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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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