Arguments for studying Latin.

Cafe Society
1

It seems that those who recommend studying Latin do so based on

  1. Increasing vocabulary

  2. Understanding English grammar better.

  3. Reading the classics in the original language

  4. General intellectual simulation
    Of these, the one I don’t quite get is number 2. My meager understanding of latin includes the use of declinated nouns to indicate its relation to the verb. As a result, word order doesn’t necessarily matter save perhaps for emphasis. Can anyone explain why studying latin is a better supplement to studying english over simply studying more english?

2

Because the English grammar you’re taught in school is based on Latin grammar. Seeing the same construct in multiple languages should give you a clearer picture of it.

3

So you understand what I mean when I say “Semper ubi sub ubi.”

4

Because I never heard of grammatical terms like gerund, gerundive, predicate nominative, er… etc etc, until I took Latin (they did show up in English class a few years later).

Latin opened up my understanding of English language construction in phenomenal ways.

5

I studied Latin for 4 years in high school and would have continued into college had GT offered courses. I studied it for a handful of reasons:

A) I had plans to further my language knowledge and thought Latin would be a good basis for the Romance languages.

B) My dad wanted me to study Spanish and I did Latin to annoy him

C) Latin lent itself to my style of learning and I appreciated the rote memorization it required. To this day (4 years since my last Latin test), I retain a fair bit of vocabulary and remember the vast majority of the endings.

D) Latin is a “dead” language. Yes I actually studied it for this reason. I have a love for history. Though I will argue the ‘dead’ part, I present it that way.

Latin is an easy language if you’re willing to memorize a lot of stuff. The exceptions are few and notable, it’s very formulaic which can make translation easy (excepting for the poetry of the time)

And yes, there are lots of nifty Latin sayings…

6

A significant part of the benefits from learning is not really that closely related to the language itself but to the way it is taught in school. The latin classes that I have seen took a more formal approach than other language classes and also demanded very careful analysis of texts.

7

[the simpsons]

“Ask about our Latin motto contest!”

[/ts]

8

Let’s also be honest - if there is a universal language (aside from English) in the world it’s Latin. There are a lot of educated persons who can speak and understand enough latin for simple conversations all around the world. (Of course you’ll get into the whole Cicero/Kikero conundrum… but you’ll be understood.)

And, yeah, learning any foreign language makes you realize just how FUBAR English really is. What other language uses the exact same word choice and constructions for the perfect and imperfect tenses? I never understood the subjunctive until I got it in another language.

9

[QUOTE=OtakuLoki]
(Of course you’ll get into the whole Cicero/Kikero conundrum… but you’ll be understood.)
[/QUOTE]

Hmm?

10

[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
Hmm?
[/QUOTE]

Cicero, the great Roman advocate and philosopher. Everybody pronounces his name “Siss-er-o”, but in the original Latin, it would be better pronounced “Kick-e-ro”.

11

That’s “Kick-a-row”…sorry…like “Look at all those footballs lined up in rows. Lets go kick a row.”

12

Classicists maintain that C, in Latin, was always a “hard” C. Thus you can see that Kaiser is a derivative of Caesar. So, for them, the way to pronounce the name of the Roman writer Cicero is “Kikero.” Church latin speakers, however, find that odd, and a bit of a mental speedbump, so they’ll still talk about Cicero.

Similarly, since there was no difference between U and V in Latin, the classicists believe that the proper pronunciation is more of a mix of the sounds that we use for those two letters today.

13

[QUOTE=OtakuLoki]
Classicists maintain that C, in Latin, was always a “hard” C. Thus you can see that Kaiser is a derivative of Caesar. So, for them, the way to pronounce the name of the Roman writer Cicero is “Kikero.” Church latin speakers, however, find that odd, and a bit of a mental speedbump, so they’ll still talk about Cicero.
[/quote]

How did the shift happen? When did “c” begin to stand for an “s” or a “ch” sound in some contexts?

14

[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
How did the shift happen? When did “c” begin to stand for an “s” or a “ch” sound in some contexts?
[/QUOTE]

The traditional pronunciation was the ecclesistical one. In the late 19th and early 20th century, scholars began to agree that in Ancient Rome, all Cs were hard and Vs were bilabials that sounded more like a W (Wayney, weedy, weeky). It changed gradually in schools, because people who devote their lives to teching dead languages are often not the most inclined to change their way of looking at things.

15

So… Nobody’s going to make the Latin America joke?

16

Latin is useful in law and medicine also.

Brian

17

Esyay. Ortunatelyfay, Iway easpay Atinlay.

18

Not only are the givens of the first four a benefit (in answer to the OP it helps to learn the parts of speech, and gives a number of valuable roots, prefixes and suffixes) it is also useful for learning Spanish, French, and Italian, as well as useful in a study of law and medical arts.

19

[QUOTE=OtakuLoki]
And, yeah, learning any foreign language makes you realize just how FUBAR English really is. What other language uses the exact same word choice and constructions for the perfect and imperfect tenses? I never understood the subjunctive until I got it in another language.
[/QUOTE]

The same word choice and constructions? Gosh, it’s almost as though English doesn’t make that distinction! Besides, “perfect” and “imperfect” are aspects, not tenses. Tense refers to past, present, and future, while (depending on the language) any of those could be used with either the perfect or imperfect aspect. Though I think they are often conflated in Latin pedagogy.

The problem with studying Latin to learn English grammar is all you’ll learn from it is Latin grammar. If English grammar were taught properly, the ridiculousness of learning one language in order to understand another language’s grammar would be apparent. At any rate, while you’ll learn some of the basics of English grammar (because you’ll learn some basic grammar) studying Latin, you’d be better off taking a decent course in English grammar. Because what you’d learn studying Latin is only partially relevant to English and contains large gaps in the area of grammatical features that Latin doesn’t possess.

Besides, misapplying Latin grammar to English is why people make silly little claims about “splitting infinitives” (scare quotes used because the phrase itself is ridiculous - no infinitive is being split in English) and preposition stranding.

It is? I’ve never seen numbers, but how common is Latin speakership worldwide? I would imagine that, say, French or German would be more common. In terms of sheer number of speakers, Mandarin would win out, though that’s useful only in limited areas of the world. Spanish or Arabic are primary languages in vast areas of the world and numerous different countries (and in the case of Arabic, it’s a common second language in many areas as well). It seems to me that there are very few places where speaking Latin would be any help at all, while any of the above languages would stand a decent chance of being useful at least some of the time.

I don’t know when per se (and probably no one does), but it happened when late Latin was in the process of evolving into the modern Romance languages; C and G were always “hard” in Latin (that is, they were stop consonants) but at some point they changed their pronunciation when followed by I or E (or in the case of French, A, which is why you have château while in Spanish it’s castillo.) This is because I and E are front vowels, and under their influence the preceding consonants /k/ and /g/ moved forward. The final result differs in different Romance languages - “C” followed by a front vowel became /s/ in French or Portuguese or Latin American Spanish, “th” (like English thing) in Peninsular Spanish, and “ch” (like English chin) in Italian or Romanian.

If you’re asking why we mispronounce Classical Latin words, it’s because most people don’t speak Classical Latin and don’t know the proper pronunciations, so pronunciations influenced by local languages (or, in the case of Church Latin, by the pronunciation of modern Italian) became common in areas where Latin is spoken.

20

Excalibre, my understanding had always been that the imperfect is a tense. Until you’d mentioned it, I never heard of an aspect in language. Since perfect is for acts that happened once and imperfect is for acts that have happened for a period of time, or are continuing to happen, it is a legitimate distinction. Usually in English the imperfect uses a gerund, but not always. Though, I’ll admit part of that is because tenses aren’t taught well these days either.

Secondly, I never meant to say that Latin would be enough to get you understood by everyone. However, I will say, in countries with a romance language it would get you by. In countries without one, there are still going to be relatively large numbers of people who have some familiarity with it, even in China and India. It’s not a universal language, I just said it’s closer to being one than any other language currently in use, with the possible exception of English. I’ll still stand by that, though I don’t argue that more people speak chinese than Latin. (Or even spanish)

Finally, I don’t mean to talk about transplanting latin grammatical rules to the English willinilli. The whole don’t end a sentence with a preposition is another bit of that same kind of idiocy as worrying about splitting infinitives. However, learning to think and consider such things makes it easier to recognize similar things in English. It may just be I had shitty English teachers, but I never understood the imperfect, subjunctive, or many other things about English until I got them in another language, and had to think about such constructions.