"Graecum est; non legitur." It's not just English; until Chrysoloras et al and the cheap Greek printing of Aldus Manutius, that was pretty much true across Euro

"Graecum est; non legitur." It's not just English; until Chrysoloras et al and the cheap Greek printing of Aldus Manutius, that was pretty much true across Europe. It has probably remained the idiom in English because of Shakespeare (he had a habit of supplying stock phrases to the language at an alarming rate, only matched by the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer).