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kleinbl00  ·  2550 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Teaching is Fulfilling: what TFG's been up to #3

Dante chose to write The Divine Comedy in Florentine rather than Latin so it would be more accessible to the masses. Petrarch, Bocaccio and Macchiavelli followed suit and before too long, Florentine was Italian and nobody spoke Latin anymore.

It is the people of a language that speak it, not just its scholars and when scholars are allowed to codify language, the language dies. Europe had a mother tongue uniting scholars from Sweden to Sicily but by keeping it inaccessible to all but scholars, it became nothing more than a pompous, elaborate system of taxonomy.

I'm "the educated" and I find the quickest way to provoke a stranger into antagonism is to talk like it.