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Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin?

talesoftimesforgotten.com

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Re: Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin?

#71

Post by prox »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #66
prox wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sanskrit in the Indian subcontinent has a long history, and not many are familiar with them. Lots of other scripts and languages in East Asia are relatively unknown (for example from Indonesia)

There are thousands of lost palm leaf books, in Sanskrit and other South Asian languages, rotting away. There is simply no money to support the scholarship that would preserve these works. It's incredibly sad.

Do you know any libraries that need financial support for archiving this body of work?

Re: Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin?

#72

Post by lai-yin »

p1esk wrote: post #65
lai-yin wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would be interesting to have a catalogue of endangered protocols/knowledge bases - similar to the endangered species list. Bit of a tangent: just occurred to me that part of the story arc for the show 'Mr. Robot' is hackers trying to erase an entire knowledge base - the debt history of billions of people. The protagonists try to achieve this goal by peaceful means, but...okay I'm going to stop spoiling it's an awesom…

In Mr Robot the goal was to destroy a data base, not a knowledge base. Data != knowledge.

Fair point!

Re: Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin?

#73

Post by throwawaygal7 »

quotemstr wrote: post #33
Telemakhos wrote: post #28

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 a…

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

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

Re: Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin?

#75

Post by dang »

cblconfederate wrote: post #43
dang wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't take HN threads on flamewar tangents. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

hum, considering that a lot of that culture is not digitized or even recorded, how is that related to flamewar?

You're introducing hot, divisive political topics which are completely extraneous in this thread. When people do that, what happens is that the hot divisive topic catches flame and we get a big, repetitive flamewar, drowning out the quieter, more obscure, and more intellectually interesting topic. That's the opposite of what we want on this site, which is supposed to be for curiosity, not perpetuating pre-existing battles.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The big generic topics are like black holes that suck in surrounding spacecraft. It's not a good idea to open a black hole in a thread like this.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Re: Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin?

#76

Post by aksss »

coliveira wrote: post #56
pessimizer wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Plato spoke of a golden age, now long lost, where the flaura and fuana were so plentiful that men didn't need to work. That's an example of the belief that all things were known in a golden age, and that the process of discovery is actually rediscovery of the knowledge of the elders. Common in a lot of pre-modern societies that had ancestor-worship. In old B.C.E. pre-imperial Chinese philosophy, before deductive re…

You don't need to go to old China to give an example of this phenomenon. Fundamentalist christians nowadays still have the same mindset, nothing can be true if it's not supported by their ancient texts.

I think that's a little different though - the Christian critique isn't that 'once everyone knew everything', but more that everything new presents challenges and opportunities to the human experience that are fundamentally no different than those that humans have always grappled with. Thus, every new challenge can be informed by principles in received wisdom. That's far less golden-agey, maybe more jaded or stoic. Read Ecclesiastes for instance: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes%20...

"There is nothing new under the sun" comes from this. I've never read this as saying that in a material sense there is nothing new, but more that the base class library and the primitive types don't change, if I may accost you with a silly analogy.

Re: Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin?

#77

Post by moftz »

School-Cotton wrote: post #58
quotemstr wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin?

#78

Post by cmrdporcupine »

Koshkin wrote: post #25
jl6 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but that’s the Greek mythological version of the Garden of Eden story. I find the reality even more interesting. What were humans thinking about 40,000 years ago, with their modern bodies and brains?

Even with the abundance of plant and animal food, they were preoccupied with survival. There were too many things to be taken care of: avoiding falling prey to carnivores (including fellow humans), injuries, sickness; need to hunt and/or collect food, tend to children. There was just no time to think about much else. But the prehistoric form of communism made survival easier. In the later, more individualist, times,…

I recall a rather flippant and sensationalist video with a YouTuber interviewing some present day hunter gatherers on more philosophical matters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAGjuRwx_Y8 "Asking Hunter-Gatherers Life's Toughest Questions"

I got the impression there was some language barrier stuff going on, but the answer to many questions was... "meat"

Re: Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin?

#79

Post by nerfhammer »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #39

Maybe someone on HN knows the answer to this question, which I've wondered for a while. Are there other civilizations of similar cultural sophistication to the Greeks, Romans, and Chinese whose writings have just not been passed down and so we aren't as familiar with them? Or are the ones whose work survived roughly it, even if much of their works are lost. E.g. there doesn't seem to be much surviving Persian literat…

The article mentions Punic (Carthage)

Re: Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin?

#80

Post by EarlKing »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #39

Maybe someone on HN knows the answer to this question, which I've wondered for a while. Are there other civilizations of similar cultural sophistication to the Greeks, Romans, and Chinese whose writings have just not been passed down and so we aren't as familiar with them? Or are the ones whose work survived roughly it, even if much of their works are lost. E.g. there doesn't seem to be much surviving Persian literat…

I suppose I could mention the city-states of Mesopotamia such as Sumer, Akkad, and Babylon. They left behind a rather rich literature which survived to this day (thanks to having been written on clay tablets instead of papyrus), though much of it remained inaccessible until the Cunieform script was deciphered in the 1800s. As with Romans and Greeks you'll find a wide variety of texts from the religious and scientific, to legal treatises, to contracts and shopping lists.
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