When to start teaching latin
3 Reasons to Study Latin (for Normal People, Not Language Geeks)
Aaand action!
Latin - it's the language of science, medicine, the legal profession...
These reasons just feel kind of tired to me.
Well, the same reasons that everybody else uses.
Yeah, they are. Can i actually just take the camera with me
look, I could tell you that studying latin will set you up to learn the Romance
languages or give you a base of knowledge for fine arts and literature I
can tell you that you'll be able to read Latin on old buildings him state mottos
or that reading Cicero and Virgil in the original is defiantly beautiful all
those things are true but I'm not gonna tell them to you again you've already
seen those in hundreds of YouTube videos and latin book introductions and
homeschool magazine articles and chances are if you're not already a latin
enthusiast you don't care
The real reason to study Latin, the reason number one
is latin will make you better at language acquisition
now why is language acquisition important? Well, language acquisition is
the skill of learning other skills.
Let me repeat that
Language acquisition will give you the mental habits you can use to learn any other skill.
See, different languages are different modes of thinking. We've all heard of those words
that can't be translated into English because the concept is too different
from how English speakers think. Words like Sombremesa. That's Spanish for the
time after a meal when the food is gone but the conversation is still flowing.
Or Itsuarpok: Inuit for the anxiety that comes with waiting for someone to
show up - checking the windows, going outside, checking your phone - to see if
they're here. and Pisan Zapra: Malay for the amount of time it takes to eat a banana.
Thoughts themselves are formed differently in different languages.
Didn't those words make you think differently about the things they described?
The act of learning a language or even a single foreign word is the act of learning to
think in a new way. Now the same things going on when you learn
real-world skills, and not just skills that directly involve language like
computer programming. Merriam-webster defines language as:
words,their pronunciation and methods of combining them used and understood by a community.
Well, you're entering a community every time you learn a new profession, learn a
new hobby, learn to understand the emotional needs of very young people,
learn to understand the emotional needs of big people who have a different
personality type than you, interact with historians or philosophers, interact with
the writers of cookbooks, or gardening books, or even writers of software.
Each one of those skills requires you to pick up a new mode of thinking - to think
thoughts along new lines or in new colors. And the skill of learning how to
build new lines of thought is language acquisition.
But why Latin? Why not French or Spanish or JavaScript? a lot of students say:
I don't want to study Latin because Latin is dead. Now, I could be pedantic and say
that Latin never died it evolved into modern languages. Or I could be
insufferable and say
Latin's not dead, it's "Roman" around.
but more to the point that would be like a medical
student saying: I don't want to study this cadaver. This cadaver is dead.
Or an auto mechanics student saying: I don't want to study this internal combustion engine.
This internal combustion engine is turned off.
If you're studying language acquisition you want a stationary target and classical Latin
hasn't moved in fifteen hundred years
And you might be thinking "learning new modes of thinking isn't that enticing,
can't you give me another reason?" Well I could tell you that learning Latin will
expand your English vocabulary and help you understand Shakespeare and influence
culture and get paid more in the workplace. I could tell you that the great
minds of English literature have all studied Latin, along with modern-day song
writers, authors, CEOs, star athletes, and politicians - but I won't.
And Icertainly won't tell you that literacy in a foreign language is just a good
thing in general - again all those things may be true, but if you don't speak Latin
already, then Floccos non facis.
What I will tell you is Latin will make you
better at speaking English. For a lot of students studying English grammar seems
boring and pointless- and that is not their fault. See, to speak English in
everyday situations you don't use a conscious knowledge of English grammar
You've been using concepts like tense and subject verb agreement since you were
three. Your conscious mind is so far over them that in most of life you don't need
to know their names to use them well. So when you do study English grammar, which
is important for a creative writing, essay writing, professional writing, it
feels difficult and redundant because it's difficult to analyze something you
can already use intuitively - like teaching your kids to drive.
Learning another language will give you perspective - from inside one language,
it's hard to conceive of words as "carriers of meaning." 99 times out of
100 you're just using the word AS the meaning - the word and the meeting become synonymous.
You're unavoidably blind to the limitations - and the strengths - of
your native meaning carrying system - your language - until you test drive a new one.
But once you have access to more than one language you have the objectivity to
think about how the words are doing their job and if they could be doing it better.
Suddenly you're able to think about how thoughts are expressed in language in
the abstract
Without being bound to how they happen to be expressed in your native tongue
which will help you express thoughts more precisely IN your native tongue.
Okay, but why Latin? What is it about Latin that teaches English grammar
better than any other language? Well English is a hybrid language - or a
Germanic language with a hybrid vocabulary - different people describe it
different ways. To oversimplify history a little, the Celts got invaded by the
Romans, and the Romans got kicked out by the Saxons and Angles.
Then the anglo-saxons got taken over by the French, who were speaking their own
evolved form of Latin, and all the kerfuffle, English ends up with two
halves: Germanic words which basically express concrete, everyday realities -
house, man, woman, kine, and swine - and Latinate words: multi-syllables that
express abstract realities - masculinity, femininity, virtue, republic, liberty.
Basically the Germanic half is the salt of the earth farmer and the Latinate
half is his upscale wife... who I guess he carried off as the Romans were
retreating, to go with the metaphor.
Each half has completely different root words, pronunciation rules, and spelling
rules. Students learn the Germanic half of English when they study phonics,
but take a look at democracy, Democratic, and Democrat. Why do we emphasize
different syllables in each of those words? There's nothing in phonics that
prepares you for that! Well, that's because those words are Latinate and
phonics only teaches you the Germanic half of English. So what's the system for
learning the Latinate side of English? studying Latin.
And that Latinate side is so important. If you know a Germanic word like father then you also know
words like fatherly and fatherhood. But if you know a Latin word like "pater,"
then you also know
If you know the Germanic word death then you also know the words dead, deadened, deadly
deathly, but if you know the Latin word "mors," then you know
you know, because you'll be paying until you die
Now I won't bother to tell you that being a better English speaker is going to improve your SAT
scores and your college papers. It will but those aren't good enough reasons. If
those are your reasons for studying Latin forget about it.
The real reason to study Latin - the only reason - is it's going to make you smarter
and wiser. Learning a language - paying attention to the details, looking for
patterns, memorizing vocabulary - they're all wax on wax off disciplines that
develop your brain. Learning any foreign language is like solving a puzzle, but
with Latin it's Sudoku: you're making conjectures based on easily identifiable
patterns. In Latin it's not uncommon for one word to be untranslatable without
reference to every other word in the sentence - Latin trains you to
conceptualize one thing in the context of many things and to see the
connections between all of them. That's a mental habit that's going to have
far-reaching applications as you study politic, economics, engineering, music,
astronomy, home repair, crying kids, or anything else in life.
Not only that but by the time you're translating actual literature, you're
going to be taking the literal translation - the "what does the text say" - and running
that through the grammatical big picture and the cultural backdrop to arrive at
the real translation - "what does the text mean." Studying Latin is going to grow you
in big picture and small picture thinking and give you the dexterity to
move back and forth between both. Now as we saw in reason number two, Latin is the
most structured of languages. Roman words follow rank-and-file like Roman soldiers.
And what people don't realize - the Latin naysayers and the students when the
studying gets difficult - is that Latin (or any subject) is not just about
information but also formation. It forms your mind into an image of itself. You've
heard the maxim you are what you eat. Well, in the same way your mind becomes like
what you spend your time thinking about. And that FORMATIVE aspect of any subject
is as important or more important than the information it imparts. The study of
literature teaches compassion for the human condition, the study of history
teaches objectivity and perspective, and the study of Latin teaches logic, order,
discipline, structure, precision. Suffice it to say Latin is an almost totally
consistent system, making it less like a language itself and more like an
exercise for learning the skill of learning. And all that adds up to this:
knowing another language allows you to express thoughts in your own language
you never could have come up with, and Latin - because it's structured and
predictable, because it's the other half of English, and because it's not evolving
any more - works those benefits into your brain better than any other language.
(Except for Greek or Hebrew but you'd have to learn to new alphabet)
Hey, I think I actually got them all
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Dude, what if everything is language and language is everything?
Dude.
