Slashdot Mirror
Learning Latin - Has It Helped You?
4/3PI*R^3 asks: "CNN is reporting that Latin is experiencing a revival in schools. The reason - Latin is used in the sciences and technology is based on science. Latin is also useful for registering .US domain names :).
How many Slashdot readers have learned Latin and how has it helped you in your life/career? 'non impediti ratione cogitatonis'"
Basi meum posterior!!
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Not nearly worth the effort otherwise.
II AD HADE.
How many Slashdot readers have learned Latin and how has it helped you in your life/career?
After taking Latin I've started snickering at people who use the objective case for predicate nominatives. Other than that, I don't think it's helped me at all, other than allowing me to get a degree without doing oral recitations in my language class.
I took latin for 2 years and although I don't remember a lot of it ;)
it helps very much in understanding the english language because many english words are derived from a latin word or compound latin words.
----
In Soviet Russia, the overlords welcome you!
Not having learned Latin, but being a scientist I can answer a different question -- Have I ever, in my scientific career, wished I had learned Latin? Never.
These urban Latin programs may well work, or may just be a gimmick, but if they are effective I'd suspect it's the everyday uselessness that's effective. The idea of learning something for the pleasure and prestige of learning it is probably unfamiliar to many of the kids in the program, as is the pleasure of hearing something in an unrelated class and realizing they have information to bring to bear on it.
But for following science? Even if that logic held up, you'd be better off learning Greek.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
took it for 3 years in high school...blah. i think latin would be more interesting/less daunting if you didn't spend an entire year translating the aneid.... i mean, for god's sake, if your homework for one night (every night) is 20 lines, and it's only every other day you *might* finish a sentence, you don't feel like you're accomplishing anything. i never got around to taking latin 4 (translating cutulis) but i heard it kicked ass and was alot easier/less daunting.
:) pretty cool when you're on a month long class trip with mostly girls :)
sure the aneid is the defacto latin "teaching tool", but how about somthing vauguely interesting? kids (myself) these days don't have the want (or need) for such devotion to a subject.
oh yeah, and other than SAT vocab, i didn't really see any major advantage, sans being able to walk into nearly any cathedral in europe and be able to read the inscriptions
moox. for a new generation.
Semper ubi sub ubi!
That one reminds me of my high school latin class....
I have not learned Latin. But I have picked up a lot of it from my /and/ Manly pursuits at the same time.
theology studies. I was reading the Malius Malificarum earlier this
year and all the foot notes were still in Latin. Any time I was
unsure or questioning the meaning of an important one I would call up
experiment-4578[0] as to the meaning of it. Latin is very helpful in
the areas of theology, medicine, law, and talking to
tall-beautiful-young girls who happen to know it, thus enabling you to
balance Geeky
I have however studied a bit of Ancient Greek[1] and have found even
it to be a very nice language to pick up. But once you learn Greek
you can no longer say "It is all Greek to me". But every skill
acquired means one less thing you can claim ignorance on.
Not that I keep up on these things.
[0] who is fluant in Latin
[1] bible debates are much more fun this way.
Ascii artist &
It's not just a sig, it's a lifestyle choice.
illegitimii non ingravare
The plural of virus is viruses. Virii just makes you look as smart as a bowl of chickenpoxen
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
I took Latin for 4 years in high school. It has proven utterly useless.
I took latin in High School, and it easily boosted my SAT's by a good hundred points.
While I have a strong vocabulary, it never hurts to improve it, and learning latin made learning new words much easier!
It has helped in more ways than I can possibly express.
Definitely worthwhile.
GPL'd web-based tradewars themed space game
fucj no. it cudn't even help me spell good.
Latin is a language
as dead as it can be
It killed the ancient Romans
And now it's killing me.
I got my regents (for those of you in NYS) in Latin after taking it for 2 years, and it helped me tremendously on the SATs.
...but...
If you're looking for the perfect language, learn Esperanto. Its hella 1337.
THERE IS NO DATA. THERE IS O
Where Latin has helped me is Languages. I think it helped me immensely with Languages. Particularly with romance languages but even others. I really had to learn grammar and structure with Latin and I gained a facility with pronunciation of new languages.
I would suggest, however, that an introduction to Latin - maybe one year - is enough. After that it is diminishing returns for a (mostly) dead language. Move on to a modern spoken language after an intro to Latin (unless you really love it).
Move on. There's nothing to see here.
Latin, besides being damn cool, IS important. The simply ability to trace words back to their origins (even though English isn't a romance language) makes you understand your own language much better.
Since chat room speak is on the rise in more formal settings, I think a focus on the core of our language will help stem such idiocy. Not to mention the portability of its vocabulary and concepts such as declensions and noun gender into other languages.
It's all going according to
Now I can't speak for Latin, as I don't know it, but I learned more about my own language (English) learning a foreign language than studying it through high school and college. Professionally or scientifically learning a new language does nothing more than help you learn how to learn, at least in my own field of software.
I believe having learned another language, I have a better grasp on getting ideas across and even communicate technical issues. Also, I know how it feels to not be understood and probably even more so the frustration of not understanding. What someone else is saying.
It's a pretty humbling experience being 22 years old and talking at a 3-year-old level with adults.
I've had two years of Latin. It has helped me an incredible amount on the verbal parts to standardized testing, mostly the PSAT and the SAT. For those readers not up to speed on the US college game, scores from those tests are almost as important as grades in school in getting into lots of universities.
Would I do it again? Yes. Even though I transferred to Spanish after my requisite two years, it was most certainly not useless or boring - quite the contrary. The literature (if you read primary sources) is incredibly fascinating.
I studied Latin for four years of high school, and am disappointed that my college doesn't offer anything in the area. Nonetheless, my understanding of English grammar grew phenomenally. I'm not convinced that this might not have been due to the fact that modern English classes don't teach grammar anymore.
Latin not only gave me a clearer sense of how language and grammar in general, but a method of thinking not present in modern English. The whole concept of cases and conjugation can be relatively new to today's students.
The reading [and writing] of Latin requires a systematic mental process much akin to writing code, I've found. Much like Latin, code can often have blocks in which the order of bits don't matter much, but there are good and reasonable conventions which prevail. Latin is like this, and so is good code. I'm still a student, so I can't be sure of work experience, but Latin has increased my general academic ability greatly, and code and logic tremendously.
Of course, there are other benfits. Like that scene in Life of Brian (which we actually convinced our teacher to show in class) makes much more sense to a Latin student. Though, domum doesn't take a locative, it has a locative. *sigh* They did do pretty well though.
-Tevye
We're on a mission from God.
I'm taking Latin II in high school right now (high school instruction ususally goes up to Latin V). In my biology class, Latin has helped me figure out the meaning of some words because I know (or can guess) the meanings based on the Latin words they are derived from. Also, a lot of times my Latin class teaches me more about English than my English class does, which is just not right. ;-) Anyway, I really enjoy taking Latin, and it is actually fairly easy to learn because there aren't so many fscking exceptions to the rules like in English! (I do particularly despise the third declension though...)
"I don't trust goats," --To Catch a Spy
I can look at a word I have never seen before and based on knowing it's root and how it is used in a sentance I can figure out to a reasonable certainty what it means without having to go look it up or ask somebody what it means.
Not to mention the practical application of raising my SAT score. I was the only person I knew to attend Georgia Tech with a higher verbal score than math. Add to that the fact that I never had to study for a high school vocabulary quiz and I think it paid off rather well.
slashdotito ergo sum.
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
It is quite under-used these days...
/usr/games/fortune
I took 2 years of Latin at the beginning of junior high (7-8 grade). Since my first language is French, my relation to Latin is a bit stronger than for English speaking people, because French is closer to Latin than English (even if it's not that far away either). I can say it helped me to learn Spanish, too. And if i ever was to learn Italian.
As for the method of learning, my school used the Cambridge method rather than the "rosa rosa rosam, rosae rosae rosa, rosae rosae rosas, rosarum rosis rosis" method. Vocabulary and history (that of Pompei more specifically) were tied together in small 20 pages fascicles, so it wasn't as dry as some people told me from their experience. I enjoyed it, plus we convinced the teacher to organize a trip to Pompei in our second year.
It's hard to find good Latin teachers these days. I had an excellent teacher my first year; he taught at a college level for a long time, and he was quite ancient, so he retired after one year. The next two teachers who came later weren't any good, the last one being this Sicilian dude with a serious attitude problem.
Latin taught me how to deal with inanity, how to teach myself, and how one goes about trying to get teachers fired. (which by the way is damn near impossible for anything short of child abuse)
This guy was straight from Sicily, and he was all full of himself about how the Italian school system was so much tougher, and that we were so stupid for being bad at Latin. He wouldn't accept the fact that it might have something to do with his English abilities, bad teaching, and fascist teaching style.
Lessons learned? Knowing your subject is one thing. Being able to teach it is another. A good teacher needs one skill just as much as the other.
Or you can go straigth to programing in Latin, thanks to the efforts of Damian Conway and his module for perl Lingua::Romana::Perligata.
The interesting stuff about programming in latin is that the order of the words doesn't matter any more. In english or most other languages ``The boy gave the dog the food'' has a different meaning than ``The food gave the boy the dog'', but in latin (and in perligata) a similar exchange would have no effect on the meaning of the statement.
Fh
Ps: The dog&food example was stolen from the Perligata web page, just go check it.
"Cupio ejaculare in tuum orem."
and
"Magnum phallum habeo."
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
Edited from: The Life of Brian script
Centurion: What's this then? Romanes eunt domus. People called Romanes they go
the house?
Brian: It, it says 'Romans go home'.
Centurion: No it doesn't. What's latin for 'Roman'? Come on...
Brian: aaah.
Centurion: Come on.
Brian: Ah! Romanus?
Centurion: Goes like?
Brian: Annus?
Centurion: Vocative plural of 'annus' is?
Brian: Anni?
Centurion: Romani. [He crosses out the 'es' and writes in 'i'.]
Eunt? What is eunt?
Brian: Go.
Centurion: Conjugate the verb 'to go'.
Brian: Uh. Ire - Uh... eo, is, it, imus, itis, eunt.
Centurion: So eunt is?
Brian: Ah, Uh, Third person plural of present indicative. They go.
Centurion: But Romans go home is an order, so you must use the?
--------[The centurian lifts Brian: by the sideburns... nasty, eh?]
Brian: The imperative.
Centurion: Which is?
Brian: Ahm. Oh, oh, um... I, I.
Centurion: How many Romans?
Brian: Ah. Plural, plural... ite, ite.
Centurion: Ite. [He again corrects the writing on the wall.]
Domus? Nomonative? 'Go home'? This is motion towards, isn't it, boy?
Brian: Dative, sir.
--------[The Centurian takes out his weapon, and holds it to Brian's throat.]
Ahh. No, not dative, not the dative, sir. Oh, Ah. Uh.
The accusative accusative. Ah, Domum, sir. Ab domum! Ah! Oooh! Ah!
Centurion: Except that 'domus' takes the?
Brian: The locative, sir.
Centurion: Which is?
Brian: Domum. Aaah! ah.
--------[Again, the writing is ammended.]
Centurion: Domum... um... Understand?
Brian: Yes, sir.
Centurion: Now write it out a hundred times.
Brian: Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. Hail Caeser, sir.
Centurion: Hail Caeser. And if it's not done by sunrise, I'll cut your balls
off.
Brian: Ooh, thank you, sir. Thank you, sir. Hail Caeser and everything, sir.
Oh. Mmm!
I took Latin for three years in HS, and I got straight A's, but unfortunately I don't remember any of it any more. I did, however, gain a much better understanding of human languages as a whole. In fact, many of my friends are impressed at my linguistic abilities, which I attribute mostly to my study of Latin. Unlike European languages, which have various grammatical structures merged into a few words, everything is "spelled out" in Latin. It's impossible to understand English grammar completely using just English.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
For me, Latin has been a Godsend. My friends familiar with Spanish or French try to pass coded messages to each other or speak over my head in their languages of choice, thinking I won't understand it- I took the "dead language." However, I have discovered I can understand about 40% of the average Spanish or French periodical without knowing anything about the language, and about 80% of the conversational forms of those languages. While it is true Latin will not help the average geek in most fields, it can be a lifesaver in the biological sciences, and helps with chemistry as well. For that matter, in the more advanced math courses knowing Latin can help with memorization of key terms. Yes, you have to work at vocabulary to benefit from Latin studies. But do not forget that approximately 60% of English comes from Latin, with even higher rates in specialized fields. Do you really want to deny yourself a resource that, with use, will form the core of a broad knowledge base applicable in any number of places in life? I chose to pursue Latin, and I believe I have profited. Your mileage may vary.
Anybody who studies languages will tell you that learning a second language is hard, but learning a 3rd language isn't nearly as hard.
I studied German as a second language, then moved on to Spanish, and I caught on very quickly. Then French was even easier. Italian I hope to learn in a few months.
My girlfriend studied French for 5 years, then moved on to German and she is picking it up much faster than French.
My point is, you are right about Latin helping you with other languages-- but studying any language will make studying languages easier. There's no reason to study Latin just for that.
In all honesty, having a base in Latin has helped me figure out words I haven't seen before and don't have an obvious English derivation -- something like "puerile" for instance.
Also, in 9th grade, Mrs. Toronto insisted we memorize the entire Aeneid. I think we did a page a day, and it lasted about a week before the class revolted. However, to this day, I can tell you: "Arma virumque cano, Italiam fato profugus." Which (I hope) is the first line or two of the Aeneid. It has no practical use, but whenever I talk with long lost Latin classmates, I usually work it into the conversation and we all fall down laughing.
It helped me pick up Spanish MUCH faster than I probably would have had I not taken Latin, and I feel comfortable saying that I'd probably pick up French similarly quickly (though how much of this I owe to Latin is debatable).
rooooar
LOL
I'm a student finishing up a double major in Classics and Computer Science (None of the classes I've taken counted for both, in case you're wondering) But I'm always surprised at people's reaction when I tell them I study Latin.
Generally people are impressed but I always feel like they seem me the way computer science people think of someone who still uses their Apple II because they think it's inherently better.
Granted, Latin is hard. Also, it's not like other languages where you can go somewhere far away but still know how to ask where the bathroom is. But the advantages of Latin are totally different.
I think they are similar to the kind of things you would learn from studying logic for example. Learning Latin doesn't have direct practical benefits but it has so many secondary benefits.
First of all, I think vocabulary is one of the biggest. I've always had a large vocabulary but since studying Latin it seems an order of magnitude larger. I think this is because I have some greater degree of fluency, that is I have more confidence that I understand words more fully so I'm not afraid to use unfamiliar ones.
Secondly, Latin teaches grammar. This is probably the most noticable (and annoying) benefit. Our education system is failing to teach kids proper grammar. If you disagree pay attention to the next person you talk to and listen for adverb/adjective confusion. If you don't know those words, I rest my case. Every day, several times a day, I have to resist the urge to strangle someone because they make mistakes that are so blatant to me. This did not happen before I studied Latin.
Finally, I'd say that simply because of it's complexity learning Latin is helpfull to students. A great deal of discipline is required to memorize the paradigmatic forms. I can definately see how learning forms would help mathmatical reasoning, etc.
Anyway to sum up I think you need to look at how learning Latin (or Greek for that matter) affects the way a person thinks in order to see the benefits. If you look for direct benefits to knowing the actual language you won't find many other than reading inscriptions once in a while (which is acutally pretty fun, and it makes you look really smart)
but for those non-engineering sciences like biology or medical related specialties, latin basics are essential for precisely describing a location or giving instructions. (i.e. imagine a surgeon saying "I just cut off your #4 valve in your heart. To do this you just lift the rib, cut some fat off and stick a balloon in it." Instead they can give precise descriptions using big words like anterior).
How many Slashdot readers have learned Latin and how has it helped you in your life/career?
Career?!!? CARREER? You were trying to use a dead language in your CARREER?
Gee whiz, man!!! You were supposed to take that Latin Knowledge and become a Latin LoverJUST LIKE ME!!! The chicks get all giggly when I speak in dead toungues...
Some people don't get it...
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Odi profanum vulgum et arceo
Learning Latin is not going to directly help anybody in any career. It is not true that scientists need Latin, and neither is it true that learning Latin helps learning other languages (because the many years you studied Latin could have been used actually studying those other langauges...).
Knowing Latin was crucial in Europe in the middle ages, just as English is somewhat crucial today for those who plan to go abroad. Just more so, especially if one wanted to be a priest or another scholar. After the birth of national states, when national languages were being used in favor of Latin, Latin was still essential for those who planned on an academic career. Latin has been required for higher education into the 1900s in some places. Latin was also used as a neutral language in diplomatic circles, until French overtook that role in the 1700s.
Because of all this, Latin has been used as a social tool, as a means to to differentiate the commons from the elite. But the commons could also use Latin as a springboard to higher social status, for instance by having access to education, becoming a doctor or whatever. There is no such social benefits with learning Latin today, or at least they are minimal.
Instead, the reward is a personal one, of achievement, a mental kick of mastering something pretty difficult, and having established connections with the past, for two thousand years of history. It is meaningful to converse privately with the old Roman scholars and philosophers, and it gives satisfaction knowing those citations and quotations some people throw to show off.
Latin is a key to understanding much of European history and the development of European languages (English has borrowed heavily from Latin), but it is not essential in any career but linguistic ones. Look at it as a value-added piece of knowledge that may give some (social) bonus here and there.
frawaradaR anahaha islaginaR!
Latin is the language that is most often used by lawmakers, it was the Greeks who where the scientists...
Anyway, after my first year Latin I quit, and I do not think that I missed it for any course that I ever followed.
I think its value lies more in the fact that it learns people to persist, rather than to learn logic.
If you are into languages, learning Latin and Greek should possibly be a good exercise.
But I have had enough science and engineering courses, and there is no way that learning Latin there can be helpful.
In high school, I was terrified of getting yelled at for saying something the wrong way, or accidentally ordering a plate of flaming testicles instead of a slice of pizza.
There were no snooty Romans alive to correct me on my pronunciation -- and in fact my teacher told me that there were two ways to pronounce things, Roman-style and medieval-style.
Then, in college, I tested out of Spanish because I knew enough Latin that I only needed a little bit of Spanish cramming to answer the placement exam questions. (That, and a Mu Alpha Theta career, and lots of standardized tests. If public schools have taught me anything, it's how to fill in a bubble sheet for a multiple-guess test.)
So I didn't end up speaking any languages other than English fluently, which sucks, but I did get my linguistics degree (think of it as a blessed +2 scroll of learn language named "I know Kung Fu") and went on to grad school for my librarian union card.
Hmm. Considering the fan noise coming from my computer, maybe I should have studied American Sign Language.
Firstly, it greatly improved my vocabulary, since the meaning of many unknown English words can be guessed if you can spot the 'root' of the word.
:)
:)
It also helped with foreign languages (French, Spanish and other 'Romance' languages, obviously) and while I was working in Germany, and I didn't know the German word for something and the guy I was speaking to didn't know the English, we used the latin word!
Plus it can make you seem highly educated
I recommend Lingua Latina Occasionibus Omnibus as a humourous primer to the language
Mark
Liked this comment? Why not buy me something nice
I was told in school (by the latin teacher) that latin was very good for programming as it teaches you lots of structure and attention to detail. Any find it helps with programming? My method to doing latin (and ancient greek. and programming for that matter) is to look everything up and lump it all together and find out from the teacher (or compiler) if it was wrong (or when in the case of the compiler).
Mind you I enjoyed latin. Not quite so sure about the greek though.
A:Latin helped me write a Perl program!
I used my knowledge of Latin to help me write the Name of a Number Perl / CGI program. Now I know how to determine the English name of any integer of any size. While some dictionaries list names of numbers as large as 10^33 (one decillion) or even 10^63 (one vigintillion), it took a study of Latin before I was able to determine the name of numbers such as:
You never know when you may need to give the English name of a large integer. It was almost 20 years after I discovered what was then (in 1979) the largest known prime 2^23209-1 before I knew how to pronounce the English name of its decimal representation. If I had studied Latin in more detail when I was in grade school then I would have been ready to answer the frequently asked question: "How do you pronounce it?"
1/2 :-)
chongo (was here)
oh god, old memories:
Latin is a dead language,
As dead as dead can be.
It killed all the Romans,
And now it's killing me.
I think Quintus made it to England before Vesuvius erupted, but I'm pretty sure that Cerber us was toast. (I think this is the same Cambridge series you're talking about)
I was not offered ANY other languages, until High School. Latin was not one of them.
I did not understand some of what they were trying to teach me in English, until then.
The article did not say if Latin was the only choice in school systems that had dropped all other languages or not. The chance to see the similarities and contrasts between languages, as early as possible (before language lock-in) would have been useful.
---
As a side note - I have heard that Japanese may be one of the few modern languages that has lot a Latin-like structure?
... take the ablative.
Arma virumque cano
Trojae qui primis ab oris
Littora, uh, uh saevae memorem Junonis ab orem
Multa quoque et bello passus dum conderet urbam
Uh, inferetque deos latio genus unde latinam
Um, um,
Albanique patres atque alte moenea Roma...
Or something like that.
And there you have it. Everything I got out of four years of Latin. Everything.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
There was a proposal, only a few years back, that Latin be used as the Lingua Franca for the developing EEC. This received a fairly moderate amount of press in academia and the popular news magazines and was seen by some as an answer to the Community's resistance to the Americanization of European culture.
I've done some quick searching on the net to see if I could find any references to this, but they seem to passed beyond the pail and into the classification of nothing more than a historical footnote at this point.
just like code.
The reason latin helps me in my career - I took 6 years of Latin at a Dutch secondary school - is because it forces you to be extremely precise in the way you think. Modern languages allow a certain amount of ambiguity - English notoriously so - in the way you express yourself. Latin - like code - requires you to specify exactly what you mean.
The cool thing was that - after a few years - latin became second nature. It was no longer necessary to laboriously parse each word to make sense of the sentence, instead, the meaning started to become clear from the whole construct. I have found this to be the case with code as well - after a while, you no longer worry about the syntax of a given language, but rather move up a level to looking at the architecture as a whole.
Would I recommend Latin to anyone who has the option ? Only if you persevere. The first couple of years were tedious and frustrating; there's a lot of memorizing of stuff that appears to be complex for its own sake, and you have to work very hard to get even small results.
After you have the basics though, it becomes very rewarding - all western european languages become easier, the clarity of thought Latin brings with it pays handsome dividends, and we got to translate texts that were basically pornographic. There's nothing better than being 16 years old and having to translate porn for your homework. Oh, well, maybe there is....
The link with science and law is more about the absolute clarity of thought required than about the fact there's a bunch of words those disciplines borrowed or inherited from a dead language...
It's all very well in practice, but it will never work in theory.
I had a very strict old grammar teacher in 5th - 7th grades (at a private school) who taught English and Latin. It's somewhat interesting to see the relationships between the two languages; and if you learn the highly structured grammar of Latin, you will understand the parts of speech very well, whereas in English with its lack of structure (conjugations and delensions, agreement of person and gender and number etc.) they are not so painfully obvious. But alas she stressed grammar much more than vocabulary, and not having used Latin since, I forgot most of the words.
When I began to learn Russian however, the grammar concepts were so familiar already. (Russian has a much more pure Latin heritage than English, and very similar grammar rules). So in a sense it was useful, accidentally.
I had a class at Rice U that basically taught all three at the same time. The class was specifically oriented to teach the Latin and Greek components of English. So...we had vocabulary and grammar from three languages at once. It was actually a very entertaining class and the prof had us spewing our own composites in no time.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
I studied Latin fairly intensively for 4 years at school (one lesson per day, plus a serious amount of homework - this was 40 years ago, when kids used to do real homework, in a school which had a tough entrance examination). I also studied ancient Greek for 2.5 years, also pretty intensively. Based on my experience, I regard this as a total waste of time. Studying a modern language like Spanish would have been much more useful.
People advance the following fallacious arguments for studying Latin:
1. Latin and Greek are used in the sciences.
They're not. A few words and phrases, which you pick up without any real effort, are used. You don't need to learn Latin for that, any more than you need to learn Italian to say "Ciao!" when you take your leave of someone.
2. Knowledge of Latin makes it easier to learn other southern European languages
To acquire reasonable fluency in a foreign language, starting after age 10, a bright person needs to work at it hard for at least four years. The vast majority of English-speaking people never become fluent in another language. If you want to learn Spanish, the best way to that goal is to study Spanish (duh!), not to spend 4 years on a detour via Latin, the most likely result of which will be that you'll never actually get around to learning any Spanish.
Every now and then (mostly in writing science fiction), I need a term translated into Latin. Google and Babblefish, offer many languages, but no Latin. Searching elsewhere, I have found many online Latin dictionaries, but since a lot of Latin's difficulty is in the formation of words for tense, possesives,etc. (see the much cited Life of Brian sketch) this is worthless to me.
So, does anyone know of any online Latin translating engines akin to Babblefish or Google? Any information would be appreciated.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
It is pretty humbling to be 22 and speak at a 3 year old level, but it's great to be able to SPEAK like a 10 year old, and to UNDERSTAND everything in another language.
You only speak like you're 10 years old, but your reasoning ability is much more advanced (assuming that you're older than 10!). The worst part is that people may assume that you are less intelligent, because you don't speak their language as well as they do.
Be more sensitive to people who are not native speakers of your language.
So much of language is culture, I think it is less useful to study latin, as there is less culture attached (don't flame me for this)to it than say Hungarian. Expressions make up the beauty of languages. Turkish is notourious for its descriptive swearing. Latin seems to be alive as a scientific cataloging method and a neat classroom parlor trick. Still, it's better than nothing, and it will definitely help in learning another language. The romans did have some influence on the rest of the world.
Definitely not QED.
Latin is a language
as dead as *BSD
It killed the ancient Romans
And now it's killing me.
http://www.dribbleglass.com/Jokes/latin.htm
"Dasne bonum caput?"
Latin is used in the sciences and technology is based on science.
I don't know about this one. I am a third year CS major who took 3 years of latin in high school (really weird I know). I read slashdot, so I guess one could say I have a relatively broad technological vocabulary. Of all the useless acronyms and silly computer words I know, I would say that 0% of them are based on Latin. Maybe Nautilus is based on Latin, but we all know it sucks.
Don't get me wrong Latin is very useful if you are going to be a doctor or a lawyer, or someone deals with really large numbers. Helps the SAT score, too. But as far as today's technology is concerened, it doesn't really play much of a role, in my opinion.
Three years of Latin in High School. Wished I had taken more in college, plus some Greek. Consider it of such a benefit that I've begun home-schooling my four-year old daughter in it.
I learned Latin at school just because all college-bound British school kids did. But I also know several European languages pretty well. Those have been far more use to me than Latin.
If all you want is to learn a romance language, take French or even Italian (the modern Latin) instead. There are plenty of good modern books (and websites) in those languages and you can use the spoken language as well as the written. I had a teacher who insisted that Latin had been a spoken language and we held conversations in class using it. I'd have hated to learn it just as a dead syntax.
I once read that the major that predicted the highest earning power was Latin. It turned out that only rich kids could afford to major in such a 'useless' subject.
http://www.sysprog.net