Hippy HavenBoard

St Stephen n Critters wrote:

I started out as a Latin teacher, but switched to media studies. The times they are a-changin'...
(but old Latin teachers never die — they just decline)

Haha, that's very true. Latin is really a wonderful niche world in academia. It's relative in its importance. On one hand, from the perspective of detractors or people who don't see the value of studying Latin, it's a meaningless esoteric ivory tower. In comparison with the Latin learner and someone who hasn't, those who know Latin are often superlatively good communicators, because they have an abstracted, coherent logical system that accounts for 60% of English words and 90% of multisyllabic English words, and are also seasoned logical and critical thinkers, because Latin is more like a puzzle than a living language course. From the perspective of one who has learned Latin and knows it well, it is a joy. It's like having a secret or magical lens or filter through which the world can be viewed, when you want, and it connects a lot of seemingly unrelated things in our contemporary society, like science, medicine, law, literature, the arts, mythology, and communication. Even one who learned Latin long ago and has lost the language itself through non-use, you continue to reap the cognitive benefits of once having known it, because it lays the tracks for a system of pure logical exertion and linguistic awareness that "greases the wheels" for learning or succeeding in virtually anything else. I love it.

The cool thing is that it is only with a highly irregular and heterogenous language, like English, that it would be possible to have such a dead, ancestor language, like Latin. Many of the pitfalls that befall learners of English and bedevil native speakers don't exist in more regularized language that descended directly from one primary ancestor language, like Italian from Latin, or Lithuanian from Balto-Slavic, or Hindi from Sanskrit. Since our basic grammatical structure is Germanic, and our larger vocabulary words are from Latin and Greek, learning Latin (or Ancient Greek, for that matter) has the particularly salient feature of only focusing on reinforcing and qualifying the more technical, advanced words and syntactical structures, which are precisely the ones that are apt to elude the average person. Because English is a complex, awkward "genetic exchange" of Germanic and Latin influences, with a smattering of smaller, admittedly less integral infusions from other languages around the world, but the Germanic influences are ultimately the basic controllers of the operation, it is not readily apparent to the native speaker what the system governing a sizable minority actual, elegant English fluency is, i.e. Latin. Learning Latin gives you the other half of English for free, and does it in a one-size-fits-virtually-all manner, for Latin is a very simple language with a highly regularized, uniform grammatical structure and a smaller-than-average core vocabulary body, and yet it was so heavily mined in the Renaissance and centuries surrounding it for the vast majority of multi-syllabic words. In fact, here is the post with all of the Latin cognates or derivatives that I can identify off the cuff:

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