Comment by graemep
19 hours ago
They were written in Latin until well into the modern era. Newton wrote his major work in Latin, for example.
19 hours ago
They were written in Latin until well into the modern era. Newton wrote his major work in Latin, for example.
Yes, I know. Why the confidence that this contradicts anything I said?
Edit: Re-reading I realise you were reading that as me thinking the books weren't written in Latin, whereas I was trying to get the parent poster to think a bit beyond "the books were written in Latin" to wonder why they might be written in Latin long, long after the fall of the Roman Empire.
Yes. that was how I read it. Sorry for that but think the poster you were replying to got it either.
The other poster seems to have got on the wrong end of the stick about something, but I don't think it's that.
> Newton wrote his major work in Latin, for example.
Newton wrote in Latin because he was, famously, an arrogent bellend. The rest of the sensible scientific community had long since swiched to living langauges.
That doesn't sound right. Newton's contemporaries like Leibniz, Huygens, Halley all wrote much of their most significant work in Latin.
Newton also wrote Opticks in English, perhaps because he was aiming at a more mass market audience.
Do you have a source for this made up information? Seems to contradict with this:
"Leibniz wrote mainly in three languages: scholastic Latin, French and German."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Wilhelm_Leibniz
"Many of his writings were in Latin"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Linnaeus