[Telemakhos]

A more interesting knowledge-hole is Neo-Latin, Latin written from the Renaissance to today. Surviving from the sixteenth century alone are 10,000 times more different books in Latin than survive from all of antiquity (at least according to Jurgen Leonhardt's "Latin: Story of a World Language"). People think about the Romans when they hear Latin, but they forget that it was the international publishing language for academia into the nineteenth century (people were still writing dissertations in STEM in Latin at some European universities in the early twentieth century). Since the nineteenth century, fewer and fewer people have been learning Latin, and of those few care about anything except the Romans, so there is a vast and barely known volume of Latin out there waiting to be explored. Google Books is full of stuff that nobody has read in centuries.

[dr_dshiv]

Yes! I was shocked when i learned this.

I'm currently working on a Neo Latin translation from Marsilio Ficino. He is famous for catalyzing the Italian Renaissance by translating Plato (and many other Greek works) into Latin, making it available in the west after about 1000 years. He also restarted "the Academy." He was a prolific philosopher himself.

The book I'm helping to translate is "De Voluptate", or "On Pleasure." In it, he integrates Epicurean hedonism and Platonic virtue. I mean, after translating all those works himself, I feel like Ficino deserves having his works available to scholars today.

[Causality1]

Plato wasn't translated into Latin until the middle ages?

[dr_dshiv]

Until c.1450, the only Plato was the Timeaus and some scattered partial translations.

[hihihihi1234]

Modern philosophy courses tend to give equal weight to Aristotle and Plato (with a side order of Socrates), but for most of Western history the only pre-Christian philosopher that anyone cared about was Aristotle, who was often simply referred to as "The Philosopher". Plato was largely ignored and forgotten until there was a burst of scholarly interest in him in the 19th century.

Source: some random thing I read online somewhere; I might be wrong in the details.

[dr_dshiv]

This is really not true, sorry. Plato was huge in the Renaissance and his academy ran in Athens (not continuously) from about 400BC-550AD. Platonism had a major influence on the formation and reception of Christianity and Islam, as well.

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

[hihihihi1234]

You may be right, I'm very far from being an expert. Was just repeating something I read somewhere.

[cheese_van]

I picked up my first Latin dictionary at 19 after I found Kraft-Ebbing's "Psychopathia Sexualis" in a used book store. Kraft-Ebbing was one of the first, if not the first to academically discuss homosexuality, among other sexual practices. All the real naughty bits were in Latin so I needed that dictionary. And put it to good use.

It was assumed, at the time of the writing, 1894, that his audience was Latin fluent.

[thwave]

There are still some scholarly work written in Latin. For example see Terence O. Tunberg's book from 2013[0].

I highly recommend this[1] blog post about contemporary Latin knowledge.

[0]https://www.amazon.com/rationibus-colloquendi-Supplementa-Hu... [1] http://blogicarian.blogspot.com/2019/03/argumentum-ad-ignora...

[quotemstr]

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

[umanwizard]

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.

[moftz]

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.

[tablespoon]

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

I kinda doubt that, given its writing system.

[jazzyjackson]

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.

[tablespoon]

> 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...).

[Goety]

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...

[thaumasiotes]

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

[umanwizard]

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

[wizard-beta]

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.

[JJMcJ]

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.

[ARandomerDude]

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

[coldtea]

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

[dr_dshiv]

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

[quotemstr]

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?

[dr_dshiv]

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.

[ARandomerDude]

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.

[rsj_hn]

> 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.

[throwawaygal7]

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