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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?

#61

Post by dr_dshiv »

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?

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

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

#62

Post by cheese_van »

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…

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.

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

#63

Post by JJMcJ »

wizard-beta wrote: post #52
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?

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.

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

#64

Post by quotemstr »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #61
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?

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?

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

#65

Post by p1esk »

lai-yin wrote: post #20
inglor_cz wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgotten protocols are a thing until today. AFAIK we have problems deciphering the recorded transmissions of Lunokhod, the Soviet probe that landed on the Moon. Everyone who knew the code is dead.

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.

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

#66

Post by dr_dshiv »

prox wrote: post #49
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…

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.

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

#67

Post by ncmncm »

prox wrote: post #49
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…

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)

The whole of modern linguistic theory, including the regular, context-free, and unrestricted grammars, were fully worked out in still-preserved Sanskrit.

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

#68

Post by dr_dshiv »

quotemstr wrote: post #64
dr_dshiv wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#69

Post by ncmncm »

pseingatl wrote: post #14

More texts are on the way. The Villa Papiri texts will soon become readable, it is hoped, through the application of modern technology. These charred scrolls were part of a library at Pompeii. Odd that he didn't mention these at all.

All the interesting charred scrolls are still to be dug up; what we have is from the top-floor "reading room". Italy is holding off excavation because they do not get enough money to preserve what is already exposed.

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

#70

Post by dr_dshiv »

antognini wrote: post #35

I've been doing a lot of research on early astronomy lately and have been digging into how exactly we know what we know about the early Greek astronomers like Thales and Anaximander [1]. It turns out that it's pretty remarkable that we know anything whatsoever about these early figures. Thales was active so early on that philosophers weren't really writing anything down at that point. One of his successors, Anaximand…

Cool podcast!

Check out Shwep.net.

Did you know that Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler credited Pythagoras for heliocentrism [1]? And Newton credited Pythagoras for the inverse square law [2] of gravity? Pythagoras is best...

[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/228080

[2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/531064

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