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In a way, this reinforces my hypothesis that Latin in traditional Western higher education was never quite so much about Latin itself as it was about gaining a
by mortenjorck 15y ago
In a way, this reinforces my hypothesis that Latin in traditional Western higher education was never quite so much about Latin itself as it was about gaining a deeper understanding and greater praxis of your native tongue by reading its source code.
- boredguy8 15y agoUhm, what? You couldn't be more off. Traditionally, any liberal arts education would include extensive familiarity with the classics. That means Plato & Dante, at the minimum, whether a BA or BS. You were expected to know Latin and Greek because you were expected to read Latin and Greek. If you were pursuing a BS, then perhaps you would read Euclid's "Elements" instead of Thucydides' "The History of the Peloponnesian War". (&c., It's not like those were the only texts one would encounter.) But languages were a prerequisite because they lacked the chronological hubris of our age. Hence the tight coupling with Geography: notice the ties between Xenophon in translation & the role of the Ten Thousand in Geography.
- jacobolus 15y agoDante wrote in (what we now call) Italian.
- DrJokepu 15y agoMy understanding is that even for native Italians it's very difficult to understand Dante as it's rather archaic. I'm not sure that being able to read Latin would be of any help.
- learc83 15y agoI think it was also a bit of holdover from a previous time, when Latin and Greek texts represented the pinnacle of human knowledge.
- jerf 15y agoIt isn't "chronological hubris" that the vast bulk of human knowledge has been generated since 1869. Precise measurement is difficult to even define but it's difficult to imagine a non-pathological definition for which that would not be true. Personally I'm a huge advocate for the fact that what one might call "wisdom" is not unique to our age and may indeed be getting a bit lost in the shuffle, but nevertheless, there's no way that we can go back to covering everything that took 12 years to learn in 1869 and cover all the things that take 12 years to learn today. When you push an hour into the curriculum to cover, say, the basic functioning of electricity, to name just one thing that I think one should not be able to escape from modern schooling without having gotten exposed to at some point, an hour has to come out of it somewhere else.
- sneak 15y agoThe bulk of current (2011) human knowledge was set in stone a thousand years before 1869.
- roel_v 15y agoIn what way? In the way that most of physics 'existed' back then, yes. But the vast majority of 'knowledge' (actual explanations on how nature works, mathematics, etc. etc.) was 'discovered' or 'described in detail' over the last couple of decades.
- baddox 15y agoI think Latin was just a big part of the "culture of the educated." Sure, they could read Latin literature, but they could easily just translate those into English and study English grammar and vocabulary.
- suivix 15y agoA better way to do this is to learn French or German.
- baby 15y agoI don't agree with you. I did 2 years of latin and one year of greek. I don't feel like it really helped me. I actually found it pretty useless except the syntax/grammar part which can be good to understand new languages easier. It's exactly like learning scheme. Seriously who fucking cares about scheme? I see latin and greek in a Harvard test as a part of distinguishing highly educated kids from the others.
- BrandonM 15y ago> It's exactly like learning scheme. Seriously who fucking cares about scheme? Err... This website is written in Arc (a cousin of Scheme), which itself is implemented in MzScheme. So by extension, you care about scheme, and so does everyone else here.
- baby 15y agoI think this website has a pretty poor UI. And it's PHP also.
- dangrossman 15y ago> And it's PHP also. I have never heard that before. What part is PHP?
- baby 15y agowoops, I talked too fast.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- BrandonM 15y agoI think people are more likely downvoting because "it's PHP also" is utterly incorrect, yet stated as if it's fact. As for the UI, many HN members (including pg?) have expressed the idea that the types of people that get hung up on UI shortcomings are a close approximation to the types of people we wouldn't want as members, anyway.
- estevez 15y agoYou might also consider the role that Latin played as the lingua franca of scholarship.
- FelixH 15y agoHow is Latin the 'source code' of English? Sure, a large number of Latin derived words made it into English (mostly via Norman French), but that's only half the picture