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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

> Academic life was dominated by Latin and, to a lesser extent, Greek. The exact share varied, but the classical languages took up generally at least half of teaching hours, and sometimes as much as 80 percent, especially earlier in the century.

That's so weird to me. How did that tradition hold on for so long? Where did it come from? Who thought that was a good idea?

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This theory continues in modern elite American Universities -- they exist not to provide job skills but to deliver a "liberal education" -- one that teaches students to think, be moral, etc. (I read from the brochure here).

Those Ivies that have more job-oriented programs tend to have (at the least) those schools looked down upon in comparison to the more 'pure' academic pursuits, e.g. Cornell's Hospitality school.

While Ivies are not tied strictly to America's true upper class, serving more as a means of entry into the upper-middle and lower-upper, this sort of signaling is an important part of some of the soft benefits they provide students -- it would be gauche to be worried about a job, ne c'est pas?

n'est-ce pas ? Sincerely,the French grammar police

Surely you mean the police grammar French

Alours. merci monsieur

It's a thing in other countries as well. Schools which teach the classical languages in Belgium are called humaniora (literally 'more human'). About 30% of my classes were Latin and ancient Greek but we would also have more in depth art history classes.

They would lack in other education (like math and sciences) in theory but as it's also the place the best students get their education they tend to just force you to learn both (which is against some protocols afaik).

USA universities have lately corrupted the meaning of the word "liberalism", turning it into its opposite. So-called "liberal education" doesn't exist anymore.

Signals must to be costly in order to be effective

Also also hard to fake and easy to slip in. You throw in a Latin quote in your conversation and either the other person gets it and you both know you're the proper class, or they don't and you both know you're higher up the ladder than they are.

This is repeatedly used in Yes, Minister to demonstrate the large class gap between Sir Humphrey (and Bernard) and Jim Hacker.

si tacuisses philosophus mansisses ;)

Also see Count Binface (classics, Oxford) vs Sky News https://youtu.be/MCCVt8IhJkA?t=130

Yup. It’s the shibboleth. Cuius regio, eius religio, and all that.

Spent my childhood at boarding school having my head stuffed full of Latin and Greek. Forgotten all of it.

> Signals must to be costly in order to be effective

Utter bollocks.

A safety pin though ones nose and a pair of ripped tights costs nothing, and signals who one is (or wishes to be) very loudly and clearly.

That signal certainly sounds pretty costly to me, it would not be effective at signaling intelligence though.

If you judge intelligence by appearance, then you are rather foolish; somewhat to your detriment.

If someone has modified their appearance in a way that appears foolish and their intent was to signal intelligence then I my prior would be that they are extra foolish.

Instead if they know Latin then my prior assumption would be that they are intelligent.

Acquiring information is costly (multi armed bandit) which is why signaling is important. Perhaps in the future with AI and attestations we can replace expensive signals with cheaper ones that are more difficult to fake and thus more honest.

With the improvements in machine intelligence I have become much less concerned with human intelligence and only persist with disagreeing with netizens out of a quickly fading residual sentimentality.

Cost of a signal is not necessarily just the resources required to emit it, but also what that signal represents to others. Throwing slurs around doesn't take any money but can be very costly.

This is why grammar schools are so called, they're talking about Latin grammar

The term comes from the trivium: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Yes grammar is literally part of it but more generally it's the learning of facts and definitions.

Remember that religious study was the driving force behind much of the education that went on for a long time. If you view some version of the bible as literal divine word, learning the language it's written in makes sense.

The Catholic church only allowed mass to be delivered in a language other than Latin in the 1960s. If you wanted to simply understand what was said, you had to learn it.

The Anglican church (to which virtually all of the Victorian elite belonged) had phased out Latin since the 17th century. Likewise Victorian scientists, eg Darwin, wrote in English. (If they needed to correspond with their peers abroad, they might use Latin, but many would learn French, German, Russian...)

Its use in the Catholic church probably helped Latin survive as long as it did, but by the 19th century it was already an impractical relic whose prestige in English schools came partly from the fact that it had no actual application.

you're wrong the church originally did the Mass in Rome in Greek and it allows it in several other languages in other regions from the beginning. When the Mass was changed to latin in Rome it was the speaking language of the people. Learning latin was about important for most of the western history because pretty much every important book was written or translated to Latin

If you expect people to cover every detail, you need to be reading rather thick history books, instead of internet comments.

"The Catholic church only allowed mass to be delivered in a language other than Latin in the 1960s" this statement is factually wrong.

> If you wanted to simply understand what was said, you had to learn it.

What an absolutely bonkers concept. I mean, how dare they. I am shocked, I tell you! Shocked! Outrageous. I mean, the Catalonians treated me the same way when I visited Catalonia. I finally just gave up and went home.

The Eastern Orthodox (and other pre-schism apostolic) churches vigorously promote the liberal use of the vernacular in many cases. Even those which had a rather ossified "sacred liturgical" language sort of moved with the times.

With the story about the Roman Catholic Church, it is important to note that the Council of Trent was pivotal here. Trent essentially decreed to suppress/abolish many, many localized liturgies, and replace them all with the Roman-style liturgy. The Latin Church was quite diversified up until that point in the 16th century. Trent looked forward to a truly global and universal church that needed a central point of unity and cohesion. A singular liturgy was ideal to ensure that abuses were minimized and everyone was "playing according to Hoyle" because, as you may recall, two huge continents had just opened up for evangelization beyond anyone's wildest dreams.

So in the days before French became the lingua franca of the U.N. and the world, Latin was truly the proto-lingua-franca. Latin could transmit ideas amongst many people and be well-understood. Latin crossed borders, in ways that German or Euskara or Finnish could not. That is an extremely valuable aspect of a language, and that is why we value English, and Mandarin in much the same way in the 21st century.

The Church did not, however, prevent you from reading Sacred Scripture in the vernacular. The Douay-Rheims was a contemporary of the KJV and many English versions have been produced since then. Many, many vernacular Catholic Bibles. So essentially, if you knew your Scripture, you'd probably figure out the Mass anyway by following along. And as they say, "actions speak louder than words" and also, "a picture is worth 1,000 words" so the act of attending Mass was never quite wasted, as you'd hope to portray.

p.s. The "literal divine Word of God" is Jesus Christ. The Bible, for its part, came later than Jesus, and itself is a product of Sacred Tradition.

Your post script is not correct from the point of view of the Catholic church. God essentially penned the texts with human help.

The rest doesn't quite seem like a response to what I said.

To know another language is to possess a second soul - Big Chuck aka Charlemagne.

Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote an entire journal in Greek in the middle of enemy territory. "You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.". Historians criticize his Greek fluency.

The Romans and the Greeks provided a lot of their thinking. They provided models for their buildings and for the empire. The Romans wrote about the way they ran their empire, controlled local tribes and so on... They also provided a rationale for the civilising mission (as they perceived it).

Latin and Greek were useful for coining a lot of the new vocabulary that English had to create for science, industrialisation and overseas adventures.

>In Western civilization, the study of the ancient Greek and Roman classics was considered the foundation of the humanities, and they traditionally have been the cornerstone of an elite higher education. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classics

Apparently Oxford only dropped the requirement to have O-Level latin in 1960 (!)

Who thought understanding, in depth, the fundamental bases of their legal system was a good idea?

Academia in Britain was intimately connected to membership of the church and, thus, to the ability to speak Latin to hold services. It held on beyond that tenure out of both momentum and prestige.

That was true in medieval times. From the start of the early modern (e.g. Henry VIII) the Church of England used English for services.

The prestige also accrued because it was the language of the educated in Europe for a long time.

I agree, but latin was the language of the educated in Europe because of the (Catholic) church, and the universities pre-date the C of E by several hundred years.

I was going to answer with just "the church" but the OP specifically asked about academia.

It was the language of the educated because of the Roman Empire. The elites used to study how to be Roman elites before the 5th century, and when Rome fell they just continued, as it was the established sign of higher class. The elite has been educated by Cicero for the last 2 millennia, and continues to be so.

A good analogy is French being the language of the elite in Britain, well after the Normans got merged into the general population.

> and when Rome fell they just continued, as it was the established sign of higher class.

Well not in the west where the elite was replaced by uneducated barbarians for several centuries and it took quite a while for the church to teach them how to read and write again.

Nomen usoris rei convenit...

Henry the Eighth never allowed vernacular service, that was his son Edward the VI.

All academia used latin until quite recently. Because all books were written in latin.

Why do you think all animal species have a latin name? You think the ancient romans classified them?

Genuinely bizarre comment. Why do you think the books were written in latin?

They were written in Latin until well into the modern era. Newton wrote his major work in Latin, for example.

Yes, I know. Why the confidence that this contradicts anything I said?

Edit: Re-reading I realise you were reading that as me thinking the books weren't written in Latin, whereas I was trying to get the parent poster to think a bit beyond "the books were written in Latin" to wonder why they might be written in Latin long, long after the fall of the Roman Empire.

Yes. that was how I read it. Sorry for that but think the poster you were replying to got it either.

The other poster seems to have got on the wrong end of the stick about something, but I don't think it's that.

> Newton wrote his major work in Latin, for example.

Newton wrote in Latin because he was, famously, an arrogent bellend. The rest of the sensible scientific community had long since swiched to living langauges.

That doesn't sound right. Newton's contemporaries like Leibniz, Huygens, Halley all wrote much of their most significant work in Latin.

Newton also wrote Opticks in English, perhaps because he was aiming at a more mass market audience.

Do you have a source for this made up information? Seems to contradict with this:

"Leibniz wrote mainly in three languages: scholastic Latin, French and German."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Wilhelm_Leibniz

"Many of his writings were in Latin"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Linnaeus

Because other languages didn't have a writing system, which is why every western language is using latin alphabet now.

The only language that literate people in Europe had in common. Mostly because of the church.

> Why do you think all animal species have a latin name?

Good god! This proves you have _completely_ missed the point!

The reason scientic names are in lattin, is BECAUSE it is a dead language. The scientific name can therefore never be confused with the many local/regional names for a species which will always be in a living langage.

Lol… It's because Linneus wrote in latin (a quick look on wikipedia will confirm)… because he wanted other intellectuals to be able to read his works.

Also your theory fails flat in the entirety of south america, some parts of africa and europe where the "local/regional" names are just… the old latin names still used today.

Thank you for the lecture!

I'm impressed by your ignorance!

the clergy.

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