Comment by coliveira | Hacker News Reader

Comment by coliveira | Hacker News Reader

I am in favor of using Latin in some circumstances. People miss the fact that the great thing about a dead language is that it doesn't change. However, if you write about science in English, for example, you can guarantee that 50 years from now your text will feel dated -- just try to read papers from the beginning of the 20th century. On the other hand, we still can read the great works of antiquity (from 20 centuries ago) in Latin. Also, a lot of scientific works were written in Latin during the renascence, and they are still available to us. Sadly, what is written in English will hardly last for more than a few hundred years. The only saving grace is that future generations will have automatic translation systems that will solve a lot of these problems.

Another issue with English is that it is a very imprecise language. You have to be extremely careful to write precise sentences in it. Latin, because of its grammatical nature, is much easier to handle in this respect. This is the same reason why it is much easier to understand philosophical concepts in German than in English. Just because English is widely understood (due to the cultural dominance of English-speaking countries), it doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to use a better language to express ourselves. Latin seems like a natural option due to its large impact on the western world.

> "However, if you write about science in English, for example, you can guarantee that 50 years from now your text will feel dated -- just try to read papers from the beginning of the 20th century. On the other hand, we still can read the great works of antiquity (from 20 centuries ago) in Latin."

Starting as somebody exposed to only modern english, getting off the ground with 17th or 18th century english is going to be much easier than getting off the ground with any latin.

Seriously, I'm not sure what english works you have been reading, but it really doesn't get bad until you get really get back into the mid-17th century or so. Even with 16th century stuff, I would say that most of the difficulty comes from antiquated idioms (and rarely vocabulary). Trouble you had with scientific papers from the early 20th century probably had more to do with your inexperience with the subject matter of the paper, not the language it was written in. Books written in the 19th century are still considered reasonable reading for children today (Twain, Carroll, Dickens, Thoreau, etc.)

I agree and provide some more popular examples:

Shakespeare from around 1600 is rewarding but pretty much needs a translator into English to be understood by moderns. On the other hand Gibbon writing around the American Revolution in 1776 is modern, and is a very easy read.

The biggest issue you'll find is a variation in what moderns would consider grade level. Modern journalism is not allowed to rise about 3rd grade level reading ability because of the "need" to maximize potential readers aka profit. Bad writing drives out good writing just like bad money drives out good, or some say bad code drives out good code. (or coders?)

Gibbon is at a higher grade level of reading ability than modern average, which is going to be intimidating. I'd say its around high school level. It IS harder than the average newspaper sports page. However its not harder than any modern high school level text. Compared to a college level physics textbook, Gibbon is a pretty easy read.

> Shakespeare from around 1600 is rewarding but pretty much needs a translator into English to be understood by moderns.

Nobody in 1600s England spoke the way Shakespeare wrote. Shakespeare was writing poetry. His plays are famous for their use of iambic pentameter especially, which is beautiful to hear and read but not a natural part of English prose.

To pick another example more-or-less at random from the same era, the work of Thomas Hobbes is much less poetic and, therefore, substantially more readable. The major stylistic difference I can see is that they were absolutely addicted to what we'd now consider overlong, or even run-on, sentences.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hobbes

Leviathan: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3207

You make an excellent point, another poetic example is Jabberwocky is not a typical example of all late 1800s English literature.

Two-hundred year old English is perfectly readable, and it would be entirely impossible to write a paper in Latin on, for example, computer science without very creative reinterpretation.

Torturing English to turn it into a relatively regular language would make much more sense than trying to torture Latin into something remotely adequate for conveying modern concepts.

There is no way to change English into a regular language, unless you create a completely new language. Latin is already a highly regular language by the definition of its grammar.

As for writing CS papers in Latin, there is no reason why you can't do it by importing the existing vocabulary, the same way English imported the vocabulary it needed from other languages.

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