Posted by ks2048 3 days ago
If you squint enough you can see English as a barbarised form of Latin.
One very fun thing I discovered recently is that Dante (and presumably other people in the middle ages) thought that Latin was a constructed language designed to go over linguistic differences, and that's why it had a proper grammar, unlike romance languages :)
But I think the source is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_vulgari_eloquentia In the Italian Wiki page, the "constructed nature" of latin is hinted at; it doesn't seem to be present in the English wiki.
Update: It's indeed in the book, at the end of the 1st chapter of the 1st book:
3 There also exists another kind of language, at one remove from us, which the Romans called gramatica [grammar]. The Greeks and some - but not all - other peoples also have this secondary kind of language. Few, however, achieve complete fluency in it, since knowledge of its rules and theory can only be developed through dedication to a lengthy course of study
4 Of these two kinds of language, the more noble is the vernacular: first, because it was the language originally used by the human race; second, because the whole world employs it, though with different pronunciations and using different words; and third because it is natural to us, while the other is, in contrast, artificial.
Here, vernacular refers to "italian" or whatever dialect, while "gramatica" is latin - the artificial one :)
I always found designs worked better without lorem ipsum, for example, if building a website for a T-shirt company, you might as well use their existing descriptions to see if the content actually fits the layout. Plus you can model real world things, I remember many a lorem ipsum design just falling apart because things like product names were longer than 'lorem ipsum'. Yes I get the idea of lorem ipsum but I always found we wasted time, insulted the client and just created problems for ourselves, just to accomodate a designer that only ever saw text as shapes on a page.
This passage especially stood out to me:
> At the application level, AI in the strict sense raises questions about the reliability of data and the criteria by which programmers process it so as to make it available. It is unclear what biases or power systems influence the work. In particular, serious doubts arise regarding automated, AI-based decision-making processes in sensitive areas of human life: when deciding whether to provide medical care or grant loans or mortgages or insurance, or when prosecuting criminal cases in court or assessing the conduct of prisoners and the likelihood of reoffending with a view to reducing sentences, or when deciding on military attacks or law enforcement interventions.
It is funny because this almost feels like a complete summary of recent Hacker News debates in a single paragraph.
Encountering Artificial Intelligence (https://jmt.scholasticahq.com/article/91230-encountering-art...)
Reclaiming Human Agency in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (https://jmt.scholasticahq.com/article/154545-reclaiming-huma...)
https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/docu...
ANTIQUA ET NOVA: Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence. "Francis ... on 14 January 2025 ... approved this Note and ordered its publication."
via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43750835, comment by jimmcslim on Pope Francis has died.
The writing is genuinely excellent.
In tech communities, we often talk about how many times productivity will increase, or whether AI has consciousness. But in religious documents, the focus is often on how the problems of the vulnerable and the community will change.
That is interesting to me. The worldview is Western and religious, so it feels somewhat unfamiliar, but at the same time, it seems useful as a way to rediscover values that we may have forgotten.
See specifically perhaps the encyclical Rerum novarum (Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor) from 1891:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rerum_novarum
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_social_teaching
Various others over the decades.
Even after that shift, the Catholic Church continued to be a fundamentally reactionary force in the realm of social policies, all the way through the second world war.
First, the Church isn't in the business of policy. The Church recognizes the distinction between secular and religious authority, and indeed, it is the origin of that distinction, from which the exaggerated liberal separation of Church and State comes from (you won't find this distinction outside of Christianity, and indeed it makes no sense outside of that context). The Church will advise or comment or respond to policies as a moral authority, but policy as such does not belong to its scope.
Second, Catholic Social Teaching didn't materialize out of thin air. It is a culmination and explicit formulation of millennia of teaching. The industrial, political, and economic upheavals of the modern era are what motivated this explicit formulation.
Third, I wonder what you consider as "reactionary" here. The term itself is an incredibly loaded and condescending progressive term and takes for granted the correctness of the progressive view. The Church has been consistent in its teaching. It does not adapt to what is fashionable or to ideological fallout (even if particular prelates may show signs of doing so).
Proceeds to argue that the Catholic Church is not in the business of policy, when it ran an actual, sizeable _nation state_ all the way to 1870 and in fact was extremely pissy when it was taken from them. And you call me distorting? Lol. They are in the business of policy, they've always been.
Dude, I'm from a city that was directly ruled by popes for centuries. We've dealt with all that rubbish over and over, Gelasius' swords etc etc. The reality is that the institution does what it does in order to survive and maintain as much power and influence as possible, by any means necessary. They will find ways to justify anything and its opposite, because theology is just a literary game.
Rerum novarum was an attempt to maintain power and influence in a situation where their power system was fundamentally challenged (or unmasked, some would say). It remained a niche and largely ignored effort all the way to Council II. For all the effort of some local clergy, most of the real powerbrokers in the Catholic Church still don't give two shits about redistribution and social justice, and never will.
Yes, there actually is a distinction between ecclesiastical authority and secular authority. The same person can hold both secular and ecclesiastical offices. The Church - the institution - wasn't deciding policy in the Papal States, and it is not deciding it in the Holy See today. It is simply nonsensical to claim that.
Of course, the Church does maintain that all states must conform their laws (ius civile/lex) to the natural and divine law, but that's a general moral claim. I think most sane people would reject positivist conceptions of law as crazy and tyrannical, and would agree that the civil law should be a determination of general moral principles according to particular circumstances within a jurisdiction, and not arbitrary. Policy thus properly belongs to the state which is guardian of the particular common good of its jurisdiction. So, yeah, I would expect someone holding both offices to enact policies that coherently agree with the teaching he is transmitting through his ecclesiastical office. But as I said, the Church already expects all secular authority to conform prudently to the natural law at the very least, and the fullness of the Church's teachings if they are a Catholic confessional state.
But more to the point, it is irrelevant, because even if the Church had been directly deciding policy in the Papal States, it wouldn't follow that the Church has the authority to enact policy just anywhere. Its authority rests above it, like a referee.
The care for workers was a thing long before Marx. Rerum novarum (¶20) quotes scripture on the topic:
> To defraud any one of wages that are his due is a great crime which cries to the avenging anger of Heaven. "Behold, the hire of the laborers... which by fraud has been kept back by you, crieth; and the cry of them hath entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth."(6)
Jesus himself was a tradesman, often translated as "carpenter":
* https://uscatholic.org/articles/202205/was-jesus-a-carpenter...
Marx's caring for the downtrodden and weak is itself a Christian concept; in contrast, Nietzsche hated weakness and Christianity for its support of those that are (he was not a fan of the Sermon on the Mount).
Catholic nuns were instrumental in the development of computers. A Catholic priest is fundamental to the Big Bang Theory†. Dozens of craters on the moon were named by and for Catholic clergy who discovered them.
Amongst scientific clergy, there’s also Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit who was part of the team which discovered the Peking Man fossils (although looking at the Wikipedia page, it appears his legacy is a bit more complicated than one can address in an HN comment).
Historically, however, this framing of opposition would have been incomprehensible to Catholics. Scholasticism itself provided the intellectual foundations for modern science. Historically, you won't find a sustained and fertile scientific enterprise anywhere but the Christian West. As Jaki puts it, everywhere else, it was stillborn.
This battle between Religion vs. Science is an ignorant myth repeated by the ignorant and by tendentious bigots.
/s