# Are kids today worse-educated than in times past? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [February 27, 2010, 2:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-today-worse-educated-than-in-times-past/530600 "2010-02-27T02:47:51Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 17\ **Page:** 7
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2010, 7:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-today-worse-educated-than-in-times-past/530600/121 "2010-03-08T19:30:39Z")
> [@Dogzilla](#): > > I beg to differ. I found the precision and structure invaluable knowledge to have when working with English. Much of English grammatical structure is derived from mostly Latin. While I willingly concede the value of foreign language study in better understanding the structure of one’s own language, English grammatical structure is not “derived from” anything, least of all Latin. Latin grammar was the mold into which teachers once attempted to force English grammar, to the utter confusion of almost everyone else. ---
**Author:** ![Indistinguishable](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/90ced4/32.png) [@Indistinguishable](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Indistinguishable)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2010, 7:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-today-worse-educated-than-in-times-past/530600/122 "2010-03-08T19:37:52Z")
And more to the point, if you want to gain a deeper understanding of English grammar, study of almost any foreign language would work just as well as Latin through highlighting similarities, contrasts, and careful attention to details one does not consciously think about as a native speaker. There’s nothing intrinsically beneficial about Latin for this purpose; it’s not particularly grammatically close to English and it has no greater precision and structure than anything else. ---
**Author:** ![Johnny\_Angel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/d26b3c/32.png) [@Johnny\_Angel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_Angel)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2010, 12:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-today-worse-educated-than-in-times-past/530600/123 "2010-03-09T12:04:56Z")
I think we really ought to give this topic its own thread, but here I re-present a previous post on this subject, with a slight update for an additional source: > [@Final high school exams (NSW) - the ten most popular languages](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/final-high-school-exams-nsw-the-ten-most-popular-languages/514423/59): > > Latin is the ur-language that unites a lot of languages used in the west. If it’s true, as is claimed on Wikipedia, that the study of [Interlingua](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua) helps one puzzle through Spanish better than the same amount of time spent actually studying Spanish, then Latin would be at least that useful, since Interlingua is basically Latin without inflectional endings. It’s also possible with a knowledge of Latin to [suss out Spanish or Italian with a few simple rules](http://roserwilliams.com/Spanish%20and%20Italian%20through%20Latin.pdf). > > It has also been mentioned that Latin helps with learning biological nomenclature. Of course, you can also just study the nomenclature by itself. Most do. Those, however, don’t end up learning much about Latin. The person who studies Latin, on the other hand, gets way out ahead in the study of scientific nomenclature and is in the enviable position of not merely memorizing, but understanding. Note that this advantage is cumulative with the advantage discussed above. > > Latin is often cited as a good way to build up verbal scores in standardized tests, and not without [evidence](http://www.promotelatin.org/WhyStudyLatin2003.pdf). But in fact, it simply stands to reason. 60% of English words come from Latin, and that jumps to 80% when you look at words of three or more syllables. How many syllables on average are you expecting per word in the SAT? Furthermore, those English words from Latin mean what they mean because of morphological rules that are not themselves carried over into English morphology, so English doesn’t teach you how to decode them. You can just study the English vocabulary directly, but the same amount of effort in Latin vocabulary plus derivational rules yields a rich English vocabulary as well. It’s also possible to just study the cheat sheet on Latin derivation, which will certainly help. But you won’t get any of the advantages mentioned in the previous two paragraphs, which are cumulative. > > Latin is also a highly ordered and logical language, and is traditionally promoted as part of a complete curriculum that exercises rational faculties. Of course, you can and should study logic itself as well as mathematics and rhetoric. But it’s not as though the advantages of all these approaches to analytic training don’t stack. They are cumulative with those of Latin, which includes all the above discussed advantages as a free bonus. > > It’s true that you don’t come out of a Latin class with the ability to communicate with living people (ignoring for the moment that the spoken Latin community is growing now that the internet is here to connect them). But let’s not pretend that high schools are cranking out fluent second language speakers either. You can parlay your halting high school French into continuing studies, but most people don’t. They let it wither and fade, and the advantage in principle that it’s an actual living language is rarely an advantage in fact. The opportunity cost for that advantage that never manifested is all the things above that Latin teaches you, which are cumulative. > > Latin builds a diverse intellectual portfolio which pays reliable dividends however the market changes. Modern languages are high-yield investments with little liquidity. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2010, 2:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-today-worse-educated-than-in-times-past/530600/124 "2010-03-09T14:49:58Z")
> [@Dogzilla](#): > > Much of English grammatical structure is derived from mostly Latin. No, much of English grammatical **terminology** – “nominative,” “dative,” etc. – is derived from Latin. But the grammatical **structure** is derived from Old English. The grammar is positional – you know what a word is doing in the sentence from its place in the word-order, not from the form of the word reflecting its case, tense, or whatever. ---
**Author:** ![Capt.Ridley\_s\_Shooting\_Party](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/cc9497/32.png) [@Capt.Ridley\_s\_Shooting\_Party](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Capt.Ridley_s_Shooting_Party)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2010, 3:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-today-worse-educated-than-in-times-past/530600/125 "2010-03-09T15:51:43Z")
I studied less than half as much Latin at school than I did French (2 vs. 5 years), yet I think Latin helped me more in the long run. I don’t think it’s anything to do with the language, but for more silly reasons perhaps. Whereas in French class we were being taught how to order cakes from a patisserie, ask somebody to hoover your bedroom or buy train tickets to Calais (kill me now, please!) in Latin we really were translating Tacitus and reading about the Roman assault on Mona, the massacre of the druids and Caesar’s adventures in Gaul. It’s hard to quantify, but I think Latin class was at least 10 billion times more interesting than the dull shit we got taught in French. ---
**Author:** ![Perciful](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/b38774/32.png) [@Perciful](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Perciful)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2010, 4:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-today-worse-educated-than-in-times-past/530600/126 "2010-03-09T16:07:02Z")
> [@Dogzilla](#): > > I beg to differ. I found the precision and structure invaluable knowledge to have when working with English. Much of English grammatical structure is derived from mostly Latin. I work as a professional editor today and thank my high school Latin teacher every single day of my life at work. Learning Latin gave me a deeper understanding of English grammar. > > Latin would also be useful to anyone who goes to medical school or works in a biology field: lots of Latin names and words used everywhere. I think Latin should be required for law students; learning precise structure could make reading contracts and other documents written in legalese much more readable and understandable. Latin was very useful for my daughter not only in Dental school but also during the summer when she works as a pharmacy technician. She just seems to pick up on medical terms easily because the roots are Latin. It was amazing how quickly she picked up Spanish knowing Latin. Speaking Spanish fluently and she can interface well with customers that have trouble with English. ---
**Author:** ![Maeglin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/8baadc/32.png) [@Maeglin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maeglin)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2010, 6:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-today-worse-educated-than-in-times-past/530600/127 "2010-03-09T18:00:42Z")
> [@Dogzilla](#): > > I beg to differ. I found the precision and structure invaluable knowledge to have when working with English. **Much of English grammatical structure is derived from mostly Latin.** The bolded section is completely false. The English language has endured a dreadful amount of post hoc Latinization, but fortunately most of this has been undone. English and Latin certainly have some grammatical structures in common, but this should surprise no one given their common source. But this observation is trivial and unhelpful for learning either Latin or English. > [@](#): > > I work as a professional editor today and thank my high school Latin teacher every single day of my life at work. Learning Latin gave me a deeper understanding of English grammar. I think that learning Latin imparted a deeper understanding of _grammar_, period. This is one of the great things about learning any highly structured Indo-European language. You would have derived the same benefit had you learned Greek or Sanskrit instead. > [@](#): > > Latin would also be useful to anyone who goes to medical school or works in a biology field: lots of Latin names and words used everywhere. I think Latin should be required for law students; learning precise structure could make reading contracts and other documents written in legalese much more readable and understandable. I also disagree completely. If you are in a medical field and care enough about learning Latinate roots, just learn the roots. You don’t need to know how to translate a future less vivid condition or be familiar with the cadences at the end of Ciceronian periods. A couple of days and an extensive word-list is all you need. The situation in law is even worse. Legal Latin is typically so bad that I suspect that knowing Latin will actually hurt you. Lawyers need to know what the _legal_ meaning of stare decisis is, not what it actually means. A disproportionate number of classicists become lawyers and do you know what the first thing they do is? They unlearn Latin. ---
**Author:** ![Maeglin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/8baadc/32.png) [@Maeglin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maeglin)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2010, 6:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-today-worse-educated-than-in-times-past/530600/128 "2010-03-09T18:27:55Z")
> [@Indistinguishable](#): > > And more to the point, if you want to gain a deeper understanding of English grammar, study of almost any foreign language would work just as well as Latin through highlighting similarities, contrasts, and careful attention to details one does not consciously think about as a native speaker. **There’s nothing intrinsically beneficial about Latin for this purpose; it’s not particularly grammatically close to English and it has no greater precision and structure than anything else.** We discussed this earlier and now I suppose my arguments must have been unconvincing since you are still repeating this. On what basis do you make this judgment? Latin simply does have more structure than most other living languages. It has a richer grammar, larger verbal system, and is capable of tremendous nuance due to its flexible word order. The act of reading decent Latin itself is a highly mediated process akin to deciphering a code. The act of translating decent English into decent Latin is also rigorous: you don’t realize how much ambiguity we tolerate in our verbal system until you’ve tried to translate it into a language that tolerates much less. ---
**Author:** ![Johnny\_Angel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/d26b3c/32.png) [@Johnny\_Angel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_Angel)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2010, 7:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-today-worse-educated-than-in-times-past/530600/129 "2010-03-09T19:14:57Z")
> [@Maeglin](#): > > Latin simply does have more structure than most other living languages. It has a richer grammar, larger verbal system, and is capable of tremendous nuance due to its flexible word order. The act of reading decent Latin itself is a highly mediated process akin to deciphering a code. The act of translating decent English into decent Latin is also rigorous: you don’t realize how much ambiguity we tolerate in our verbal system until you’ve tried to translate it into a language that tolerates much less. My impression is that Latin is a particularly good language for getting an idea how language works. Much of what it does, we can understand through English analogs, though the English version tends to be messier, less concrete, so that English grammar is actually easier to understand with Latin to compare it to. If any other language is comparable as a jumping-off point for the study of language, feel free to discuss. I personally don’t want to relegate Latin to the status of a code system. Even today people do speak and read it, it’s just harder with so few means to immerse oneself. But even if you don’t take it that far, the study of the language exercises analytical faculties you wouldn’t know you were missing unless you tried it. ---
**Author:** ![Maeglin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/8baadc/32.png) [@Maeglin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maeglin)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2010, 9:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-today-worse-educated-than-in-times-past/530600/130 "2010-03-09T21:24:01Z")
> [@Johnny\_Angel](#): > > My impression is that Latin is a particularly good language for getting an idea how language works. Much of what it does, we can understand through English analogs, though the English version tends to be messier, less concrete, so that English grammar is actually easier to understand with Latin to compare it to. If any other language is comparable as a jumping-off point for the study of language, feel free to discuss. I have the same impression. Greek and Sanskrit do this just as well in general, but Latin is so damn useful for English because there are so many cognates. > [@](#): > > I personally don’t want to relegate Latin to the status of a code system. Even today people do speak and read it, it’s just harder with so few means to immerse oneself. But even if you don’t take it that far, the study of the language exercises analytical faculties you wouldn’t know you were missing unless you tried it. I don’t want to relegate Latin to a code system, either. I also cringe a little when people casually declare its death. I’ve read [Farrell](http://www.amazon.com/Latin-Language-Culture-Literature-Contexts/dp/0521776635). But reading literary Latin _is_ much more of a mediated process. You can’t read it one word after another: you have to skip around, match up antecedents with their relatives, identify the main and subordinate verbs, put hyberbata back together, etc. It does require flexing linguistic muscles that you just don’t need for most other modern languages. ---
**Author:** ![wheresmymind](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/91b2a8/32.png) [@wheresmymind](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wheresmymind)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2010, 12:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-today-worse-educated-than-in-times-past/530600/131 "2010-03-10T00:43:01Z")
Warning: useless personal anecdote to follow, tangentially related to the OP. I’m a graduate student in biology/marine science/ecology. This past fall I volunteered for a workshop where local 8th-graders came to our lab for a field trip and to do a few simple microbiology experiments. All of the 8th grade students came, not just the “gifted and talented” bunch. When the first group of the day came to my station I asked them if they knew what PCR (polymerase chain reaction) was. I was surprised when a student answered “Yeah, it’s how you make DNA.” I had about 5-6 groups of kids throughout the day, maybe 6 kids in each group, and each group knew basically what PCR was. I was flabbergasted, this was something that I hadn’t learned about until AP bio in high school, and not 10 years later they’re teaching it to every 8th-grader in the county. Now granted they didn’t really know the the gory details of PCR, just that it had to do with making DNA in a lab (something they probably could have picked up from CSI: Miami). But to me it spoke volumes about the pace of technological change and scientific knowledge. I felt a bit outmoded - if these 8th-graders are learning about this stuff already, what will they be teaching the ones that take AP Bio in 4 years? Probably the stuff I had to wait 'till college to learn! Of course, this doesn’t mean that children are better educated nowadays, but it does illustrate one of the challenges facing the educational system; as time goes by there’s more and more to teach, but you still only have 12 years of instruction. Obviously someone in charge decided that molecular biology was important enough to start teaching it in 8th grade, but I have know idea what curriculum was thrown out to accommodate this decision. ---
**Author:** ![Johnny\_Angel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/d26b3c/32.png) [@Johnny\_Angel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_Angel)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2010, 1:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-today-worse-educated-than-in-times-past/530600/132 "2010-03-10T01:21:09Z")
> [@Maeglin](#): > > You can’t read it one word after another: you have to skip around, match up antecedents with their relatives, identify the main and subordinate verbs, put hyberbata back together, etc. It does require flexing linguistic muscles that you just don’t need for most other modern languages. One barrier to reviving Latin as a spoken language is that you are obliged to jump into tackling great works and challenging authors as quickly as possible. Any modern language is lousy with children’s books, casual or even trashy readings and newspaper stories whose writing style is designed to get a point across in a clear and succinct manner. In addition, other languages have other media which include an oral/aural element, whereas reading out Latin is generally treated as a stunt and very few students are expected to pluck any meaning out of Latin they only heard. I am as much charmed as anybody by the lofty ideals by which Fredrick Wheelock sought to teach Latin by having students translate actual classical authors. But it’s really just a few lines per chapter placed (and sometimes dumbed down) as an example of the current lesson. But ultimately I reject this approach as the doom of any attempt to keep Latin alive. You can spend years studying Latin this way and all you’ve learned to do is take a piece of Latin and painstakingly convert it to English. What I have been doing since I started getting serious about studying Latin as a spoken language is to find Latin that I can simply read. I read it aloud, and I read it again, aloud. I don’t write anything down except notes on new vocabulary and idioms I’ve had to research. I don’t translate except in my head, and I don’t skip around the sentence hunting the verb and working backwards. If the syntax is too complex to read it as given, it goes on the pile to be tried again later. Don’t translate, don’t transpose. Read, read, read. I do have a variety of other things I do, coming at the language from mutliple angles. But I have made decent progress, and reading has been the most effective part of that. The amount of time the words spend turned into English in my head gets shorter, and has even disappeared for the earlier material. I mentioned the Latinum podcast in a previous post. There is a textbook to that, which I read, but the main lesson is in the drill. I listen, listen, listen. And as with the reading, the gap from perceiving to understanding gradually gets shorter. Word order is not that big a barrier. If someone said to you, “For this, my shoes I’m putting on?” you would know exactly what was meant, because even in a word-order dependent language, other cues exist. Latin, however, is packed with cues. I believe it’s getting into the habit of going to the verb and working backwards that makes it hard to do otherwise. In the Adler’s Latin Grammar text that the podcast is based on, the first twenty chapters are just on three verbs – ‘esse,’ ‘habēre’ and ‘tenere.’ Mostly what changes are which nouns and pronouns you practice using in variations of questions and statements of who has what – “Habēsne sal bonum? Etiam, habeē. Estne aliquī sal bonum? Vērō, puerī cuidam sal bonum est.” Repetitive, sure, but then I picked up a book that told a story about a guy who nodded off during a slave auction where nodding indicated a bid. I can’t find where I put the book, but is response when he awoke to see himself surrounded by his merchandise was something like “Cui gladiātorēs sunt?” His friend replied, “Tibi.” That exchange spent zero time in my head as English. And I experience such surprising bouts of spontaneous, unmediated understanding with increasing frequency. Latin can be understood. It should be. But jumping right to great works is like a weightlifter going from learning the basic exercises to using the biggest weights he can find to do them. He’ll probably give up in frustration. If he was particularly stubborn he might end up like most Latin persistent students – just getting really good at dragging the weight around. ---
**Author:** ![Indistinguishable](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/90ced4/32.png) [@Indistinguishable](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Indistinguishable)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2010, 3:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-today-worse-educated-than-in-times-past/530600/133 "2010-03-10T03:03:49Z")
> [@Maeglin](#): > > We discussed this earlier and now I suppose my arguments must have been unconvincing since you are still repeating this. On what basis do you make this judgment? Yeah, I don’t think we’re very far apart in our general positions in this thread, but on this particular point, I remain unconvinced. Latin has some grammatical features English lacks, and English has some grammatical features Latin lacks. Is Latin to be considered more precise than English because it has more case markings? Why not just as well say English is more precise than Latin because it makes more significant use of word order? (Of course, I myself would say neither) I guess I’m just naturally skeptical, in the same way as expressed in [this closing paragraph](http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000467.html). Again, there’s a grander narrative (being rejected) in there that you probably aren’t endorsing anyway, but the point is still… I’ve never seen any linguist claim Latin to be particularly beneficially “precise” in comparison to other languages or indeed anything along such lines (I notice you mention Greek and Sanskrit as well; do you include modern Greek among that? If not, perhaps what you are referring to is simply an artifact somehow of the study of dead languages rather than a result of properties intrinsic to the languages themselves, as I suggested before); I suppose if I were to see such a thing, then I could be swayed. ---
**Author:** ![Johnny\_Angel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/d26b3c/32.png) [@Johnny\_Angel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_Angel)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2010, 11:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-today-worse-educated-than-in-times-past/530600/134 "2010-03-10T11:19:54Z")
> [@Johnny\_Angel](#): > > “Habēsne sal bonum? Etiam, habeē. Estne aliquī sal bonum? Vērō, puerī cuidam sal bonum est.” Weird, because it’s still correct (except for aliqui) in my text editor, minus the macrons. It should be: “Habēsne sal bonum? Etiam, habeō. Estne alicui sal bonum? Vērō, puerō cuidam sal bonum est.” Also, “gladiātorēs” should be “gladiātōrēs”. ---
**Author:** ![Maeglin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/8baadc/32.png) [@Maeglin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maeglin)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2010, 1:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-today-worse-educated-than-in-times-past/530600/135 "2010-03-10T13:02:27Z")
> [@Indistinguishable](#): > > Yeah, I don’t think we’re very far apart in our general positions in this thread, but on this particular point, I remain unconvinced. Latin has some grammatical features English lacks, and English has some grammatical features Latin lacks. Is Latin to be considered more precise than English because it has more case markings? Latin actually has rather a lot of grammatical features that English lacks. The noun terminations actually have nothing whatsoever to do with this. English has prepositions instead of cases; one is really no more precise than the other. What Latin (and other ancient languages) do have is a much more abundant _verbal_ system. The system includes more moods, tenses, and voices all of which enable more precise expression. In English we rely on clumsy and often ambiguous modal verb constructions to try to say exactly what we want to say. No such difficulty in Latin, were future perfects and imperfect subjunctives are nicely built into the language. Does one _need_ them? Clearly not. Are they nice to have and do they enable more precision of expression? Yes. > [@](#): > > Why not just as well say English is more precise than Latin because it makes more significant use of word order? (Of course, I myself would say neither) I don’t make this claim because like noun terminations, word order has nothing really to do with the precision of the language. > [@](#): > > I guess I’m just naturally skeptical, in the same way as expressed in [this closing paragraph](http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000467.html). This is actually a terrible little piece with a surprising amount of misinformation. I think my personal refutation of this is somewhat out of scope, but it is enough to say that the author shows a breathtaking disregard for facts as we know them. > [@](#): > > Again, there’s a grander narrative (being rejected) in there that you probably aren’t endorsing anyway, but the point is still… I’ve never seen any linguist claim Latin to be particularly beneficially “precise” in comparison to other languages or indeed anything along such lines (I notice you mention Greek and Sanskrit as well; do you include modern Greek among that? If not, perhaps what you are referring to is simply an artifact somehow of the study of dead languages rather than a result of properties intrinsic to the languages themselves, as I suggested before); I suppose if I were to see such a thing, then I could be swayed. I get that you have never seen any linguist make the claim that Latin is more precise, but I really do not know what that is supposed to demonstrate. Maybe they make their claims when you aren’t around? More likely they just aren’t interested in this sort of thing. I know a few linguists, and by and large, they’re not. One cares far more about abstraction and language than precision, for example. Moreover, I am not even sure that many linguists could make this judgment. Linguistics and classical philology are very different disciplines: study of the former does not entail any detailed knowledge of Latin grammar but study of the latter does. I do not necessarily include modern Greek here because I do not know modern Greek. But the truth is, I doubt it fits in here. Most of the syntactic structures that I am talking about have tended to fall away over time. The only exceptions I can think of offhand (and I am getting outside my comfort zones here) are Finnish and Icelandic. They are both very conservative languages and have held onto many of the things that other languages have let go. I think this is really the key point here. There are no intrinsically beneficial properties to studying ancient and dead languages. There are plenty of dead languages that for a variety of reasons, most people don’t care very much about. But any linguist will tell you that language evolves and that people are lazy. Difficult, complicated things fall out of languages slowly but surely until the language you end up with isn’t the same as the language you started with. Studying a language that _does_ have these structures, whether living or dead, is good brain food. It just so happens that most of the really good examples of languages like this are in fact ancient. If the Indo-European language saga had a plot, this would be it. ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2010, 10:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-today-worse-educated-than-in-times-past/530600/136 "2010-03-10T22:42:10Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > No, much of English grammatical **terminology** – “nominative,” “dative,” etc. – is derived from Latin. Those terms really aren’t specific to English grammar, but are standard vocabulary among grammarians and linguists discussing any language that has such cases. IIRC they wouldn’t use such terminology in discussing English, because English doesn’t have cases except for pronouns, and otherwise possessives depending on who you talk to. The typical English sentence structure subject-verb-object (SVO) conveys the relationships between the words which, in German or Latin, is expressed by case inflections. > [@](#): > > But the grammatical **structure** is derived from Old English. The grammar is positional – you know what a word is doing in the sentence from its place in the word-order, not from the form of the word reflecting its case, tense, or whatever. OE certainly contributed to the grammar of today’s English, but remember that OE was highly inflected, as much as Icelandic is today, and it allowed great flexibility of word order. But that was lost as the inflections disappeared. ---
**Author:** ![Maeglin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/8baadc/32.png) [@Maeglin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maeglin)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2010, 10:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-today-worse-educated-than-in-times-past/530600/137 "2010-03-10T22:45:46Z")
> [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](#): > > Those terms really aren’t specific to English grammar, but are standard vocabulary among grammarians and linguists discussing any language that has such cases. IIRC they wouldn’t use such terminology in discussing English, because English doesn’t have cases except for pronouns, and otherwise possessives depending on who you talk to. Indeed. You can go your whole life as an English speaker neither knowing nor caring what an ablative is. More useful grammatical terms derived from Latin are winners like “noun”, “verb”, and “sentence”. Knowing Latin doesn’t really clarify what these things mean either, but it gives you something to talk about at cocktail parties if you have already blown your first impression. > [@](#): > > The typical English sentence structure subject-verb-object (SVO) conveys the relationships between the words which, in German or Latin, is expressed by case inflections. > OE certainly contributed to the grammar of today’s English, but remember that OE was highly inflected, as much as Icelandic is today, and it allowed great flexibility of word order. But that was lost as the inflections disappeared. German’s case system is pretty vestigial, but otherwise, this is all true. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-today-worse-educated-than-in-times-past/530600.md?page=6)