The value of Latin

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Dragon27
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Re: The value of Latin

Postby Dragon27 » Wed Oct 30, 2024 7:13 am

I did think of a similar thing myself. That classical languages are often treated and developed (both by the contemporaries and later users/scholars) in a way that makes them more consistent and "logical" than they originally were, with the invention of new rules and semantic differences that didn't exist originally. This artificial consistency shouldn't be exaggerated, of course (which people are so fond of doing).
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Re: The value of Latin

Postby Cainntear » Wed Oct 30, 2024 1:43 pm

tritiumoxide wrote:I'm going to just declare my previous post trash since I thought I was agreeing with both of you (and still do) while extending your points with just a bit of hyperbole, but it was clearly just a communication fail. I'm not sure I feel like taking the risk of even trying it again, so maybe I will just point out that I very much understand the difference between programming languages and human languages, and that was my whole point, that treating human languages like we do C++ or the lambda calculus is quite absurd and leads to the "Latin is logical" fallacy at hand.

Sorry -- as someone with degrees in both computer science and languages and whose last job involved teaching both English and programming to overseas students looking to start in Scottish universities, I'm perhaps slightly hypersensitive to the whole human language vs programming language comparison and can get unnecessarily prickly over it!!!
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Re: The value of Latin

Postby Akiva » Wed Oct 30, 2024 2:45 pm

And why would I not value Latin? For one, reading Latin authors in Latin and not in translation kind of gives you the understanding of how their train of thought worked. The same goes for Ancient Greek and frankly any other languages. If you study Greek phyolosophy, for example, mastering Ancient Greek will give you a deeper understanding of Greek thought. Émile Benveniste showed this in his article about Aristotle's categories, which, according to Benveniste, came straight from grammatical categories of Ancient Greek. He theorised that any school of thought born within another language would probably inherit categories from that language's structure or, at the very least, will just be different.
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Re: The value of Latin

Postby Ug_Caveman_Backup » Wed Oct 30, 2024 4:52 pm

I studied Latin at school and simply put, I struggled horribly. Not because I didn't find it interesting, but because I just wasn't ready to study a case-based language when I was 11, and dropped it as soon as I could.

That being said, the vocab I picked up definitely enriched my understanding of English (and French, Spanish and Italian) and enabled me to work out what unfamiliar words meant (or even make very well educated guesses as to what someone should be called when I didn't know the word.) It's even helped me on a few pub quizzes when I needed to define a particular word.

Maybe one day in the future I'll go back and give it a proper go, I thoroughly enjoyed studying the culture of classical civilisation that came with studying school Latin. (And as a physicist, a knowledge of the Ancient Greek alphabet is most useful - so maybe I'll diversify ;) )
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Re: The value of Latin

Postby Iversen » Wed Oct 30, 2024 5:10 pm

I started out learning Latin words (not the grammar) as a young teen because zoological nomenclature mostly was based on Latin. But then I ran into a number of critters with species names on leuco-, which all had something white on them. Aha, I thought, then lecogaster on a whitebellied fish or bird must mean that leuco- means white and -gaster means belly. But I couldn't find neither word in any of the Latin dictionaries I consulted. I mentioned this to my doctor, and he said that gastritis is a stomach illness so my hunch was right, but the word might be Greek. However I hadn't learnt the Greek alphabet yet, so there I hit the wall :shock: . I did learn more Latin words and snippets of words, but I was 15 years old before I finally learnt the basics of Latin grammar through a grammar-translation course at school (probably abolished now).

If I hadn't known that Latin would catch up with me later on I might have started to study it on my own, as I did with Italian and Spanish. And then I might have been better at it...
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Re: The value of Latin

Postby Gänsefüßchen » Sun Nov 03, 2024 3:53 pm

I haven't read the entire thread, but I want to reply to the original post.

O1000 wrote:[...]
1. As far as I know, the Romance languages evolved from vulgar Latin, so to varying degrees, there doesn’t seem to be much resemblance in grammar between the Latin that is usually taught today and modern Romance languages, especially regarding French. While many words in the Romance languages, have Latin cognates, you still have to learn them in your target Romance language and vocabulary acquisition is the easier part of language acquisition. Almost 50% of the English vocabulary comes from French, but no one says, oh, learn French first to have it easier in English. (As I said, maybe I am just an uneducated heretic)


I've been studying French in the past few months and found that my (rather superficial) knowledge of Latin helps me with understanding the conjugations and deciding which gender a noun has.

2. Interestingly, the Slavic languages seem to be closer to the grammar of classical Latin than the Romance languages do. Still, I would prefer investing my time in learning the target Slavic language directly, rather than taking the detour and learn classical Latin first, unless there’s a good reason for that. What’s your take on that?


I studied Russian at school and then took Latin classes at university. I was one of the best students there, which I attributed to my knowledge of Russian grammar. I had memorised the declension tables in no time at all. I assume the other way around would work as well. Latin reminded me a lot of Polish due to the preference for hyperbata.

Apart from an interest in Roman culture and history, I think there are two main reasons for people to study Latin within the school system nowadays:
1) They want to avoid being in a class with too many children for whom German is not the first language.
2) They prefer (or believe to prefer) the different teaching methods used for Latin, mainly reading and translation.
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Re: The value of Latin

Postby sandrabellevue » Mon Nov 04, 2024 2:32 pm

I'm a French speaker (B2) and have touched a slice of Latin. The connection between French and Latin is fascinating and fundamental to understanding French's evolution. French is a Romance language that developed directly from Vulgar Latin (the everyday spoken form of Latin) after the Roman conquest of Gaul. The French concept of gender (masculine/feminine nouns) comes directly from Latin. And many French irregular verbs maintain patterns from their Latin origins. For example, the irregular verb "être" (to be) follows patterns similar to Latin "esse".
Understanding Latin has particularly helped me grasp why certain French words seem irregular or exceptional - they often preserve older Latin patterns that were regular in their original form. This historical perspective makes French grammar rules feel less arbitrary and more logical.
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Re: The value of Latin

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Thu Nov 07, 2024 7:07 pm

This appeared in the list of recommended videos:

Why study latin?
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