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This reminds me of a lighthearted paper my former CS professor wrote back in 1978, where he looks for equivalents of “it was Greek to me” and uses them to creat

This reminds me of a lighthearted paper my former CS professor wrote back in 1978, where he looks for equivalents of “it was Greek to me” and uses them to created a directed graph between languages to determine which is the hardest: https://people.cs.umass.edu/~rsnbrg/hardest.pdf https://people.cs.umass.edu/~rsnbrg/hardest.pdf Spoiler alert: it’s Chinese.

dfawcus 7y ago
Which mentions "High Dutch" and "Double Dutch" being used in Britain. The latter being what I experienced.
lowdose 7y ago
I immediately see Noam Chomsky in the text. Could you give me a recommendation on which book to start reading from him? He published so many and a few got revised in 2015 so it's pretty hard to decide what is a good read.
dotancohen 7y ago
In Hebrew we also say "It's Chinese" when we don't understand something. Interestingly enough, I took the family to Greece just last month and explained to the children that in English, it is said that something sounds Greek if it cannot be understood. My oldest was wise enough to ask why, if Greek is the root of so many English words. I still don't have an answer for her!
- qwhelan 7y ago
  Just a guess, but the Catholic Church relied on a Latin translation of the Bible. Accordingly, schools taught Latin as you needed it to understand the Bible and the Mass. Those schools also taught Ancient Greek for advanced students to be able to read philosophy and portions of the Bible. This was useful if you wanted to be a priest, but otherwise it was just a pointlessly hard course for most students.
  - asveikau 7y ago
    I had read that during the Roman empire there was a lot of Latin-Greek bilingualism, and that an educated person would be expected to know both, even in the western part of the empire. At some point that ceased to be the case and those places just got Vulgar Latin and the various Romance languages.
  - dotancohen 7y ago
    Thank you, I'm going to mention that possibility to the kids this evening. There are other oddities that they are familiar with regarding Biblical translations, such as Moses being depicted with horns.

dfawcus 7y ago

Which mentions "High Dutch" and "Double Dutch" being used in Britain. The latter being what I experienced.

lowdose 7y ago

I immediately see Noam Chomsky in the text. Could you give me a recommendation on which book to start reading from him? He published so many and a few got revised in 2015 so it's pretty hard to decide what is a good read.

dotancohen 7y ago

In Hebrew we also say "It's Chinese" when we don't understand something. Interestingly enough, I took the family to Greece just last month and explained to the children that in English, it is said that something sounds Greek if it cannot be understood. My oldest was wise enough to ask why, if Greek is the root of so many English words. I still don't have an answer for her!

qwhelan 7y ago
Just a guess, but the Catholic Church relied on a Latin translation of the Bible. Accordingly, schools taught Latin as you needed it to understand the Bible and the Mass. Those schools also taught Ancient Greek for advanced students to be able to read philosophy and portions of the Bible. This was useful if you wanted to be a priest, but otherwise it was just a pointlessly hard course for most students.
- asveikau 7y ago
  I had read that during the Roman empire there was a lot of Latin-Greek bilingualism, and that an educated person would be expected to know both, even in the western part of the empire. At some point that ceased to be the case and those places just got Vulgar Latin and the various Romance languages.
- dotancohen 7y ago
  Thank you, I'm going to mention that possibility to the kids this evening. There are other oddities that they are familiar with regarding Biblical translations, such as Moses being depicted with horns.