Hi! I just had a random linguistic question. I was thinking of terms like “alma mater” and graduation designations like “cum laude” etc. and even in academic writing we commonly have phrases like “ad hominem” or “ad nauseum”. Why have these terms persisted in English societies, and where did integration of them with academia come from?
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It wasn’t that long ago since you basically couldn’t get a higher education at all unless you were fluent in Latin, because bulk of the literature was not translated to local languages. It was so recent that even Einstein was told he would never amount to anything because he was no good at Latin.
You needed to be fluent in Latin and hopefully decent in Greek and/or Hebrew. It was only in end of 19th, start of 20th century that for nationalist reasons universities really started prioritizing local languages. And Latin certainly didn’t disappear overnight, it’s still not gone, there are still quite a lot of countries where Latin remains compulsory part of education. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instruction_in_Latin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instruction_in_Latin)
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