-1.
In Los Angeles that would be about 50,000-to-1.
Mircea might want to try this experiment.
I thought she was living in the USA?
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