• MudMan@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Yes? I think you may have missed my point in the shuffle.

    What I’m saying here is that Latin doesn’t make sense as a mystical, secret language for magic because it was too common. I’m not saying it wasn’t the language of scholars, I’m saying that not only was it the language of scholars, so every treatise on optics or history would have triggered accidental lightning bolts, but it was also a commonly spoken language as well.

    Hey, you know what is lingua franca for science while being widely spoken? English.

    Does that sound mystical to you?

    • spauldo@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      If English had been a dead language for fifteen hundred years and was only used by people who talk about things only a tiny subset of the population understands?

      Yeah, it would seem pretty mystical.

      • MudMan@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        But that’s my point, it hasn’t been, and it wasn’t.

        Again, Latin was mandatory in my high school for a year, optional for two more. In the 1990s. It’s still optional, I believe. My parents went to church in Latin as kids.

        So no, it doesn’t sound mystical outside the anglosphere, it sounds like crusy old priests, lawyers and boring lessons. Today.