Top all-time · #10654
The bLogicarian
Personal blog · blogicarian.blogspot.comhistoryculture
The bLogicarian is a personal blog at blogicarian.blogspot.com about history and culture. Since 2021, 7 different Hacker News readers have linked it 9 times, most often “Latin as she is spoke: How classicists tricked themselves (2019)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-04-17, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link it for posts on classical scholarship and language, such as the state of Latin knowledge among classicists, the small surviving corpus of Greek and Latin texts, and ancient Greek pronunciation.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Latin as she is spoke: How classicists tricked themselves (2019)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-09-27
- /2019/03/argumentum-ad-ignorantiam.html2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-12-30
What Hacker News says?
The pronunciation used in schools for didactic purposes has only a modest relationship to authentic historical pronunciation. Pronouncing eta as [i] is an influence from modern Greek - in ancient times it was [ɛː], as described by the author (and as used in my secondary school Ancient Greek class - when we switched teacher to one who pronounced it [i], he conformed to our standard rather than vice versa). The bLogic…
Comment linking /2012/10/ancient-greek-food-for-classics.html
on “Spartan School (2019)”Submitted Latin as she is spoke: How classicists tricked themselves (2019) as a story · 178 points
HN discussion>That's hard to believe. I understand why you'd feel that way but classics departments aren't what they used to be. It's pretty common for even elite universities these days to not require grad students to understand the languages of the cultures they purportedly study across the board, let alone for Latin. https://blogicarian.blogspot.com/2019/03/argumentum-ad-ignor...
Comment linking /2019/03/argumentum-ad-ignorantiam.html
on “The Vatican's Latinist (2017)”Submitted Latin as She Is Spoke: How Classicists Tricked Themselves (2019) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionhttps://blogicarian.blogspot.com/2019/03/argumentum-ad-ignor... — per this blog post (which takes https://www.the-tls.co.uk/regular-features/mary-beard-a-dons... as the starting point), most classicists “can't sight-read a complex Latin text all that well” [unlike medievalists and Renaissance scholars].
Comment linking /2019/03/argumentum-ad-ignorantiam.html
on “The Vatican's Latinist (2017)”The paper that this article is based on: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abl7655 . On a tangential note: Corpus of Classical Texts that we have is really small, e.g. ( http://blogicarian.blogspot.com/2019/03/argumentum-ad-ignora... ): "... But the entirety of extant literature in Greek and Latin through to, say, the Late Empire is probably enough to fill a single small bookstore. It's a lot, sure. But a…
Comment linking /2019/03/argumentum-ad-ignorantiam.html
on “Could the greatest works of literature be undiscovered?”There are still some scholarly work written in Latin. For example see Terence O. Tunberg's book from 2013[0]. I highly recommend this[1] blog post about contemporary Latin knowledge. [0] https://www.amazon.com/rationibus-colloquendi-Supplementa-Hu... [1] http://blogicarian.blogspot.com/2019/03/argumentum-ad-ignora...
Comment linking /2019/03/argumentum-ad-ignorantiam.html
on “Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin?”Yes indeed a structured environment and teacher would be best… another reason is that self-guided learning also tends to run out of steam/motivation more easily. But it's not as if there's an abundance of classes (online or otherwise) for Latin. Apart from what others have said about their experience learning Latin from LLPSI, a couple of other points: • Using the book does not necessarily preclude looking up other…
Comment linking /2019/03/argumentum-ad-ignorantiam.html
on “Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata”What a surprise! I was always envious that Ørberg's famous book and approach had no counterpart for Ancient Greek. In fact in every bookstore I’ve checked books on learning Latin far outnumber those for Greek, if those exist at all. I learned Greek from Grouton’s From Alpha to Omega , a totally unappetizing book. The reason, I think, for the difference is that, while there’s a robust tradition of using Latin in mode…
Comment linking /2019/03/argumentum-ad-ignorantiam.html?m=1
on “Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata”
