Re:Who speaks Latin these days?
by lists on Tuesday February 12, 2013 @01:23PM
(#5208507)
Slightly off-topic: Though there's usually a lot of support for the idea of knowing Latin in order to understand the history of thinking in the west (Greek as well, of course), it rarely comes up that one actually has to know Arabic too for that some 500 years where Western learning was germinating in the Islamic empires.
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Well, yes and no. It took quite a while before the western universities got their Aristotle etc. translated directly from Greek rather than via Arabic. But they--the translators apart--mostly were reading their Averroes and Avicenna in Latin translations.