Latin

[at_anchor]

What are the benefits of learning Latin? Does it improve your communication in English at all? 

It's sort of a dead language and kind of useless unless you work in the medical profession.

[Vibroverse]

It can be helpful, perhaps, if you're studying etymology. 

 

[JuliusCaesar]

While Current English is under Great Germanic influence. There is nonetheless, abundant use of Latin in English. For instance, all Legal Maxims are in Latin, all Medical and Scientific terms are in Latin, not to mention all Latin we use in everyday speech such as Et Cetera. Furthermore, something like 60% plus of the English language is Latin based.

 

There are many scientific sources extolling the health benefits of language learning. So even if Latin had absolutely no relevance to English, it would be still worthwhile to learn it.

[eos_nyxia]

1. You're a classical studies or history nerd.
2. You're a language and etymology nerd. (There's that helpful, interesting carry-over between Latin and all of the languages that came from it later.)
3. You're an academic (or an aspiring academic).
4. I think that you still have to learn it if you want to become a Catholic priest?   (My dad learned it originally for this reason while he was in priest school, but many schools here actually used to teach some Latin as well, years and years ago. Like in the 60s/ 70s, lol.)

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Does it improve your communication in English at all? 

For conversational use? No... why would it?

If you want some insight into the original, elementary building blocks of English (as opposed to all of the words we imported into it from Latin, French, and other non-Germanic languages), looking at Germanic languages would probably be a better bet.

[at_anchor]

Thank you for the answers.

I think that learning French might be just as useful as Latin for etymology, if not more so or does Latin give you more insight?

I think Latin roots can be googled and written down along with word meanings without learning Latin. So yeah.

14 hours ago, eos_nyxia said:

• You're a classical studies or history nerd.
• You're a language and etymology nerd. (There's that helpful, interesting carry-over between Latin and all of the languages that came from it later.)

Lady, you are studious.

I'm not a history nerd but I would like to be. I also like etymology. It kind of makes everything clearer. It kind of appears useful. I never knew that "Ego" just means "I" before I started exploring Latin a bit. But I won't be learning it, I think. Because I have other ones more useful and interesting I guess.

14 hours ago, eos_nyxia said:

If you want some insight into the original, elementary building blocks of English (as opposed to all of the words we imported into it from Latin, French, and other non-Germanic languages), looking at Germanic languages would probably be a better bet.

If it can be answered, which one is the best for that? 

[eos_nyxia]

8 hours ago, at_anchor said:

Thank you for the answers.

I think that learning French might be just as useful as Latin for etymology, if not more so or does Latin give you more insight?

Depending on what French dictionary you're using, the Latin root/ etymology will also be in there and might be worth noting. In my experience (and this might not be very helpful), but French language-only dictionaries have been the best for this. And just thoroughness in general.

(This is actually how I started with etymology when I first started French Immersion around middle school age.)

To your answer: yes, you can learn French while picking up Latin etymology and that actually ends up overlapping a great deal with English. Based on observation: a lot of English words are imported directly from Middle French.
 

Quote

Lady, you are studious.

I'm not a history nerd but I would like to be. I also like etymology. It kind of makes everything clearer. It kind of appears useful.

Oh. I practically popped out of the womb a word-nerd, haha.

Knowing the shared connections between languages can be extremely helpful for figuring out the meaning of words if you don't know them in another related language, or helping you remember the meaning of new words period, IMO.

I find that it is a bit more organic to me than memorizing a bunch of words and grammar, and it sticks deeper and more effortlessly.

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If it can be answered, which one is the best for that? 

So these might not actually technically be the closest languages to English (because I googled it and people said that Frisian/ Scots is closer), but in my experience, almost all of the North Germanic languages (Norweigan/ Swedish/ Danish) are much easier to pick up as a native English speaker, if not because of the relative shortness and accessibility of the written words and grammar compared to say... German.

German has a ton of English cognates but it's not as immediately accessible.

Especially when you realize that the most striking similarities are not in the way the words are spelt, it's how it sounds.

 

It's like if you somehow "squint" with your ears, North Germanic sounds like "weird English" and vice versa, lol.

Edited October 20, 2022 by eos_nyxia

[eos_nyxia]

A couple of unsolicited resource recommendations (in case you might be interested), regardless of what you end up choosing, if you're interested in learning in more of an organic/ relaxed/ "fun" way, or if you need supplemental material:

1. The Language Transfer:  it's free, it's awesome, and I don't think there's anything else quite like it out there: The person who made it does a really amazing job at explaining the interrelationships between related languages in a very clear, concise, and accessible way. They have an app too. https://www.languagetransfer.org/free-courses-1
2. Language Reactor:  you can get two sets of subtitles in whatever your chosen language is plus another for Netflix (and also Youtube, and possibly other sites). You can also save vocab, access a dictionary with sound by clicking/ hovering over the words, and save vocab and export it to ANKI, if you do the flashcards thing.    https://www.languagereactor.com/

Edited October 20, 2022 by eos_nyxia

[at_anchor]

@eos_nyxia Thank you for the excellemt language learning tools and everything. I think that overlapping is exactly why I want to learn another foreign language that is related to my own, but that I might actually like even more. Danish and Dutch to me feel more complicated than German.

[JuliusCaesar]

On 10/19/2022 at 11:24 AM, at_anchor said:

Thank you for the answers.

I think that learning French might be just as useful as Latin for etymology, if not more so or does Latin give you more insight?

I recommend you learn at least modern Italian and become fluent in it before you attempt to learn Latin. Trust me, fluency in the modern vulgar language will make learning the ancient tongue much easier. To do so, I would recommend Pimsleur, do some research on them before you buy anything, but they've done free trials in the past and I believe those may still be ongoing. 

 

And if you find after a free trial or whatever that you don't like Pimsleur, then check out the Michel Thomas Method. It's similar to Pimsleur, but more engaging and possibly fun lol.

 

And yes, French is useful, in fact if you want, I'd advise you learn French and Italian before Latin, heck even through Spanish fluency in there for good measure lol. If you're feeling especially ambitious, you might want to go for fluency in Romanian also. It has some Latin that other Romance languages don't, though of course the same is true of Russian actually, But because Russian is so heavily Slavic in it's origins in general it's not going to help as much as learning a proper Romance Language such as Portuguese or especially Italian.

 

On 10/19/2022 at 11:24 AM, at_anchor said:

I think Latin roots can be googled and written down along with word meanings without learning Latin. So yeah.

There are 170,000+ words in use in the English language today. The majority of those words are either literally just straight up Latin, or rooted directly in Latin. You're never going to absorb such information using left brain processes. 

[at_anchor]

@JuliusCaesar I think Duo and Anki are suffucient enough tools for language learning with some added YouTube videos and listening materials.

This video has some criticism of Pimsleur: 

 

38 minutes ago, JuliusCaesar said:

There are 170,000+ words in use in the English language today. The majority of those words are either literally just straight up Latin, or rooted directly in Latin. You're never going to absorb such information using left brain processes. 

This is a good point. So to speak English well you need to know French or Italian and/or just Latin? German and Polish people don't have the same problem. Germans don't learn Swedish to understand German better and Poles don't learn Russian to understand Polish better. But there might be some truth to what you're saying.

[JuliusCaesar]

49 minutes ago, at_anchor said:

I think Duo and Anki are suffucient enough tools for language learning with some added YouTube videos and listening materials.

Duolingo? Lol, you'll find loads of criticism of them on Youtube if you look for it. 

 

50 minutes ago, at_anchor said:

This video has some criticism of Pimsleur: 

In the first two minutes, he already makes the false claim that Pimsleur is audio only, it is not, perhaps it was in the past, but today they teach you how to read/write also.

 

Furthermore, Pimsleur has been utilized successfully by agents of the US Government to acquire(that is become like a native speaker) in foreign languages. And I'm pretty sure it makes more sense to listen to Gov'T agents whose life depends on this than some random old guy on YT lol.

[at_anchor]

@JuliusCaesar Okay you are right, I will give it a try (actually can't wait). I should really remove that video, but too late now.

How can Italian help with English when Italians and the French speak English the least? Even Poland has more English speakers than Italy. So you basically say that learning Italian is gonna help me understand English words more intuitively, because it is a vulgar form of Latin. Sorry for the typos and misunderstanding.

[JuliusCaesar]

2 hours ago, at_anchor said:

How can Italian help with English when Italians and the French speak English the least? Even Poland has more English speakers than Italy.

That's not particularly relevant, India is inferior to China in terms of English proficiency, that doesn't mean learning Chinese will help you to learn English any better than Hindi lol.

 

2 hours ago, at_anchor said:

So you basically say that learning Italian is gonna help me understand English words more intuitively, because it is a vulgar form of Latin.

Somewhat yes. English is oftentimes not called a Romance language because it has some rather heavy Germanic influence. But frankly, it's still obvious that the majority of the English language has arisen directly out of Latin. And since Italian is even more Latin based well, you see why knowing Latin is helpful if you want to learn English. Especially the Legal variant because as I've mentioned before, literally all legal maxims are in Latin.

 

However, to be specific, what I'm stating is that since Italian is basically Modern Day Vulgar Latin, fluency in Italian is very useful with respect to attaining any degree of comprehension of the ancient language. And since fluency in Latin is very useful in learning English because the majority of English is Latin, that also means that learning Italian is useful in exactly this way via the common roots it shares with Current English in the Roman Empire of Antiquity. 

 

See, Latin lives on today in many different forms, English is just an example of somewhat Germanicized Vulgar Latin. Whereas the more notoriously Latin based languages such as the various dialects of Italian, the Spanish tongue, the Portuguese Tongue, French, Romanian etc are all just blatant examples of Modern Latin. As such, learning what's effectively the Grandfather of all these other tongues will aid in acquiring any related language. And surprise you as it may, that even includes Russian to some extent and those tongues close to Russian that is to say that are at least somewhat mutually intelligible with Russian such as Belarusian, Ukrainian, Rusyn etc etc.

 

Heck, even the name of the ruler of the Russian Empire цар(Romanized as Tsar) is short for Цезарь(Tsezar) the Russian translation of Caesar. Of course, the Prussian(German) Empire did the same thing with their ruler calling him Kaizer, which ironically is almost identical to how the ancients pronounce the name of CAESAR. The only two serious differences being, CAESAR's s sounds like the s in salad, and the A sounds like the a in father, not like e in Kaizer. Other than that, the Germans got it 100% correct, they even trill the R lol.

[at_anchor]

Latinates came to English mostly through French if that's correct. Which could mean that all the words from Latin in English are basically French words with like a couple of hundred give or take that came directly from Latin. If this is true, then that could mean that learning French is better for building an intuitive understanding of English than real Latin. What am I missing?

Edited October 30, 2022 by at_anchor

[JuliusCaesar]

3 hours ago, at_anchor said:

Latinates came to English mostly through French if that's correct. Which could mean that all the words from Latin in English are basically French words with like a couple of hundred give or take that came directly from Latin. If this is true, then that could mean that learning French is better for building an intuitive understanding of English than real Latin. What am I missing?

While the grammar and core vocabulary of English is derived from Proto-Germanic. The majority of the English language's total vocabulary is derived from Latin. Some of it is directly from Latin, as I've before mentioned there are literal Latin phrases in colloquial use of the English language such as ET CETERA, or for example, EXEMPLI GRATIA abbreviated as E.g., in writing.

 

Furthermore, because almost all English words not part of the core vocab are Latin, e.g., any word ending in -tion such as Emancipation (from Latin EMANCIPATIO, which is EX MANCIPATIO rendered one word. Ex means from or out of, MANCIPATIO refers to a place where slaves are auctioned). Or Interception, from INTERCEPTIO. Which as INTERCEPTIONEM means essentially exactly the same thing in the ancient language as it does in Modern English, as by adding the -NEM to it, that suffix makes INTERCEPTIO a direct object since it's in the accusative case.

 

So, the case for learning Latin in order to learn English is clear. The bottom line is there's a great deal of Latin in the current English language. However, in defense of the French Language. It is true that some Latin words in English came to it through French in the Middle Ages. In addition, French is undeniably Vulgar Latin at least in its written form.

 

And to some extent, perhaps a great extent in the spoken form as well. Though the pronunciation rules and application thereof are somewhat murky. Which is a stark contrast to the ancient language because after all the Romans invented the letter system I'm using here. And as such, they made it 100% phonetic, whereas French is derived from multiple languages using the Roman letter system and as such can have some wonky pronunciations. Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese don't really have that problem, at least not anywhere near the degree to which it exists in the French language.

Edited October 30, 2022 by JuliusCaesar

[JuliusCaesar]

8 minutes ago, JuliusCaesar said:

Ex means from or out of,

To anyone who may have been wondering. My writing this as Ex and not EX is not a typo in spite of the fact that I was using Roman Capitals when writing in Latin. I did that to imply that Ex is not just a Latin word, but also an English word. I'll use it in a sentence. "My Ex-Consort struck her upon the cheek with excessive force when she saw us kissing." Here, Ex-Consort means my prior consort. That is to say that I came out of the previous woman either to go into a state of being single, or to take a new Consort.

Edited October 30, 2022 by JuliusCaesar

[King Merk]

I’ve been acquiring French for about a year and a half now and it’s definitely changed how I look at language and my native tongue

Regardless of what language you should choose, I believe it’ll be worth your while  

[RobertZ]

I studied Latin for 1 year and here are my comments:

1) Latin grammar can teach the principles of the grammar that other languages use (such as Spanish or Portuguese), compared to English—at least familiarize a person with the concepts of Latin family grammar. For example, English relies more heavily on the order of certain  sentence parts than Latin to show the relationship between the words. In English, a person might say, “I give the ball to you,” or “I give you the ball”. In Latin (but not English) the order, ‘The ball gives I to you’ could have the same meaning. Therefore, studying Latin improved my English grammar by identifying the significance of the order of certain sentence parts.

 

2) Many words in Latin were quite easy for me to remember, as an English speaker. Many Latin words sound similar to a similar-meaning English words. For example, the Latin word for ‘danger’ sounds like the English word ‘precarious.’ Time sounds like temporary. Mercy sounds like misery, and so on. Personally, I find the pronunciation of Latin sounds very similar to English words in pronunciation—so I found it easier to remember Latin words than French or Spanish words personally. I studied Spanish for a year but remember much more from Latin than Spanish. I can never remember French words because the pronunciation is different than English or Latin; but I never studied French.

3) Latin is of course less useful than a living language—Similar to Hebrew or Greek in that respect, I suppose. The study of old languages might be useful in reviewing old texts that survived the test of time. But It is also more difficult to learn a language well if you cannot live in a place where people speak the language. Besides the academic study of texts—Unless perhaps you are taking a licentiate degree at the Vatican to become an exorcist, formator, or bishop—you probably won’t be speaking much Latin to people. Maybe liturgy—but that’s about it for speaking Latin.

4) One enjoyable part of studying Latin is discovering the sheer quantity of colloquial expressions commonly used in modern English that are literal word-for-word translations of ancient Latin texts. 

[JuliusCaesar]

1 hour ago, RobertZ said:

1) Latin grammar can teach the principles of the grammar that other languages use (such as Spanish or Portuguese), compared to English—at least familiarize a person with the concepts of Latin family grammar. For example, English relies more heavily on the order of certain  sentence parts than Latin to show the relationship between the words. In English, a person might say, “I give the ball to you,” or “I give you the ball”. In Latin (but not English) the order, ‘The ball gives I to you’ could have the same meaning. Therefore, studying Latin improved my English grammar by identifying the significance of the order of certain sentence parts.

Russian and I believe German use declension as extensively as Latin does. And probably many languages closely related to those two also use the same system. 

 

1 hour ago, RobertZ said:

Latin is of course less useful than a living language—Similar to Hebrew or Greek in that respect, I suppose.

Technically Hebrew and Greek are living languages in the forms of Yiddish spoken in current day Israel, and Modern Greek spoken in Greece. Though these languages have changed over the millennia, and in the instance of Modern Greek I believe it's almost totally foreign to Ancient Greek. Yiddish may have a relationship with ancient Hebrew comparable to the relationship that exists between Hindi and Sanskrit.

 

And I would argue that Latin is a living language, even here we're using what's essentially an anglicized form of Latin. And those they call Romance languages are effectively modern Latin. Not to mention many "non-Romance" languages that have many Latin terms and use Quasi-Latin grammatical rules such as Russian. 

 

 

 

[eos_nyxia]

Man... where are the people who just learn things for fun, like almost entirely just for interest and curiosity and not necessarily for "usefulness" (which generally amounts to being able to use the language with other people, as a living language)? ...and also possibly because they're moderately masochistic in an intellectual way? Personally, sometimes I really just love a challenge. Especially if someone tells me it can't/ won't be done, or that I can't do that, or people just don't do that sort of thing.

Also.... just general nerdery for its own sake.

For example:

I did a self-study course in Classical Arabic in uni because it was interesting to read parts of the Qu'ran in the original language, and not because I'm religious and interested in it, or I'm religious and felt it was necessary. And not because I was specializing in the subject in school either.

I self-taught a little Sanskrit for the same reason.

It's different, it's novel, it's foreign, and I want to have some sort of hands-on experience with what it's about. Something that's not just based on what other people (presumably and hopefully actual "experts") say about it, but something that is first-hand experience, so I can at least make some observations and conclusions for myself, or see where other people's conclusions come from.

.........just because.