Connections Competition
highly commended
Science’s
- Maria, Lower V
Connections to the Classics
Classics - the very word appears to be an antonym to science, with its modern progressions, yet even at a glance Classical Greek and Latin are evidently relevant to science today.
For instance, in taxonomy the genus and species of an organism are in Latin, take Homo sapiens, the biological name for humans. From this binomial classification it can be determined that a human is a “wise man” (the literal translation of Homo sapiens). Prefixes in chemistry are similarly handy for describing the structure of a molecule: pentane (using the prefix ‘pent-’ derived from the Greek ‘πεντε’ for five) is an organic molecule containing five carbon atoms.
In an age with English as the universal language of science, it is important to remember how prominent the Classics once were: Latin was used for scientific publications in European countries such as France and Italy for longer than the Romance languages, here being French and Italian. The Italian astronomer Galileo translated his discoveries during the 16th and 17th centuries into Latin to reach the masses, as European upper classes were generally well-educated in the Classics and used them to communicate in their daily lives. Latin had been the main language used for scientific publications in France, too, until the 16th century Renaissance. These ties with Latin can be traced back to the Roman Empire, under
which all the Empire’s inhabitants spoke Classical Latin, which initially deteriorated into Vulgar Latin and eventually formed distinct languages - yet it was only realised in the 8th or 9th century that these tongues were separate to Classical Latin.
Lastly, the Classics had ample opportunity to become the languages of scientific discovery thanks to ancient thinkers. Hippocrates, a Greek physician born in 460 BCE, developed the Theory of the Four Humours, the belief that illness is caused by an imbalance of blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile, which was studied and implemented by many English doctors up until the 1700’s. So whilst it may appear that ancient ideas hindered science rather than aided new discoveries (especially as it was taboo to question the Theory of the Four Humours in Medieval England), some ideas are still endorsed today, such as Juvenal’s “mens sana in corpore sano”, “a healthy mind in a healthy body”.
Given the impact that Classics as the languages of scientific communication have had on science, it feels somewhat unjust to dub them dead languages.
