Brain fart: I was thinking “ignition.” Which goes to know that knowing Latin doesn’t necessarily help with day-to-day communication.
Never too it. Surprised an educated person couldn’t suss it out. I could’ve,would’ve taken longer.
I took 2 years of latin in high school in the 70s. They offered it in my “Appalachian Regional High School”, along with Spanish and French.
The language came in handy in College, and still sometimes does. I can still recite Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, too! Mica mica parva stella, miror quaenam sis tam bella…
Latin just isn’t taught any more round here, which I think is a shame. I studied it to A Level and for many years afterwards could just about converse in it. My teacher was totally fluent, of course.
Which is, coincidentally, how I weed useless freshers out of my Classical Studies course [major].
I never took any Latin, but you pick up a lot of Greek/Latin roots along the way when you study for the GRE. A lot of fantasy games use made-up words with Greek/Latin roots (like the Maleficarum in Dragon Age) and the connections to English words are usually pretty obvious to me, but that might be because I’m an English teacher.
I feel like most Americans would be familiar with at least a smattering of Latin phrases, like pro bono or ad nauseam.
Not eligible for your first questions, but from what I know, EFL people get to learn a lot less philology than people whose first language is about any other European one. I was familiar with “igni-” as “root meaning ‘fire’” some five years before the year of Latin I had to take in high school, from a year where there was at least one hour a week dedicated to “the roots of Spanish”.
You guys use a lot of Latin expressions without knowing that they’ve been borrowed directly from Latin. Current example, one of my English coworkers says “per say” for per se: this both explains why “per say” is a commonish typo and tells me that he either doesn’t know Latin or doesn’t realize per se is Latin.
U. S. citizen, three years of Latin in high school. It’s mostly taught in private schools. I personally think it should be taught in public school, because learning Latin considerably improved my command of the English language.
And yes, I knew what ignis meant, but it is quite possible that others might not have correlated it with ignite.
I wouldn’t expect a high number of Americans to know Latin. However, people in other countries (such as Japan or England) may speak multiple languages because of their country’s superior educational system. I don’t know much about Russia or their educational system though…
Latin was the language of the academic world for centuries though, so its not surprising that some nations would encourage its study. I am a student who is pursuing a Master’s degree in History, and I am currently studying Latin (2nd year). Personally, I think it is a fascinating language (but i’m biased because I love Roman history :D).
But i’m digressing, its not a big deal that you can’t speak Latin. Being able to speak multiple languages is always a good thing, but it really just depends on what your interested in/do for a living. Figure out something you can do that your Russian friend can’t…and then annoy him about it haha 
I have heard others make this claim, and I certainly believe it. But it leaves me wondering whether spending X hours learning Latin improves one’s command of the English language more than spending those same X hours studying English would have.
I can vouch for it too. I think it’s in part to do with analysis, discipline, and precision. For example, many noun forms are homonyms - different cases have the same spelling - so you have to analyse the text to determine the correct case and you have to show that you understood in your translation. And to show that understanding you have to use correct English.
I had 3 years of Latin in US public high school. It was the only foreign language offered. Most colleges expected a foreign language, and it was assumed that Latin would be the most acceptable. Since more went to college than were in our Latin classes, there is something wrong with that assumption. Glad I had it, but I can’t get very deep into it.
I’ve heard latin is one of the best languages to learn because it helps one get by in many related languages like Spanish and French.
I would not say that. If you want to get by in Spanish or French, learn Spanish or French. Either one will help you much more with the other as Latin will, since there are shared cognates for modern words that don’t exist in Latin (e.g., camion, which means truck in both languages.) I’ve taken all three.
This, but I can also relate the fact that Marcus is stealing Quintus’ satchel.
In all seriousness, I can still read long passages of Latin well but I can no longer conjugate verbs and identify noun declensions and so on. I took five years of Latin in (English) prep schools, as well as another year of a beginner course (it was all that was offered) in US high school.
Thirded. Or fourthed, or whatever.
I had English classes right alongside the Latin classes. For me, it’s understanding the derivation of words in English; it gives me, I think, more precision in my vocabulary choice. But that’s just me.
It’s also that throwing a second language into the mix (any second language) forces you to think about English grammar in a way that studying English, on its own, won’t (if you’re a native speaker). Latin has particular benefits in that it is heavily inflected, usually not taught as a spoken language, and the source of a large chunk of English vocabulary.
My first foreign language was French, and I learned much more about English grammar from French in grade 7 than I had learned in English, even though we had talked about exactly the same points. In English, I didn’t understand the difference between a noun and a verb. I was taught it, but I didn’t have to learn anything new to fake it. In French, I had to.
I think one of the differences is that Latin has noun declensions. Which means you are forced to learn the parts of speech and to use them all the time. Nothing prevents you from learning them in English, but because English doesn’t have many noun declensions left (except for plurals, but they are pretty simplified), you don’t get the constant reinforcement.
And I think most kids learn their first language through exposure and repetition, rather than the rules. They figure out what sounds right when compared with what they’ve heard, but they don’t necessarily know why it sounds right. So when they are using unfamiliar words or structures, they can’t figure it out.
It’s more than that. All English nouns have two cases: genitive (dog’s (s), dogs’ (pl)) and not-genitive (dog (s), dogs (pl)). But we never talk about them as cases, and because we distinguish the genitive from the plural with a punctuation mark rather than by sound or spelling, it confuses everybody. Latin helps clarify what’s really going on behind the stupid apostrophe.
Yes, that’s what I was talking about in my second paragraph.
Nescio, Litore Custos?