Quote:I get your point and you're right about that. But spelling is a useful tradition; it helps communication if we all spell words the same. I was thinking of a different type of tradition: social customs, habits. Once upon a time it was useful to write diplomas in Latin, because that was the language of international scholarship and science. Right now, it's English, so if we want to remain practical, we should change. Retaining Latin means you're petrifying a custom that has lost its function long time ago.
But the point that really irritates me is that the demonstrators betray a profound lack of understanding what really matters. Our universities, our scholars and scientists, are no longer good enough. Partly, the universities are themselves to blame. They did not fight back when they should have done so (1980s). Many people - not lunatics, but serious people with a good education - have reasons to distrust the universities (more...). The universities have a serious image problem.
Well, it's not only about spelling the same way, but also in a particular way and that is a habit. We could all use a quasi-phonetic orthography and yet we don't. Today we could all use IPA and we wouldn't care about several alphabets worldwide. From at least one point of view things would be much more simpler: once we learn how to speak a language, we'd also know how to write it as well.
In my opinion the drive is the tradition and the existence of a substantial body of literature. We reprint most of it anyway, but I guess we wouldn't want our recent 'classic' works shifting forms so often, as our languages evolve (Spanish or Italian evolved from Latin, but Latin literature isn't Spanish or Italian,
it's not felt like Spanish or Italian). There are several other aspects of language influenced by having such traditions such as literary archaisms and phraseology (in English we still have echoes from Shakespeare and pirate talk
)
Similar processes happened in Antiquity. As a rule of thumb the ancient alphabetic spelling was quasi-phonetic. And we see as the pronunciations evolved the orthography often did not. Maybe also because they wouldn't want to change Homer and the other classics (they recopied those works over and over anyway, so it was not a matter of costly rewriting). Epigraphic evidence illustrates this gap. The barely literate people couldn't care less about the rigors of obsolete spelling and they did what it seemed most reasonable to them: they approximated the language they spoke in the alphabet they knew - be it Greek or Latin.
On the other hand, in analogy with the modern use of Latin, some Greek authors of Late Antiquity wrote in Attic Greek, no longer spoken in their time. Some of us, from a teleological perspective, may see it as an exercise in futility, yet very probably it was a display of erudition and prestige from their side.
Such things are, in your words, petrified customs. We can't get rid of them unless we sacrifice most of what we call culture.
Back to our times, today English is an international language in the world, but is it
the language of scholarship?
Let's suppose we want to study the geography of Eastern Roman Empire, as it is reflected in the works of Procopius Caesarensis. If our only language is English, we'd better study something else! The current (but obsolete) edition of
De Aedificiis is Haury's (improved by Wirth in the 60s) and there's an English translation by Dewing. But we'd better stick to the critical edition if we need those names in Greek with their
variae lectiones. However Haury's
apparatus criticus is in Latin! Moving forward, on the identification of fortifications, churches and so on, the major, seminal work (even though obsolete in several regards) is Veselin Beševliev's
Zur Deutung der Kastellnamen in Prokops Werk "De aedificiis" (Amsterdam 1970). Depending on our focus, we'll find numerous other studies, many in Serbian, Bulgarian, Greek, Romanian (obviously, the works on geography, toponymy, questions of identification, etc. get mostly published in local journals and that is also true for a large part of the archaeological research) but also many others in German, Russian, French (e.g. M. Perrin-Henry's "La place des listes toponymiques dans l'organisation du livre IV des Édifices de Procope" in
Geographica Byzantina, Paris 1981). Obviously there are some materials in English as well, but clearly insufficient.
Moreover we
need Latin in modern scholarship not only to read some critical editions, but also corpora of inscriptions. I'm mostly familiar with Balkan inscriptions so I'm bringing as example G. Mihailov's
Inscriptiones Graecae in Bulgaria repertae, Sofia 1958-97 (IGB I was published first time in 1956, but it was reedited in 1970). So if one needs to make an argument over a Greek inscription, edited in Latin, what should he/she do? Rely on some other work in English which happened to mention that inscription (but perhaps failed to point out vital aspects in interpretation)? What if such a work is not available? Is this professionalism?
Certainly for a historian of WWII Latin may be almost useless. But for a historian of Western Christianity Latin is a must (also Greek, and depending on the focus, some Old Slavonic, Aramaic and perhaps also other languages). Same for historians of Carolingian Europe, medieval Hungary, Renaissance (and these guys should have a clue about vernaculars such as French and Italian), of early modern scientific ideas, of transmission of musical theory from Antiquity to our modern times, etc. As I pointed out before, Latin is not merely the language of the Roman Empire and important segments of European history cannot be properly studied without an adequate knowledge of this language.
While my view on modern academia (I'm no scholar though) is much more optimistic than yours (I could write more on that, but already my reply is very long), one of the flaws I found often enough is the ignorance of evidence and somtimes of previous scholarship, which often enough is also caused by ignorance of languages. And Latin is one of these languages. I agree the Latin on university diplomas does not really matter that much, but this decision looks like a symptom of a more serious problem, too many historians don't know Latin (or other languages they should have known).
