A summary of what happened on the #ClassicsList (Liverpool) in the last few days:
- the Americans think that leaning a second language on top of English is classist.
- some Italian, French, and Greek guys say that the Humanities do not need a lingua franca like hard sciences do.

- a guy posts in Yiddish, another one in Arabic, nobody understands a word, but these people get applauded for they defence of multilingualism in academia.
- ok: Italian, French, German. But what about Dutch?

- the Scandinavians still don't give a shit and refuse to engage with the madness.
- one proposes everyone publishes in their own language (including Swahili) and then every paper will be professionally translated into English and more. Obviously there's tons of funding for this.

- Afrikaans for our entertainment.
- a guy posts in a made up non existent language to take the piss out of everyone. Nobody, not even the moderator, notices, proving hat nobody even cares to use Google translate when they don't know the language. Now imagine with academic papers

- a guy proposes to go back to Latin as lingua franca if people are so much against English. Instead of actually considering the idea, they start fighting on whether they should use Attic or Koine Greek instead.
- Donaldus Trump intervenes.

- In Quebec they hate English so much that they want to switch to Esparanto.
- apparently we need to learn Japanese, in the light of its many centuries of Classical tradition.
I'm done.

PS: I was a bit disappointed that no-one proposed High Valyrian as new lingua franca. Let's face it: they teach it on Duolingo and it's surely more exciting than Esperanto.