Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
I'm in the "I want both" camp, and we can have both.
I thoroughly enjoy the occasional foray into language from a century ago, maybe two, but I don't have the time or patience to learn French, Greek, Latin, Middle English etc., so I'm forced to accept translations of anything very much older. The older you go the more it seems common for authors mix other languages into English - some older texts make me feel very badly educated indeed. (I read some John Ruskin recently where I know I missed important details due to a lack of Greek and Latin.)
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It's certainly true that an author (in Britain, at least) 50 years ago could assume a reasonable grasp of Latin on the part of his or her readership, because it was a subject taught in every British school. I'd guess it was probably around the early 1970s that it stopped being universally taught.