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Comment by heelix | Hacker News Reader

Our US company sent me to France to help out with an implementation. The guy I worked with spoke very little English and my French is terrible. Both of us had done Latin, however - so the comments were hilarious as we used that as our common link. One of those projects I'd expect to show on the daily WTF at some point.

I did try my hand at a translation tool, as it was all i18n up proper. Watched one guy blow coffee through his nose when I demo'ed - and the 'BACK' navigation was the French word for a persons back or something like that.

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Isn't it true that schoolboys in many countries would learn Latin 100+ years ago? I suppose it would've been used sometimes in international communication?

100+ years is still pretty recent. The immediate predecessor to English as a world language was French. Matter of fact, my country has only dropped French translations from its passport with the most recent design update a decade ago or so.

Latin would have been used pre-Renaissance. Our grandparents might have still had to learn it as a part of an educated person's toolkit, but it was long not intended for communication anymore back then.

> The immediate predecessor to English as a world language was French

From what I remember, there was a divide between Catholicism and Protestantism, where some of the smaller countries that followed Protestantism used German as a common language due to its origins. I think knowledge of German in Norway was something that was expected of students attending the universities until the mid 1900s (due to geopolitical changes)

Japanese scholars famously learned Dutch because they were the only foreigners who were allowed to bring in Western books.

Luckily if you are intelligent enough to read Dutch learning English is a walk in the park.

I was offered it in the 90s in school.

It's still mandatory (1-2 years) in non-vocational high schools in Croatia, for the stupidest of reasons ("culture" and "you might need it in law or medical higher education").

I learned Latin in the 90s-00s

If you're from Europe knowing Latin definitely gives you a deeper appreciation of a bunch of stuff.

It's a useful way of formalising verb conjugation and tenses which is common across the major European languages. Something they all take for granted but I watch my poor mother's mind melt when she tried learning German as a Chinese speaker. Especially as a lot of these forms are looser and more forgiving in English.

A lot of vocabulary has its origins in Latin and biology and medicine still like to borrow from it.

It's niche but only today I was playing some Mozart on the piano and saw "M. S." where I was meant to cross the hands and I considered for a sec and guessed it must be mano sinistra (forgive the declension) even though I've never learned Italian thanks to Latin.

It was mandatory at the schools I attended from 7 to 14, which was in the 90s, although this was at what British people call "prep/public schools", a group of a few hundred fancy fee-paying schools. Most people dropped it at 14 (GCSEs), and almost everyone dropped it by 16 (A Levels)

Lol, I learned it in the 80s - 90s. If you chose to learn Latin & Greek in high school here in Belgium then you're seen as being a top student. It's still a big thing.

My high school ( late 00s) had Latin classes for some students on the live sciences track.

LLMs seem pretty great at helping with the translation like this. I asked chatgpt about "back" and it gave me tons of options.

https://chatgpt.com/share/679b43af-e770-800a-92ee-b27bd87194...

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