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Comment by quotemstr | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, wasn't a lot of that Latin just the endless navel-gazing of Medieval Scholasticism?

No, Latin was the main international lingua franca among educated people in Europe for about a millennium after it stopped being spoken natively. As such, scientific and otherwise intellectual works of all kinds were primarily written in Latin, for the same reason they’re primarily written in English today.

In fact, the US, UK, and every other culturally Anglo country could sink into the ocean tomorrow and I suspect English would still be a dominant international language for the foreseeable future.

The lingua franca comes from the dominant culture of the time. The massive colonial empire of Britain move things from latin to English and the rise and control of the US has perpetuated English even more so. If the Anglo countries all sank into the ocean, I doubt it would be very long until Mandarin developed into the dominant language. China would be the major trading power and without the need to work with America, there would be little need to continue with English as years progress.

Well I would still say French would be dominant over Mandarin for several reasons. Technological advantages include current nuclear collaboration on the vast coast of China. China still does not have key infrastructure to self support.

https://www.neimagazine.com/news/newschina-and-france-sign-s...

A big joint project between China and France does not constitute an argument for learning French in preference to learning Chinese.

Nor does it constitute an argument for learning Chinese, assuming both parties already know English.

The question was "if every Anglophone country sank into the sea, would people learn Mandarin Chinese, or would they learn French instead?"

You seem to be answering some other, unrelated question.

> I doubt it would be very long until Mandarin developed into the dominant language.

I kinda doubt that, given its writing system.

There have been various movements that have advocated for the use of pinyin as a primary writing system, for the same reason that Beijing replaced Traditional script with Simplified.

> There have been various movements that have advocated for the use of pinyin as a primary writing system, for the same reason that Beijing replaced Traditional script with Simplified.

I don't speak or read Chinese, but my understanding is there are a lot of homophones (and a culture of homophonic puns) that would make that undesirable (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homophonic_puns_in_Standard_Ch...).

There are lots of homonyms but they are disambiguated by context. Look at it this way: you don’t need the characters when you’re listening to someone speak, so why wouldn’t you be able to sound out the phrase from pinyin and understand its meaning?

> There are lots of homonyms but they are disambiguated by context.

But wouldn't that lose something? My understanding is a lot of the puns specifically rely on the characters to force a different reading than the context would imply (or to evade censorship by having many ways to write the same sounds).

Not necessarily - it was literally anything. Any publication whatsoever in Europe up to about 1800 was apt to be in Latin. Science, history, geography, correspondences, laws, records of all kinds, etc.

For example, the career of the great German mathematician C. F. Gauss. His early works, written around 1800, were in Latin. By the end of his career in the 1840s, he wrote in German.

True, though I suspect this probably has more to do with the rise of German nationalism in the 1840s, including a few revolutionary unification attempts. The German language itself was a major political issue of the day.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_nationalism

No, that's what the navel gazing of modern facice dismissal thinks of it.

Galileo, Decartes, Spinoza, Newton, Leibniz, Locke... All wrote in Latin.

Yes, of course. I was mostly joking. That said, hasn't much of the post-classical output in Latin already been translated repeatedly? How much worthwhile stuff is left to be translated?

So much. It is surprising, I know. For instance, how about Descartes' very first book? Or Baumgarten's "Aesthetica", where he introduced the idea of "Aesthetics"? I talked to a scholar recently who said that it will probably never get translated, because there isn't the interest.

This. Even in Christian circles, many major works remain in Latin because publishers know they can't profitably commission the effort. This creates a situation in which for-profit publishers occasionally fund non-profit translation efforts to preserve the history.

For example, a shockingly small amount of John Calvin's works are translated into English. Regardless of what a person thinks of his theology, his influence on the rise of democracy in post-Reformation Europe and the Americas is staggering.

> For example, a shockingly small amount of John Calvin's works are translated into English.

You can find "the essential works of John Calvin" (51 volumes, in English) here: https://www.logos.com/product/145428/the-essential-works-of-...

All of John Calvin's commentaries, letters and 'The Institutes' here (109 volumes, in English): https://www.logos.com/product/5170/calvin-500-collection

Calvin's tracts and treatises (8 volumes, in English) here: https://www.logos.com/product/5165/tracts-and-treatises-of-j...

I'm curious as to what you think hasn't been translated into English.

Most of his sermons and letters are still not in print in English, as well as a treatise on the Trinity, off the top of my head. Granted, as you point out, a large number of his works are in English but given his influence, it's surprising how many remain inaccessible.

There was a Latin collection that contained some of these works called the Corpus Reformatorum published in the 1800s.

If they have gone unread for centuries how can they be so easily dismissed?

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