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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.
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.
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...
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 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
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 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.
Actually, the literal transliteration is "Always where under where" iirc.
/usr/games/fortune
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.
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.
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)
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:
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.
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.
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)
... 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!
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.
Agreed, but I think Latin is particularly good because (a) it seems to have more structure than both English and the romance languages I (marginally) know, forcing me to really learn grammar and abstract some concepts and (b) it is immediately applicable to said romance languages, a not so small subset of the languages to which I am exposed.
I don't know German but I have the impression it is also full of structure and grammar that I didn't get in English (e.g. declensions), so maybe it's just that I haven't had enough exposure.
Disclaimer: I took only one year of Latin and that was 20 years ago.
Move on. There's nothing to see here.