Thread by @DrFrancisYoung

Translating Latin is one of the things I do for a living. A large part of the reason people think like this 👇 is that they believe (not really through any fault of their own) that Latin is all about the Romans. But I don't get asked to translate stuff written by Romans (thread)

Most of the stuff written by Romans has already been translated (although new stuff is occasionally discovered like the Londinium tablets). But Latin was widely used up to and beyond 1700, so every time we need to engage with society before 1700, we may need Latin

I don't just mean historians here. I've been asked to translate legal documents that are still applicable in the modern world. I've been asked to translate recipes from materia medica that are of interest to modern scientists. Some companies have old records in Latin

Many archivists and librarians use Latin every day, because so much was written and published in Latin before 1700. That includes literature; much of the most important Scottish literature of the early modern period was written in Latin

And that's just Britain. In other countries Latin remained a scholarly language for much longer. Just yesterday I was reading a book in Latin published in 1976. The idea that Latin is a 'dead language' is very much an Anglophone perspective

This is not to say that everyone will have a need to use Latin at some point in their life. But a surprising number of people will; for example, I'm often approached by people researching their genealogy who need help with Latin

Classicists will hate me, because I'm honestly not bothered whether people learn to appreciate Virgil or Cicero. Latin needn't be approached as a pretentious literary language; it's a mode of communication like any other. And it's a historic language of Britain

Learning even just a bit of Latin gives you access to the world before 1700 to a greater extent than if you don't know it at all; and while it's possible to learn Latin as an adult, an introduction to it as a child can make things a lot easier

So I'll always defend the teaching of Latin in schools, even if I'm somewhat suspicious of the cultural agenda that sometimes lies behind it

And I take issue with the idea of Latin as an 'elite' or 'learned' language. Yes, Latin was a language used historically by literate people with some education, but most of the scribes, scriveners and clergy of early modern England were hardly elite or learned