Hacker News Reader

Comment by pen2l | Hacker News Reader

While it's laudable that you sought those texts and profited from them, I worry about what others might take away from this. When I was young I knew some geniuses who highly spoke of Principia and how it gave them great insights. And the teenager me said, okay cool, I'll have a go!

The problem is that it's in Latin and quite impenetrable.

We have some geniuses here and they would no doubt be able to take away a lot from these texts, but for you normals out there: don't optimize too much, you're quite alright in taking the normal approach of just taking a class at a community college, doing the exercises the teacher assigns, etc.

View on HN

It might make sense to read a translation in a language you understand. Many of the books that are considered classics are specifically because they ARE accessible. That doesn't necessarily mean that they are easy, but there is a big difference between reading Euclid and learning how to create mathematical proofs, and taking a class focused on calculating the area of various shapes or determine angles.

I haven't read Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (the English title) but I have read Euclid and it definitely doesn't require a genius to understand. here is an online edition with great illustrations:

https://www.c82.net/euclid/

From what I've heard, Euclid is fairly accessible and was for centuries the standard geometry textbook for children; the Principia is incredibly daunting, and Newton even admitted that he made it extra confusing on purpose to deter readers who weren't already experts.

I've been flirting with the idea of working through all of Leonard Euler's publications (as a life goal). Many of them are still not translated from Latin, so there's a possibility I may have to learn it.

Anyone knows how long it would take to learn enough latin to undertake such a task?

If you're trying to understand a domain work (such as Euler's) you could probably get a working knowledge in a month of strong study, a year of off-and-on.

I bet you could start this week if you used machine translations as a crutch.

I'd start working with a publication that exists in Latin and a good translation, so you can compare your work.

Thank you! Sounds much less intimidating.

My fear with machine translations is that subtle errors here and there might throw me off in something like math where things are precisely stated.

A year of part time study sounds doable though

That's the advantage of it being a particular mathematic domain, you'll learn the terms relatively quickly and be able to catch errors in the math parts; the prose is where you will need the machine.

In fact, you'll find that many philosophers will just use the Latin words directly, and not bother translating them - Latin qua jargon if you will.

Once you've learned the various forms of "is" (sum, very irregular) you can kinda survive reading without conjugations, just like this sentence can be worked out:

he to go to store and to buy cheese yesterday

Use the book "Lingua Latina per se illustrata" to learn Latin. It's quite magical, you just start reading Latin which is comprehensible due to similarities to English and it stacks on this without using anything but Latin. It's also much faster and more thorough than other textbooks.

Physics for Mathematicians by Spivak is basically the Principia updated to modern prose and rigor.

I didn't read Euclid in Greek or Newton in Latin; there are quite good translations available - even free!

In general I find that if someone is insisting that you study the philosophy of someone in their original language, they don't have a good enough translation yet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com