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'"

Comments

useful? no.

[Hadlock]

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.

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 :) pretty cool when you're on a month long class trip with mostly girls :)

How many Romans?... Oh Oh, Romani

[Tevye]

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

Re:How many Romans?... Oh Oh, Romani

[Anonymous Coward]

Generally, IIRC, the verb was placed last in the sentence, unless for a specific reason - adding emphasis, making poetry scan correctly :-).

My communication by declining nouns I improved / By declining nouns my communication I improved. It isn't that far from English. Just because they could, grammatically, change word order without altering the semantics, don't think that they did it all the time. Habit meant that word order was generally fairly standard, and altered only for stylistic effect, as in English - see my examples above. English, ancient Greek and Latin are good examples of the flexibility of grammatic rules being used to give a richer scope of expression. Your examples would sound as odd in Latin as they do in English, and would make people (persons :-) ) wonder what you were trying to say.

Re:Translation: Allways wear your under wear

[adamjaskie]

Actually, the literal transliteration is "Always where under where" iirc.

programming in latin

[Felipe Hoffa]

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.

Re:Other perks

[kmellis]

I studied Attic and Homeric Greek for a couple of years in college, and Koine came along for the ride. In fact, I struggled with Attic and Homeric, felt like an idiot compared to many of my classmates, but discovered that I actually had learned something when I found I could easily read New Testament stuff (well, Revelations was a problem).

A lot of the stuff that's available out there for learning Koine Greek specifically is not that reliable or rigorous. My sister is an evangelical minister and missionary; and although her education has improved over what it once was, at one point early on she was being taught some seriously skewed Greek. She tried to assure me that "logos" meant primarily "word of God".

(Incidentally, I experimented with some Unicode typefaces and page-encoding, and made The Gospel of Matthew available from my personal web page . The page includes a note with links to some Greek typefaces and tools.)

I would love to have some Latin. At my school (and probably elsewhere), one often hears (to this day, I'm sure) a quote from, I believe, Gertrude Stein:

"Greek and Latin are wonderful languages to have learned."

I've lost most of my Greek, but it made me think a lot more carefuly about language, which was mostly the point. That and having a stronger grasp of some of the writers we read.

I have to chuckle at the question of the vocational utility of an aquaintence with Latin. Hell, a large portion of the stuff that one learns in contemporary American universities that supposedly is of vocational utility, isn't. Just getting the degree is the most important thing on a superficial level. On the deeper level, working hard learning how to learn will serve a student well for the rest of his or her life. Learning a classical language, among many other subjects, is a good, challenging endeavor.

Re:I took Latin

[spongman]

I believe that the first is referring to overzealous usage of the word 'whom'. For example, "He gave the object to whomever he chose." is incorrect because 'whom' is the object case of that interrogative pronoun but is being used here as a predicate nominative (a repetition of the subject) of the verb 'to give'.

The second refers to the common practice of replacing singular pronouns (he/she) and singular posessive pronouns (his/her) with their plural equivalents (them/their) in a context where gender is unknown. The example given should read "Everyone open his or her book!" since the word 'everyone' is a singular anticedant.

Re:I took Latin

[eimaj]

Call me a bumbling idiot, but I like using "they" as a non-gendered singular pronoun, as well as using "their" when referring to a non-gendered singular "them". It's intuitively clear, and more concise than "he or she". If such a construct isn't an accepted part of the English language, it should be. In fact, at one time it was...


http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/austheir.htm l


http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/s-pinker.htm l


http://www.english.vt.edu/~grammar/GrammarForWri te rs/forum/ForumTheir.html