In the West, itâs 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 youâre going to keep the âclassicsâ 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. Thereâs 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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Happy to be corrected, but as I understand it, ancient version is quite different from the modern one? I imagine it is as unintelligible to modern Greeks as old English is to English speakers? I donât know the technical defn of âdeadâ re languages. Maybe âancestralâ is right term
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Replying to @vgr
TIL Greek is a dead language
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Fair point, but one that also applies to other languages. Old French was also used beyond France by elites. And in the East, Persian was similar.
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Replying to @gcaw and @vgr
There's plenty of Greek and Latin writings that aren't specifically Greek or Roman, eg medieval Arabic and European scholarship
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One of the effects of studying cultural history partitioned into classic vs vernacular streams is it seriously distorts the actual levels of connectedness across space, time, and class across history.
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It also elides the history of linguistic disruption. Choosing to do intellectual work in the vernacular has historically been a major act of rebellion/liberation/deregulation. Iirc the Renaissance was kicked off by a guy doing âclassicsâ writing in German.
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Null hypothesis: classics is mostly just an elite larp that wonât cop to being a larp.
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If you just give up âclassicâ status and deregulate history for purposes of identity construction, as a bonus you finesse the culture wars entirely. There can be no battles over diversity and inclusion in canons if canons cease to be privileged lenses on cultural memory.
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