While we're still on to the Latin
thread...
Several times I've picked up my Latin dictionary
and flipped through it, trying to find a word or a concept that would be strange
or incomprehensible for modern people. I've been doing this because I've often
heard that we should not believe that we are able to understand people who lived
a couple of centuries before us - their concepts and their world view were so
different from ours that it is impossible to really understand them, even if we
understand their language. If this was true, I
guess a dictionary of a language which was spoken in a society that existed 2000
years ago would contain words or concepts that are alien, perhaps
incomprehensible to us. I still haven't found any. Of course, a Latin
dictionary does not contain the whole language as it was spoken by people who
used it as a mother tongue: there's no everyday speech, no street talk, no
slang. Would the language look more alien to us if such words were
included?
Perhaps I'm a romantic, but I suspect that the
difference between "us" and "them" is sometimes overestimated. I find Plato's
dialogues excellently readable and they are almost 2500 years old. I believe I
understand what they're talking about, and I believe I can hear the different
"tones" of the text: it changes from joking to serious, from deep thoughts to a
satire of pompous empty speech in a way that needs no explanation for modern
readers. Is this an illusion? To me, the dialogues are obviously written by
someone who knew exactly what he was doing, someone who knew how to communicate
his ideas while keeping his audience interested. (I've always found it
weird to read that "Plato hated literature and wanted to ban it" because of
a few sentences in "The State" - if he really hated literature, then why did he
choose to present his philosophy as literary dialogues, he could have
written like Heraclitus or Aristotle...) The translation of the dialogues that I
read was from the 1920's or 30's - it's already dated, but the ideas and the
discussions in the dialogues are still alive.
I've been thinking about this for a long time and any comment would be
welcome.
Hakan