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It is not so much excellent to know Latin, as it is a shame not to know it. —Cicero |
| Learning any foreign language is the best way to learn the grammar of your own language. Latin is especially helpful in this way because its grammar is so regular and because it is based mostly on word endings, patterns that can be readily memorized and recognized, rather than on word order. |
| Over half of all English words come from Latin. |
| Knowing how Latin words got into English and how their pronunciation changed helps teach and reinforce certain basic aspects of European history: the Norman invasion, the Hundred Years' War, the Age of Science, etc. |
| All vowels and double consonants are pronounced clearly in Latin; they are not always in English. Is it competant or competent? The student who has learned and recited the conjugation of peto knows! Is it constalation, constellation, or constilation, or constullation? The student who has learned and spoken the Latin word for star knows! |
| Because Latin students practice writing, hearing, speaking, and seeing the applications of an extensive but precise grammar, they develop habits of dealing with a complex body of knowledge in a systematic way, thus providing a practical model of precise thinking that can be applied to learning other subjects. | |
| Do you have numbers to back that up? |
| Latin helps greatly in learning the vocabulary of Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian, and it prepares the student for many special grammatical issues in German and Russian. |
| Many of the modern classics are peppered with Latin phrases and quotations and allusions to Roman history because their authors knew Latin and expected their readers to know it, too. |
| Cicero, Augustine, and Newton all wrote their great works in Latin, and the great Western medieval liturgies are all in Latin. Depending on translations means depending on translators and their biases and agendas. |
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Latin is the key to the vocabulary and structure of the Romance languages and to the structure of all the Teutonic languages, as well as to the technical vocabulary of all the sciences and to the literature of the entire Mediterranean civilization, together with all its historical documents.
—Dorothy Sayers |