Me too. Medical terms, law terms, common expressions, and some religious terms. I would have figured out what igni meant from the root or cognates, as I’ve figured out the meanings of many Latin words used for spells in witch-themed TV shows and movies.
Thanks for the replies and thoughts so far.
What it seems to boil down to is that he was mostly surprised I was using a fire spell in a video game called Igni…and I didn’t know what igni stood for or what it meant.
He says I should have made the connection between igni and ignite…especially since the igni spell causes fire to start.
Me, I just didn’t think of it. I didn’t make the connection…and I kinda/sorta think (or LIKE to think, anyway) that it might have been easier if I had known igni/ignis meant fire. Thus, why the whole Latin convo started between him and I and why he brought it up in the first place (“Don’t you know Latin?!”).
Oh well, learn something new every day.
[QUOTE=Stuffy]
I know some Latin.
[/QUOTE]
Same here. Just enough, acquired over the years to be able to make for a decent… well, not really a vocabulary, is it? Is there a term for the ability to make a good reasoning what an unfamiliar word means? Especially considering that body of knowledge is built from Greek, Latin, Spanish, German, and so on. For instance - to look at the company named Zappos and to deduce that they might sell shoes from knowing that zapatos is Spanish for shoes. I’ve also acquired enough knowledge of medical terms to surprise my neurosurgeon.*
IIRC, when I was a HS freshman, Latin was offered, but taken by only a small handful of “advanced placement” seniors. That was its last year - when I was a sophomore, they dropped the class entirely.
- Apologies for the rampant sentence fragments - it’s a hazard of trying to put streams of thought into words.
I took a lot of English classes, including AP Engligh my senior year. I don’t recall** any** discussion of Latin or Greek roots. I also don’t recall any of my teachers spending any time getting us prepared for the SAT. AP exams, sure. But we were on our own for the SAT.
I don’t even know Latin anymore, and my college major was Ancient Greek and Latin.
I did know it at one point, though! And yeah, as others have said, it’s pretty useful when it comes to figuring out what unfamiliar words might mean.
I wouldn’t consider myself to “know” Latin in the sense of being able to converse in the language or interpret documents written in the language. However, over the course of simply acquiring an education I have become knowledgeable of plenty of Latin words, phrases and terms as they are used in various academic areas. Also anyone familiar with one of the Romance languages will understand some Latin by default.
I think it’s pretty safe to say that no one in America who went to a public school (which confusingly in Britain is what we yanks would call a private school) would ever have taken Latin. A foreign language was usually not ever required in US public schools, and even so the only ones offered were usually French, German or Spanish.
The wonderfully hilarious ‘graffiti’ sketch in Monty Python’s Life of Brian is a nod to every upper middle class British kid’s hatred of having to take at least one year of Latin. Also Steve Martin does a great snotty joke on one of his original albums, “Hey isti-mundus ferreo-bundus. Oops! I forgot, you don’t speak Latin!”
My high school offered Latin. My father said I should take it, because I’d have a stronger foundation for English.
I said blah, blah, I’m taking Spanish because people actually use it.
The rebelliousness of a 14-year old.
I did six years of Latin at school and have continued to be exposed to it constantly since then through choral works and the mass/breviary texts. I’ve even had rudimentary conversations in Latin when it has been the only language in common between me and a foreigner.
There’s no doubt it was one of the most useful subjects that I did at school.
I took Latin at my English grammar school in the 1960s. (Of course, it was closer to the time of the Roman Empire back then. ;))
My American ex-wife went to Hollywood High School (yes, that Hollywood) in the 1970s. She took Latin too.
I took Latin in the 9th and 10th grades. No, I can’t speak it, but it did help me understand language construction (including English) and where root words come from.
I’m American, I went to public school and yes I took Latin in High School. I was not the only student in the class. So there are at least 30 Americans who went to public school and took Latin.
I took Latin in 7th-9th grades, but I wouldn’t say I know it. It was a while ago.
I thought Latin was a dead language. So nope I don’t know Latin and my high school never had it in the curricula. And I graduated from high school in 1957.
A person who knows 2 languages is bilingual, a person who knows 3 languages is trilingual, a person who knows only one language is an American. I probably wouldn’t have picked up on ignis , until I’d had one clue as he gave you, then probably, but I grew up speaking Spanish along with my English in Panama.
I can converse fluently on the subjects of farmers, grain, and the fact that Britannia is an island while Gaul is not.
I no longer live in the US, but I did when I learned Latin. I learned at UCSD, so I assume it’s taught there! I did know what ignis meant (and how to decline it: it’s a third-declension i-stem). I’m not at all surprised that someone wouldn’t know it, nor connect it with “ignite” (which doesn’t have a particularly fiery meaning, anyway, except metaphorically and I guess deep inside the engine). For your Russian friend, it’s also cognate with огонь (ogoñ), which might have been an easier mnemonic for him than “fire” would be for you. (It’s also cognate with the name of the Vedic god Agni in Hinduism.)
Never took Latin, but I was a biology/history major in college and had a particular interest in systematic biology and taxonomy. In that milieu, constantly immersed in Latinized binomials, you do tend to pick up on some Latin/Greek roots after awhile. And I have played The Witcher and yes, I did pick up on the Igni/fire spell association ;).
But I agree it isn’t common in the U.S. to learn Latin. Not rare, but not particularly common either. It certainly wasn’t offered in my High School.
I took Latin. At my school, if you wanted to take any of the other languages offered, you first had to take one semester of Latin. So I took one semester of Latin. I wouldn’t say I “know” it but I know things about it.
And in fact I found it very helpful when I took the languages I really wanted to take, which were Russian and French. With Russian it was helpful to already have the concept of declensions and with French it helped with some of the vocabulary.
I took two years of Latin in middle school. Thirty years later, I can sort of puzzle out the gist of short written text (if it’s written simply).
Like elfkin477, I really only know medical terms, law terms, common expressions, and some religious terms.
And schoolboy dog latin like “gustatus similis pullus”. 