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Hello! Did everyone have good weekend?

 

I talking to friend from UK last weekend and he said that school he learn Latin language. But it is "dead language" (?)

 

If nobody speaking it, why do they teach at school? Is it have meaning?

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Yes it is a "dead language", but it's an important part of European Culture and history. Many European languages such as Portugese, Spanish, Italian and French, as well as parts of English descend from Latin. It was the language spoken throughout the Roman Empire.

 

It's "usefulness" doesn't really matter. Is it "useful" for the people of Kishiwada (Danjiri festival) to pull huge wooden floats through the streets of a modern city and risk their lives ? No.....it's tradition. \:\)

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More than for just tradition. If you understand how Latin works it helps you understand how many modern European languages work. Also, it is widely used for many branches of science and it probably comes in handy in the pubs in and around the Vatican around knock-off time.

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Eiji, if it were not for Latin then we could not call a rat:

 

ratis vulgaris

 

Even if that is not correct, it has that brainy Latin ring to it, which is very important.

 

Latin is also vital in providing clever sounding text on university emblems and shields:

 

Dictum Educum Modocum

 

Which looks and sound heaps better than the Japanese university shields that I see on train advertising:

 

Univ. of Oyama

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My father 'read Latin' at Oxford, and maintained that it was the cornerstone of a 'liberal education'. I used to be rather good art, and wanted to pursue that at school. Out of sheer pretentiousness, my school had developed a Latin course, and instead of doing Art which I loved, I ended having the liberal education and did Latin.

 

Possibly because it's a dead language with no relevance to anything else (yo, if you want to understand the Latin influence on French, learn French), I failed completely at it.

 

They only redeeming feature of Latin is that it usually involves studying Roman history which is full of invasions of Britain, anchovy sauce known as garum, and mean sluts with names like Agrippina.

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My step father does Latin. Has done for a number of years now. He loves it and gets great enjoyment from it. He is a bloody smart guy and loves all that brainy stuff.

 

I did a term of it in year 8 at school. It was compulsory. Personally i wouldn't bother learning it and i would learn a language that is used today.

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veni vidi vici!

quo vadis?

 

 

Reading "Asterix" comic books was a good intro to Latin when I was little. Little bits of Latin sprinkled through those books.

Asterix, now there is a real comic, not like those dodgy wierdo manga comics

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Kamo,

 

Ahh another Asterix fan. Yes It was (and still is) the king of comics IMHO. I always had to ask my older brother what the latin phrases meant though! What I can't understand is how they made all though terrific jokes based on the english language worth in both french (the comics original language) AND english. The Roman Agent would have to be one of my faves. Our family used to own every single Asterix comic ever made. Love to have them all now.

 

You have good taste mate.

 

Cheers

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Yes, as much as I respect academic pursuits, I'd advise my kids to learn another living language before studying Latin.

 

I've spent some time studying Latin, French, Italian and law myself, and I know what I am talking about.

 

Studying Latin is a fine thing and it sure does give you some insights into the grammar of Romance languages like French, Italian and Portuguese, and even helps you understand many points of Germanic and Slavic grammar and vocabulary.

 

It also helps you understand the components of the half of English that is Romance-derived.

 

And yes, some law school classes have a few Latin phrases in them.

 

But in all cases you're better off just studying the real article at hand (French, Italian, German, law, etc.) than you are trying to derive it from whatever may have been its Latin "first principles" and how they changed through time and accident over thousands of years.

 

One thing that has always annoyed me is the smug way some pedantic drones say "...that word comes from the Latin XYZ, of course..." then expect to be crowned as geniuses.

 

"Oh well yes then you can go back to the original Greek..." Oh, please, the same fallacy all over again. Don't confuse the study of "Classics" with etymology. The former shines a light on a particular historical era. The latter follows lines of linguistic continuity back until they are lost in the mists of time.

 

Why stop with Latin? Where did the word come from before Latin? The Romans sure as heck didn't make most of these words up out of thin air. These words came to Latin from other languages and dialects pre-dating classical or silver-age or medieval Latin or whatever age of Latin is denoted. What makes a particular era's Latin iteration of this or that word the "original" or the "root"?

 

It's purely arbitrary. It's a suspect type of conversational one-upmanship. It's the specter of a snobby, exclusive, dead-white-men's club foisted off as "Classical Education".

 

This used to mean the kind of schooling that only rich, idle people could give themselves and their kids...and its patina of virtuous erudition has persisted to corrupt and distort the educational palette of too many generations of students who might have been better off studying something more relevant to their own present and onrushing future.

 

Knowledge of dead languages will always have an academic and historical utility, but its atrophied function as a class-defining asset used to distinguish Proper People from the great unwashed masses (who were too busy plowing muddy fields and mangling their hands in machinery to drill Latin conjugations) is repugnant and obsolete.

 

The general study of Latin in schools appears irrelevant, vexatious and even ill-advised to me today. Only people interested in history, linguistics and classical studies are excused from this curmudgeonly judgment.

 

Latin. What a load of nonsense. It does not belong in the curriculum of subjects that kids are forced to learn in schools. Make it an elective course.

 

If I could go back in time and revise the list of languages I studied over my life so far, it would be: English, Spanish, Chinese and Arabic.

 

These would allow me to understand the fiction, news and thoughts of, and to speak and understand the words of, the greatest number of people alive today. And far better than Latin: after learning these, adding other languages I love, like Italian (practically the same as Spanish) and Japanese (far less trouble with kanji after Chinese) would be easy icing on the cake.

 

\:D

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