>read Latin texts from 1500 years ago
>clear and understandable with no problems
>read Latin texts from 1000 years ago
>clear and understandable with no problems
>read Latin texts from 500 years ago
>clear and understandable with no problems
>read English texts from 300 years ago
>hard to understand due to how archaic the language is
Ever think writing our research down in a living language might be a bad idea?
Other urls found in this thread:
en.wikipedia.org
twitter.com
Interesting idea. But people would complain that much more about muh ivory towers
And we wouldn't be able to come up with new jargon for our subject, right? That seems like a pretty big barrier
You can invent new words in Latin, biologists do it all the time for naming animals, for example.
Daily reminder that Italian is the most successful adaptation of Latin into modernity, very clear for bot scientific and humanitarian purposes, yet still perfect for both music and poems, and finally, it's the one using the most simple set of characters and accents (better than Spanish) and a set of verbs that make sense in every situation, past, present and future (better than French).
including numbers:
XCIX = quatre-vingt-dix-neuf = novantanove
100-10+9 = 4*20+19 = 90+9
Latin is Eurocentric, The Chinese will not sign up to this.
After the demise of colonialism the world will again be multipolar and educated people will be multilingual, at least outside the Anglosphere.
九十九 = nine-ten-nine = 99
I read pre-war books about quantum chemistry and they are miles ahead of anything modern as far as readability goes.
That's because their authors were still classically schooled and knew how to structure their works.
brazilian portuguese is very close to italian, its considered the easiest for brazilians to learn, along with spanish and french
>100-10+9 = noventa E(and) nove
most articles are obsolete within a decade anyway
>MMXVI
>learning latin
So it's living language, pretty much just like English
The exactly same goes for portuguese portuguese, so you could had said "potuguese" and "lusophane" or "portuguese speaker", but you needed to be sure everyone knows you're br.
Bad ideas die. The good ideas live on.
Therefore a living language is a perfect fit.
Also language evolves as complicated ideas evolve.
German is the perfect language for that matter. It's incredibly precise and logical and is a language that has an easy way of adapting new and future words that are immediately understandable by people just by hearing it for the first time.
Sometimes germans go crazy for that like when they name laws.
"Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz" is a real word for example
There german language isn't logic.
Like most older languages, there are cultural conflations [double meanings and implications] making it impractical.
>Bad ideas die. The good ideas live on.
That's an inappropriate tautology. Just because an idea persists by being (tautologically) good at surviving doesn't necessarily mean it has higher utility or is closer to truth.
>Therefore a living language is a perfect fit.
Does not follow from the previous statement at all.
>Also language evolves as complicated ideas evolve.
And it also evolves due to other factors which are unrelated to the complexity of expressible ideas, drifting away in grammar, orthography, phonetics, and many other ways central to comprehensibility. The complexity of ideas is far from being the primary driving force behind how modern languages develop.
Latin has that too. And german is acually better in that regard because things are rarely given names of other things because of culutural implications but most things get their completely own and definitive name. And even if there are words that are confusing it's not hard to rename things in a logical manner.
A lot of time those words aren't Latin, they can be Greek, or literally any other language. I guess to the untrained ear they might sound Latin though.
Who's to say that formal English is still evolving as it has before?
With widespread communication and writing of it, and the rules and spellings of most common English words cemented in easily accessed dictionaries, isn't it possible that the "living language"'s rate of change has decreased? Couldn't it be possible that it stop changing in significant ways at is has in the past when populations were more isolated? Ignoring the occasional addition of new words or terms, and individual accents, the "official rules" of English are pretty much established. Would it be so crazy to think that generations of people continue to follow these same rules? The modern era of widespread information has changed the rules in many ways, some might suggest that we're heading towards a universal human language. I'm not sure about that, but it seems that English is the contemporary lingua franca of international communication, be it through trade or science.
>when populations were more isolated
In just 100 years from now, fossil fuels will be so expensive that not many people will afford to travel; connections will be possible on the Internet of course, but I suspect that even local dialects will have a revamping.
That's also why they are pushing so hard for the Kalergi Plan right now: any delay and the dispersion of white Europeans will became impossible.
>Who's to say that formal English is still evolving as it has before?
Anyone who isn't completely ignorant on the subject and doesn't just assume processes hard to observe due to their slowness don't exist.
For example the get-passive (e.g. "get promoted" instead of "be promoted") form has only emerged in English recently and only became common in the past few decades. If you have a look you WILL find it in scientific writing.
That said if we were to experience a disruptive collapse or decline of the sort mentioned by , our current English could well become a New Latin, a language of the educated elite not used by the general masses, or at least not in the "classical" form harkening back to the golden age of the 20th and early 21st centuries.
It has a growing dictionary but that's about it.
>Anyone who isn't completely ignorant on the subject and doesn't just assume processes hard to observe due to their slowness don't exist.
this, the great vowel shift was not really noticed until the 19th century
if you guys love dictionaries:
taxonomists*
Taxonomists are a subset of biologists.