Latin Experts: Why Latin? Are Word Roots programs enough?

[fluffybunny]

I can see the importance of learning another living language, ie French or Spanish, not just because you want to order a coffee in France one day, but because it enhances your thinking about your own language. Learning a living language is fun when you do go to the country and get to speak it; I have had this amazing experience myself. You get to understand an entire new world and way of thinking through interacting with other people in that language. However, because there are no Latin speaking nations today, this experience would not be a future option.

 

So why is Latin so important outside of word roots that can be learnt with Caesar's English? Why not French, Spanish or Italian, plus a word roots program? What secret am I missing?

[happypamama]

One of the best things about Latin, which was an unexpected benefit, is the sense of organization it's giving my DD. Because Latin is so logical (and in ways that French isn't always), it's really helping her with order and process, teaching her to follow the same steps every time. This has carried over to other subjects, like math.

[mathnerd]

One of the best things about Latin, which was an unexpected benefit, is the sense of organization it's giving my DD. Because Latin is so logical (and in ways that French isn't always), it's really helping her with order and process, teaching her to follow the same steps every time. This has carried over to other subjects, like math.

I am not the OP, but thanks for that information. I am teaching latin to my son in the hopes that picking up related languages later might be easy. But, I never thought of it as helping out with logical thinking. Now I know another advantage of learning latin.

[Nomen Nescio]

I have a standard spiel on this, which I'm adapting here for repost:

 

Latin is the ur-language that unites a lot of languages used in the west. If it's true, as is claimed on Wikipedia, that the study of Interlingua helps one puzzle through Spanish better than the same amount of time spent actually studying Spanish, then Latin would be at least that useful, since Interlingua is basically Latin without inflectional endings. It's also possible with a knowledge of Latin to suss out Spanish or Italian with a few simple rules.

 

Latin helps with learning biological nomenclature. Of course, you can also just study the nomenclature by itself. Most scientists do. Those, however, don't end up learning much about Latin. The person who studies Latin, on the other hand, gets way out ahead in the study of scientific nomenclature and is in the enviable position of not merely memorizing, but understanding. Note that this advantage is cumulative with the advantage discussed above.

 

Latin is often cited as a good way to build up verbal scores in standardized tests, and not without evidence. But in fact, it simply stands to reason. 60% of English words come from Latin, and that jumps to 80% when you look at words of three or more syllables. How many syllables on average are you expecting per word in the SAT? Furthermore, those English words from Latin mean what they mean because of morphological rules that are not themselves carried over into English morphology, so English doesn't teach you how to decode them. You can just study the English vocabulary directly, but the same amount of effort in Latin vocabulary plus derivational rules yields a rich English vocabulary as well. It's also possible to just study the cheat sheet on Latin derivation, which will certainly help. But you won't get any of the advantages mentioned in the previous two paragraphs, which are cumulative.

 

Latin is also a highly ordered and logical language, and is traditionally promoted as part of a complete curriculum that exercises rational faculties. Of course, you can and should study logic itself as well as mathematics and rhetoric. But it's not as though the advantages of all these approaches to analytic training don't stack. They are cumulative with those of Latin, which includes all the above discussed advantages as a free bonus.

 

It's true that you don't come out of a Latin class with the ability to communicate with living people (ignoring for the moment that the

community is growing now that the internet is here to connect them). But let's not pretend that high schools are cranking out fluent second language speakers either. You can parlay your halting high school French into continuing studies, but most people don't. They let it wither and fade, and the advantage in principle that it's an actual living language is rarely an advantage in fact. The opportunity cost for that advantage that never manifested is all the things enumerated above that Latin teaches you, which are cumulative.

 

Latin builds a diverse intellectual portfolio which pays reliable dividends however the market changes. Modern languages are high-yield investments with little liquidity.

[G5052]

Studying at least one foreign language to the point that you can read their literature was once considered the mark of an educated person. In most industrialized nations other than the U.S., studying several languages for many years is mandatory for those on the college track. There are so many intellectual and cultural reasons for this.

 

And IMHO Latin is "most bang for your buck" language. If you're going to throw your resources at a language, you get the most payoff there.

[Giraffe]

I studied Latin for only one year and I still find it useful 30+ years later. Looking at roots to derive meaning, learning French, scientific nomenclature. And organizing my brain. It helped that too. Knowing Latin has helped me see how languages are organized and that helped me learn Turkish, even though it's not a Latin language, but Turkic.

[fraidycat]

I'm no expert, but I chose latin:

 

Because I don't speak another living language, so as the teacher/facilitator if I murder a Latin pronunciation, it's not as big of a deal. :-)

 

To one day, hopefully, be able to read and understand all those phrases seen on old building, logos, etc.

[Critterfixer]

I do speak a little Spanish, and my brother is fluent and I chose Latin.

Like Fraidycat I am not quite as put out when I don't get the pronunciation right, but I'm also just a little lazy, so I like having one subject that covers so many different subjects at once. If I have a bad day with school and we just get Latin done then I've actually done quite a bit.

As an example from today:

We did Latina Christiana 1 (and other things--but this is a breakdown of everything in our hour of Latin this am)

 

1) We practiced our vocabulary. Which means we translated words we have memorized, and then we used those for cue words for

2) Grammar. We ran through basic parts of speech and conjugated verbs in both Latin and English, which worked on singular and plural pronouns (we've been covering that in our regular grammar program.)

3) We sang a song, which means I played the piano and we got to talk about sharps on the piano.

4) We did a bunch of derivatives. Which means we talked about spelling, copied from the board, learned a lot of new words, talked about the history of those words and learned where they came from. Because the words were from different numbers we got into math and discussed Centigrade, the metric system and where decimals come from and what percent means.

5) The math was so fun we delved into advanced Roman numerals and practiced them.

6) We finished with the history of the death of Romulus, and into the gods and practices of ancient Rome concerning observation of animals. We talked about how superstition is one thing, but observing animal behavior can tell you a lot of things. We discussed how the behavior of the chickens can tell us that the bird overhead is a hawk, and not a turkey vulture, and how our new bees are orienting to their hive. And we went out and observed those bees.

 

So: Latin, Spelling, Grammar, Reading, History, Nature Study, and Math, Penmanship, Vocabulary, Memory Work and some Music Theory all in one hour. If I do nothing else all day, I've done quite a lot.

Studying Latin for the purpose of learning English vocabulary, to me, is the least important reason to study Latin. Sure, some huge percentage of multi-syllabic SAT-words have Latin roots, and yes, Latin students have been shown to do better than their peers on the SAT vocab test, but if that's all you want to know, you might as well just sit down with an English dictionary and start memorizing.

 

You might think there is an advantage to learning a modern spoken language, but a big problem there is there is a rush to memorize useful conversational phrases at the expense of learning the grammar and fundamentals. Because we usually don't teach conversational Latin, we don't waste time there, we go straight to the meat of the matter. For example, the first week in Spanish class, everyone knows how to say "Me llamo Maria". While this is useful if you want to make friends in Spain, there's also some tricky grammar going on there, that gets glossed over for a long time -- instead of learning what's literally going on, and how it might apply to other contexts, we just teach students to memorize this and many other phrases.

 

So, in Latin, the fundamentals of grammar, which have a lot of applications to English grammar, are taught earlier, more thoroughly, and more directly. Anyone who has studied at least two years of Latin with any rigor will _always_ know when to use "I" and "me" correctly in English. Latin's inflected grammar is different enough that the student has to study it, and can't get by just on English analogues; but similar enough to help with English composition. For example, the passive voice in German is somewhat structured like in English, with a participle and a helping verb form, just like English. The passive voice in Latin is a completely different verb ending, so the student has to know the grammar roots here, as opposed to some surface-level mapping of words from one language to another.

 

Still, if all you cared about was grammar, that wouldn't be a good enough reason to study Latin alone -- you could just study English grammar directly, and probably learn just as much (though it wouldn't be nearly so fun).

 

The home-run benefit of studying Latin is reading the ancient authors in their original Language. Every orator, lawyer or politician strives to be as purposeful with rhetoric as Cicero. The style, themes and tropes of Vergil echo throughout all of Western literature. Caesar was a master of propaganda, rationalizing why a strongman should overthrow a republic. Good stuff to know if you want to be able to recognize demagoguery.

 

And, though this is self-reinforcing, thousands of years of students have already studied Latin and Latin authors, and have based their work upon it. To not have read Ovid or Suetonius or Plutarch (even though he's Greek), is to not fully understand what Shakespeare, Milton and others were basing their works on. More importantly, all of the American founding fathers were well-steeped in classics. This didn't just color their thinking about how to form the new republic, but even in the way the wrote, and to not understand Latin is to not fully understand their mindset. I don't want to turn this political, but a common Latin grammatical construction is the ablative absolute, which doesn't have a single crisp translation in English. However, one reason we find the 2nd amendment to the Constitution so vexing today is that a key clause in there written with an absolute, no doubt an echo of Latin. Without understanding the absolute phrase, the whole amendment is hard to understand.

 

So, there are many reasons to study Latin, it isn't easy, but there are many levels of dividends.

[*Michelle*]

I am not a Latin expert by any stretch of the imagination, but we're choosing to study Latin for all of the reasons started above, plus it is the official language of our Church.

[Violet Crown]

So why is Latin so important outside of word roots that can be learnt with Caesar's English?

 

So that you can read Latin.

[crazyforlatin]

DD doesn't like just learning roots. She needs to learn the entire language. I find that there are only a few subjects that truly challenge her - math, Latin, Greek, and maybe advanced music theory.

[PollyOR]

Thanks for the replies in this thread. You've given me a boost! :thumbup1:

[Georgiana Daniels]

Some of the replies on this thread explain everything I wanted to say but said it so much better! I truly believe if one takes the time to learn the language and really study, there will be no regrets over the time spent. One would be hard-pressed to find another subject that gives the brain a workout in logic and thinking the way Latin does.

[fluffybunny]

Thank you so much everyone! I feel less in the dark about what I'm doing now. This forum has been instrumental in the success of our homeschool program :)