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Comment by jimmaswell | Hacker News Reader

Some people say learning Latin makes you a better writer, smarter, etc. even if you're unlikely to directly use it. Dubious claims but it feels like FP can be like that.

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The thing about learning Latin (not that I am great at it), at least for an English native speaker, and the epiphany English language speakers have, is the realization that language can have structure and can be discover-able, if I know a root word then I can almost be sure that I know the meaning of con, re, dom etc. There is just no equivalent to that in English other than the Latin origin words we borrowed, because we just assimilate any words we like and make up new ones as we see fit. An example would be beaucoup a Vietnamese word but most US English speakers would know it means big. Without the historical reference of a movie you would not have a reason or rhyme why an Asian origin word made it into English. There is literally no reason or rhyme to most of the spoken language and I think that is the epiphany, that some people actually thought out a logical way to create a language and via that logic it is discover-able.

Isn't beaucoup French?

Yes it is - France has colonised part of vietnam

yes, and as Army slang, it made it into American English through Vietnamese

Very cool. Did not know this. Will have to tell my Vietnamese wife. We were trying to figure out if English had any Vietnamese words. I think this counts.

I'm pretty sure in Louisiana it was already in slang through French here

Hundreds of years of French culture through Louisiana.

Other unique French US cultures:

Haitian Creole

New England French were are Canadian migrants.

Missouri French

Muskrat French from Michigan

North Dakoka Metis French

It could have come to some from 40 years old but it was already here for many.

Still it's a French word. It is like going to Germany and learning an English word but calling it German.

Oui, https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/beaucoup

Sure. When learning Latin, well, you learn to read and write Latin. You absorb the language's principles by learning the language, not by trying to highlight them in a language you already know. That can only give a much shallower appreciation.

Not quite true - many complexities of grammar are shared between the languages and it is often useful to structure the learning of Latin around the English patterns of grammar.

I imagine that diligently learning a foreign language (dead or otherwise) will make you smarter, especially if the free time spent on it would otherwise be spent on less academic pursuits.

(edit: spelling)

For me I get the most benefits from using FP features. I can write one-liners that are easy to read, and replace 10's to 100's of lines of my code.

For a simple example, val newList list.map(function Call(_))

Instead of val1 = functionCall(1) valN = functionCall(N)

A side note: "Dubious" comes from Latin, sharing the root of "duo", which means two,in this case referring to the possible indecision between two things or ideas.

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