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I never understood ‘classics’ as a subject. Feels like it should be refactored into dead languages and history curricula. Most access for modern literary scholarship should rest on translation into living languages maybe?
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Here I become a traitor to my class and defend Princeton’s decision to remove Latin and Greek from its required curriculum for classics majors: theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/ (Traitor to my Latin class, that is.) In @TheAtlantic
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The ‘classic’ designation is purely a non-functional class thing afaict. It’s how civilization-scale polities assert identity by marking out certain dead languages and literary traditions as ‘superior’, but really they just have large corpuses of texts to work with.
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In the West, it’s not clear to me what the special treatment of Greek and Latin (as opposed to Aramaic or ancient proto-German or Gaelic or whatever) accomplishes beyond marking those literary canons as special for identity.
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Princeton move feels like a not-even-wrong move though. If you’re going to keep the “classics” designation at all, keep the languages. Better move: abolish the classics as a major, and redistribute the scholarship between history and dead languages departments.
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In India,there is similar thing. There’s no good reason to elevate Sanskrit above Pali, Prakrit etc. An unnecessary political contest is also created with the non-indo-European dead languages like ancient Tamil, whose proponents fought to get it recognized as a classic language.
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Untranslated Sanskrit texts overwhelmingly dominate Pali/Prakrits/Apabhramshas/Tamil by 8:2 ratio in many archives. If one wanted a first order description of many aspects of Indian past, via texts, well upto 12-14thC, it is intimately tied to learning Sanskrit.
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Sure. I’m mainly arguing with “classics” as a categorical basis for organizing scholarship. It feels like an unnecessary and inefficient hereditary nobility in academia that limits many ways of seeing cultural memory.