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What I currently have for this is probably a literal translation:

In amor cum haec lingua cado

Thank you

Johhan Santana
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Latin has an inchoative suffix -sc- which indicates that a certain state is beginning, and which is quite productive (rubesco, senesco, reconvalesco, ...). And indeed, there is the verb amasco – "to begin to love", so that you could say

hanc linguam amasco

brianpck
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gmvh
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    Damn, beaten by thirty seconds. It should be said that amasco is very rare in practice, though. – Cairnarvon Apr 15 '21 at 15:20
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    So rare I had to check it actually exists ... – gmvh Apr 15 '21 at 15:21
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    I was also told that you could use adamo but that one you suggest works for a lot of things. Thank you. – Johhan Santana Apr 15 '21 at 15:28
  • @JohhanSantana adamo is a very good choice as well (and not as rare). – Sebastian Koppehel Apr 15 '21 at 19:28
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    Not a native speaker (wink wink) but amasco sounds kind of "artificial", although maybe it would have been understood by Cicero and his contemporaries. I think something like "incipio amare hanc linguam" would have sounded more natural to them. Disclaimer: I'm an Italian native speaker who studied Latin, so I might be biased towards modern Italian sentence structure. – UndefinedBehavior Apr 15 '21 at 21:55
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    Yeah, it's only attested in the grammarians, though one quoting Naevius. They also list it together with other common inchoatives, albeit Diomedes, in the 4th century, ascribes the word to "veterēs". I dunno, it seems like a word that had to exist, and if Naevius used it, it's hard to protest against. But it must be stressed that it refers only to the very first stages of affection, a budding of feelings so to speak – Unbrutal_Russian Apr 17 '21 at 19:50
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Oxford [English-to-Latin section (under "fall")], offers "adamo" = "to fall in love with", taking the accusative case. (In the Latin-to-English the definition of "adamo" is "to love passionately". I am always suspicious when the two sections fail to coincide.)

Lewis & Short gives "to love truly, earnestly, deeply". Cicero used this verb only in the perfect & pluperfect tenses; while Quintilian (2.5.22), used the present tense.

"linguam hanc adamo." =

"I am falling in love with this language."/ "I deeply love this language."

EDIT 16/4/2021:

The simplest way may be to use "capio" = "to captivate" and the figurative, "to enthral" (Oxford). Therefore, using the passive, "capior":

"lingua hac capior." = "I am enthralled by this language."

EDIT 18/4/2021:

Thanks to Sebastian Koppehel (CHAT) for:

"amore capi vel incendi" =

"by love to consumed or inflamed".

Using the passive of "incendo":

"hac lingua incendor." = "I am inflamed (with passion) for this language.".

Seb, himself, thought that this might be over-the-top for the love of a language, as opposed to the romantic love of a person; still, it provides a poetic slant.

tony
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Although the inchoative suffix -sc- is productive, I would advise against using it in everyday speech unless the verb is already a common one. I could say "pugnasco" (unattested) or "puellasco" (a couple usages), but it would call attention to itself in a way that doesn't seem fitting for the phrase "falling in love." Since I can only find one example of amasco in Naevius (~200 BC) and one example in Diomedes (AD ~375), it's a pretty good guess that it wasn't commonly used.

Latin doesn't use the idiom "I fall in love," but it uses a rough equivalent all the time: "I have begun to love," i.e. coepi amare. Here are a few examples:

amare valide coepi hinc meretricem (Plautus, Mercator)

  • Incidentally, the previous lines of this speech have two other, more colorful equivalents of falling in love: amorem Venus mi hoc legavit die and animus studio amotus puerilist meus)

eius filiam ille amare coepit perdite (Terence, Heauton Timorumenos)

  • Terence has a few more examples, including amare coepi alone.

Porcus est, quem amare coepi (Pomponius, Atellanae)

Keep in mind, though, that amare need not refer to romantic love:

Nunc venio ad Brutum, quem ego omni studio te auctore sum complexus, quem etiam amare coeperam (Cicero, Epistulae ad Atticum)

Though coepi, -isse is perfect (contrary to my earlier assertion), this seems to capture the sense of English "falling in love," i.e. it is a process that has already begun. There are a few scattered examples of incipio + amare, which almost all seem to occur in the subjunctive. coepi + amare is more common in the corpus.

Here's my suggested translation:

hanc linguam amare coepi.

You're free to add adverbs as in the above examples (valide = deeply; perdite = desperately) to make your meaning clearer.

brianpck
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  • coepī isn't like ōdī: the latter can basically be described as stative and refers to the present together with the past, but the former refers to a punctual action in the past. It has not one present, but three: coepiō is rare, occipiō is old-fashioned and incipiō is everywhere. – Unbrutal_Russian Apr 17 '21 at 18:32
  • Yes. Typical school teaching is 'coepisse' (I prefer the infinitive) as perfect for 'incipere', usually accompanied by the suggestion that 'incepisse' either doesn't exist or is somehow bad or naughty. In the same category as 'odisse' is 'novisse': 'Eam non novi', “I don't know her”; 'Eum non noveram', “I didn't know him.” – Batavulus Apr 17 '21 at 19:14
  • incēpisse is attested just 11 times against 88 of occēpisse, so to those who don't understand the precise connotations of the use of the former, "it doesn't exist" is a workable assumption, and it's basically true that incipere and coepisse are suppletive and represent the corresponding imperfect and perfect stems @Batavulus – Unbrutal_Russian Apr 17 '21 at 19:45
  • Ah. I guess it depends where you count. – Batavulus Apr 17 '21 at 19:50
  • I'm not sure what you mean. Surely it's not that those numbers aren't representative of the actual rarity of incēpisse? By the way, these are combined for all perfect forms, not just the infinitive, naturally in PHI: https://latin.packhum.org/concordance?q=occep. Where else should we count them? @Batavulus – Unbrutal_Russian Apr 17 '21 at 22:06
  • @Unbrutal_Russian You're right--definitely a mistake on my part. (I was mixing up "defective" verbs with other characteristics that are only present in odi and memini.) I'll edit when I have some time. – brianpck Apr 18 '21 at 05:27
  • Dear Unbrutal_Russian, one can count anywhere one likes, surely, but it strikes me that the particular corpus represents but a tiny fraction of Latin literature. – Batavulus Apr 18 '21 at 11:15
  • Dear @Batavulus , your dismissive tone, in-your-face dogmatic statements and clear lack of critical self-doubt or fact-checking begins to grate on my nerves. Please do bother yourself with clicking on the About button on the PHI's website and learning what literature this corpus, that you clearly have just learned about the exitence of, includes. If you want to dispute the fact that this corpus is representative of Classical Latin, it's on you to provide data from a different corpus. Blank dismissal of my efforts to bring the evidence to you is rude, unproductive and will earn you bad rep. – Unbrutal_Russian Apr 23 '21 at 17:56
  • @brianpck Reading your latest edit it occurs to me that amāre coepisse means "to have fallen in love", while amāre incipere matches "to be falling in love, to start to love" - and the OP seems to be looking for the latter. It also reminds me of Žižek's, uh, extended remarks on the nature of "falling in love" as always retrospective, i.e. even the progressive aspect expresses that the speaker has suddenly found himself feeling love, and not literally realising that in the future, they will have reached the bottom, but are currently only "falling" :^) A difference of intensity, not fact. – Unbrutal_Russian Apr 23 '21 at 20:04
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A less literal (but perhaps more idiomatic) proposal:

Amore huius linguae accendor (“I am ablaze with love for this language!”).

Or, slightly less hot perhaps:

Studium eius linguae me excitat (“The interest for [love of] this language excites me,” i.e. “I am very much interested in, I love this language”).

Batavulus
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Others have suggested many ways to express falling in love in Latin. Let me address the grammar of your suggestion, even though it was too literal as a translation.

There is only one problem, but it occurs twice. Pay attention to which case is needed with each preposition:

  • Cum requires the ablative. Both haec and lingua need to be in this case: hac lingua.

  • In requires the accusative or the ablative. Accusative is used for movement ("into") and ablative for location ("inside"). In this situation movement is intended, so you need the accusative.

Thus you'd get: In amorem cum hac lingua cado. But this does not mean "I fall in love with this language", at least not in the usual sense. It is perhaps better translated as "I am in the company of this language and I sink down into love". A bit too melodramatic, I'd say.

Joonas Ilmavirta
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Actually there is an expression that is quite close (literally-wise) to the English to fall in love: in amorem incidere

nemo potest uno aspectu neque praeteriens in amorem incidere (Cic.RhetHer.2.33.4) - No one can fall in love at one/first sight nor in passing.

The expression incidere in aliquid implies almost passively occurence that came or fell into the person; or simply happen to him.

To attribute the object of love in this phrase, one could assigned the genitive case, as in Livy:

Qui cum in amorem Virginiae virginis incidisset

We thus end up:

In amorem hujus linguae incido

d_e
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    Good finding (+1)! It seems that there are 9 instantiations of the collocation in amorem incidere (data from Baños (2018) through PHI corpus, up to Tacitus: cf. https://eprints.ucm.es/id/eprint/56058/9/ANEXO3_COLAT_modelo%20de%20ficha%20de%20un%20verbo.pdf ). – Mitomino Sep 25 '21 at 02:54