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.
Uhm, 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.
My 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.
It 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.
In 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.
I 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.
The point of learning Scheme is that you can learn Scheme the language in five minutes and move on the actual topic of the course, which is about how a program gets executed.
> It's exactly like learning scheme. Seriously who fucking cares about scheme?
I'm a CS student at the University of Waterloo, where most early CS courses and many advanced courses here use scheme. There are thousands of students taking CS courses here so in fact there is a generation of grads being produced where a significant number (thousands at least) of them base much of their CS knowledge on scheme. That makes it very relevant.
> 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.
From that perspective, sure, but the original context was that Scheme is not useful to a programmer except perhaps as an instructional endeavor. I gave evidence contradicting that assertion.
I 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.
> 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.
I'm sorry but you sound like a ...
"we"? You speak for the community? Which I'm part of.
I'm using HN, I love HN, I just know when to recognize a UI is a bad UI. You want me to write a blog post about what is wrong with this UI point per point? I even considered re-doing it myself and submit it here but I don't have the time now.
I might sound aggressive but I really don't like people taking quick conclusions.
My native tongue is German, I had English as my first and French as my second foreign language and also had quite a few years of Latin in school and I am dabbling in Asian languages just for myself.
I can see how Latin will probably not help with English much (and with French I couldn't see it either) but in comparison German has a LOT more grammatical possibilities and rules and they are very much like Latin except for maybe 2 cases and a few other Latin oddities. This probably makes German comparatively harder for a native English speaker..
The way we had to study Latin was very analytical, never like a spoken language but like dissecting word by word until you could finally understand the sentence. So through studying Latin vocabulary and grammar like that, you got a different and actually excellent insight into your own German mother tongue. And a lot of words, vocabulary and expressions (also in English) at least have Latin (if not Greek) roots.
Some university degrees used to require you to have had Latin in school, medicine was one of those.
The more interesting part of Latin, however, is reading all the great writers and learning about the times they lived in. In a modern Latin class, this should get much more emphasis, even if it happens at the expense of pure language analytical skills.
I 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.
How 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
