Why Study Latin?
Isn’t Latin a dead language?
The Latin language is the foundation of some of the most widely spoken languages in the world. The Romance languages (Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and others) are spoken by over 900 million people in the world today; these languages are directly descended from Latin and inherit their vocabulary and grammar from it.
While English is not among these Romance languages, the vocabulary of Latin has contributed more words to English than the Germanic languages in its own language family. This means that an unfamiliar English word is very likely to be Latinate in origin. For this reason, students with knowledge of Latin are often able to determine the meaning of a new English word (or an unfamiliar word in any Romance language) by inference with the word’s roots.
The power of ancient roots has long been recognized by many educators and is why some common Latin and Greek roots are studied in fifth grade at Renbrook. Given the impact on students’ ability to decode unfamiliar words with only a targeted study of Latin roots, imagine the impact of intentional study of the Latin language in use! The study of Latin gives students power to interpret and understand the foundational elements underlying not one, but many languages.
Isn’t Latin grammar hard?
The U.S. State Department’s Foreign Service Institute (FSI) gives the following guidelines for the length of study time needed for a native English speaker to master the modern languages in the world today. Here is a summary of the four categories as the FSI has designated them:
| Category I | 24-30 weeks | French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, etc. |
| Category II | 36 weeks | German, Haitian Creole, Indonesian, Swahili |
| Category III | 44 weeks | Greek, Finnish, Hebrew, Hindi, Russian, Thai, etc. |
| Category IV | 88 weeks | Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean |
Using this system, we can place Latin in Category II – moderately difficult - and similar to languages like German. This makes Latin more difficult to learn than Spanish and French, but not as difficult as languages like Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, or Russian. This difference in difficulty can be attributed to the features of Latin grammar which have fallen out of use in many modern Romance languages.
The most prominent of these is the use of declensions for nouns and adjectives. In Latin, the grammatical function of each noun in the sentence is designated by its case endings. This requires more study than a language without this complexity. However, Latin’s case system provides students with a clearer and more complete understanding of how a sentence is made. Their analysis of Latin grammar allows them to see how language is constructed, and this understanding allows them to thrive as readers and writers of increasingly complex texts.
The accumulated skills and knowledge of Latin students have allowed them, year after year, to outscore students of other languages on standardized tests and in college GPAs. Latin students score higher on both verbal and math sections of the SAT and have improved reading comprehension within months of studying Latin. While Latin has its difficulties, it is a powerful investment in a student’s mind.
How is Latin relevant?
Much as the Latin language is foundational to many modern languages, the culture of the Romans has deeply influenced the development and history of western civilization. Allusions to Greco-Roman mythology abound in literature and the arts; Roman political systems inspired and influenced the American founders and provide the intellectual foundation for our legal system (as evidenced in the frequent use of Latin in legal vocabulary). The study of medical science (particularly anatomy) is inherited from ancient Greco-Roman sources, and these languages provide an unchanging international language for the nomenclature of the species in biology. While the influence of the ancient can be obscured by the new, it is apparent to the trained eye that the ideas and cultural values of the Romans continue to impact our world.
The aspect of language study that most motivates a learner is the purpose for which they will use the language. In modern languages, this often includes travel and communication with new people from different backgrounds. In Latin, we have a different focus. Latin allows students to travel in time to an age distant from their own, to try on new perspectives and imagine. For students who are captivated by the past, by myth, or by the origins of the words, ideas, and institutions with which they interact, Latin is a bridge to discuss and interpret their own world with consciousness of what has come before. As the language of scholars through a greater part of Western history, Latin allows students to meet not only Vergil, Caesar, Cicero, Seneca and other famous Romans, but also such Medieval and Enlightenment thinkers as St. Thomas Aquinas, Sir Francis Bacon, Carl Linneas, and Isaac Newton. Curiosity and imagination are richly rewarded by the study of Latin.