
In Defense of Latin - portobello
https://lithub.com/look-latin-is-not-useless-neither-is-it-dead/
======
triska
Latin is the most powerful natural language I know.

The reason is that the grammar is so developed that the word order is
essentially arbitrary, and that, together with other grammatical features,
gives rise to a method I have not seen so fully realized in any other
language:

It allows you to express the _content_ in such a way that the _way you express
it_ matches the content.

For example, consider the verses:

    
    
        Daedalus interea Creten longumque perosus
        exilium tactusque loci natalis amore
    

Here, exilium (= "exile") logically belongs to the first verse. The flexible
word order has allowed the author to arrange it so that this word appears _in
isolation_ (i.e., "in exile") from the verse it belongs to, while still
fitting the metre (hexameter), thus matching what is being described with the
form that is used to describe it. The suffix "-que" that can be attached to
Latin words to mean "and" makes "longumque" also quite long as a word,
stressing how long the exile is.

Especially in the Metamorphoses, this strategy is extremely common and applied
masterfully: If something is being described that is _hard_ to do, then the
sentence is structured in such a way that it is comparatively _hard_ to
understand, by using an unusual word order etc. If things are far apart, the
words are themselves far apart etc. For quick things, words are omitted that
cannot be omitted in other languages etc.

~~~
hackyhacky
_The reason is that the grammar is so developed that the word order is
essentially arbitrary_

Lots of languages are like this. Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Polish, etc. And
those are just the ones that I know.

    
    
      Janu miluje Petr. -- PETR loves Jana.
      Petr miluje Janu. -- Petr loves JANA.
      Petr Janu miluje. -- Petr LOVES Jana.
      etc etc
    

The only people who say that Latin is uniquely flexible are those people with
no experience in other languages. If expressive inflection and flexible word-
order are your thing, you have lots of languages with millions of living
speakers that fulfill that requirement.

Latin is not magical. It's just another language. I'm happy that the author
enjoys it (language, any language, makes a great hobby!), but I wish we could
skip the hyperbole around Latin's alleged virtues just because the Romans
happened to use it.

~~~
LessDmesg
You're not quite right. Classical Latin had a lot of things that virtually no
modern language has: a fully developed passive conjugation, a fully developed
conjunctive, and - the cherry on the cake - a rigorously expressed separation
between phases (consecutio temporum). Latin is quite magical, and even if it
was actually more crude than some of its contemporaries like Ancient Greek and
Sanskrit, it's still sweeter than virtually all modern languages, some of
which don't even have a past perfect tense or more than one conjunctive form.

~~~
rimliu
I have no idea what "fully developed passive conjugation" is, but my language
is very old and I imagine very difficult for English speaker to learn. There
is an example how fun it can be:
[http://www.lituanus.org/1987/87_1_04.htm](http://www.lituanus.org/1987/87_1_04.htm)

~~~
tremon
It means that every conjugation of an active verb has a corresponding passive
form, as in your link: esąs - buvęs - būsįas versus esamas - būtas - būsimas .
But that's underselling it a bit, because Latin actually had a full
3-dimensional matrix of conjugations: time-based tense (past, present,
future), goal-based tense (completed or ongoing), and action (active or
passive), with accompanying participles for each case. To compare with your
link, I notice Lithuanian seems to lack passive participles ("while being
beaten" is the corresponding example), while keeping some of the
circumstantial conjugations (frequency, intent, necessity, conjunct phrases)
that older languages did have, but Latin did away with.

In more analytical languages, most of these constructs have been replaced with
auxiliary verbs (as in English: I see versus I'm seen, I'm watching versus I'm
being watched). With full conjugations, entire sentences can change in tense
or action without affecting word order. This may not seem that special if your
native language is like that, but as the OP started out saying, it allows for
much more expressiveness in (predominantly written) language.

~~~
rimliu
If I got it right, Lithuanian does have passive participle (neveikiamasis
dalyvis). In the case of "while being eaten" it would be "valgomas". "While
being beaten" -> "mušamas". He was silent while being beaten -> Mušamas jis
tylėjo.

To quote Wikipedia:

    
    
        the Lithuanian language is unique for having fourteen different
        participial forms of the verb, which can be grouped into five
        when accounting for inflection by tense. Some of these are also
        inflected by gender and case. For example, the verb eiti ("to
        go, to walk") has the active participle forms einąs/einantis
        ("going, walking", present tense), ėjęs (past tense), eisiąs
        (future tense), eidavęs (past frequentative tense), the passive 
        participle forms einamas ("being walked", present tense), eitas 
        (“walked” past tense), eisimas (future tense), the adverbial 
        participles einant ("while [he, different subject] is walking" 
        present tense), ėjus (past tense), eisiant (future tense), 
        eidavus (past frequentative tense), the semi-participle eidamas 
        ("while [he, the same subject] is going, walking") and the
        participle of necessity eitinas ("that which needs to be 
        walked"). The active, passive, and the semi-participles are 
        inflected by gender, and the active, passive, and necessity 
        ones are inflected by case.

------
heelix
University required one year of Latin, or two years of French, German, or
Spanish. I opted to go for the 'easy' route... and took Latin. Fast forward
when our company was expanding into EMEA, and had a coding gig in France. I
spoke no French, the guy I was working with spoke no English, but both of us
could do parsable Latin. The code comments as we worked together were
priceless when the next wave of folks came in.

~~~
mc3

        // quae est infernum

------
2ion
Studying Latin and Ancient Greek in high school unlocked so much knowledge and
intuition for me:

* Easy to grok how Romance languages work (French, Italian, etc), you can make up a lot of vocabulary on the spot, knowing Latin, and still be right

* Borrowed words from Latin in whatever language (English, German) are intelligible, you don't have to learn their meaning because it's a composite of something Latin

* THis immediately affects your expression in writing as well as speech positively

* Fantastic literature in original script readily accessible

* Many good hours spent with improving the translations of especially tricky passages, analyzing sentences and grammatical structures had great overlap with how I approached thinking deeply about my other passions, Math and Astronomy so I got better at both groking and structuring information as well as patterns of thought when it comes to analyzing interesting problems. Honestly, at the end of high school I hadn't cared had I become a classical philologist if not for the earning prospects of that path.

In contrast, how English was taught as a foreign language never came close. It
was a totally uninspiring experience.

------
blaesus
Latin is "dead" and that's its advantage.

English is well "alive", and living implies mutation. In 500 years, our
children would be reading our English as we read Shakespeare (that is, with
difficulty); and in 1000 years, our English would become what Beowulf looks
like today (that is, you can't recognize a word).

Latin doesn't change. Caesar's Latin is Vulgate's Latin, which is Newton's
Latin, which is the Pope's Latin, which is the Latin used in Harrius Potter et
Philosophi Lapis and Winnie ille Pu.

What is dead may never die. The "English" as we know it will die. Latin will
not.

~~~
umanwizard
Latin is not dead, it is alive and its modern dialects are called Portuguese,
French, Catalan, Spanish, ....

The relationship between Latin and e.g. Spanish is _exactly_ the same as
between Beowulf-era English and the English we’re speaking now. So I don’t
understand your argument that Latin is unchanging whereas English isn’t.

~~~
blaesus
French and Castilian and friends are standardized against some spoken variant.
And spoken languages inevitably change over time.

Latin is standardized against the writings of the classical authors, and to a
lesser degree, the medieval authors. These authors, being dead, can't change.

------
vearwhershuh
Hillaire Belloc made the interesting claim that it was thanks to Latin that
the various European languages were able to develop so freely: you could
always communicate in Latin when you traveled.

He also noted that the various lingua francas since Latin was lost have tended
to suffer from becoming the world language. Looking at English today one is
hard pressed to disagree.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
How has English suffered from becoming the world language? I don't see it.

~~~
bryanrasmussen
I suppose one could argue that the people who come to English as a world
language are not that great at the language, and thus they are not capable of
helping it improve. (this is however belied by evidence that often those
authors who have most helped English develop have been at the periphery of the
culture)

I often see something that could inspire this argument when I travel, people
have made a native and English version of a sign or some sort of text. The
English is riddled with laughable errors - why? Because everyone knows English
and why would you ever hire a translator, just get Jules down in accounting to
do it, he's great! (only it turns out Jules is not great)

I will now, at the end of my explanation of how I think someone might want to
make the argument, explain that I myself am not a supporter of the argument
(nor do I know if this is indeed what Belloc supposed) and hope not to get one
of those responses telling me how wrong I am in believing what I do not have a
particular belief in.

~~~
notahacker
I'm inclined to suggest the blame lies the other way around: some of the more
stupid, ugly and arbitrary grammatical quirks which ought to be dropped from
the English language or made optional and context sensitive persist only
because they act as a means to identify the writer is a native speaker and/or
sufficiently highly educated.

~~~
WorldMaker
The interesting part of that to me, too, is how many of them roundabout derive
from eras where erudite and highly educated English speakers were forced to
learn Latin as well, and in so doing apply Latin grammar rules to English that
don't apply to natural English. The most obvious example being "never end a
sentence with a preposition", which is a very clear grammar violation in
Latin, but natural English has ended sentences with prepositions for a very
long time.

To a lesser extent I think it is also Latin education's fault why the
"objective" case continues to linger in English, despite being so mostly dead,
as it acts as an education marker. `Whom` is a zombie only insisted upon by
certain educations and should just be buried and put out of its misery. The
confusion around `me` versus `I` and which scenarios to use which probably
will only get worse.

~~~
JackFr
I am unfamiliar with objective. Are you referring collectively to the
accusative and dative?

~~~
WorldMaker
English merged accusative and dative centuries ago as it dropped most other
cases, and this merged almost-a-case is generally called the "objective case"
by English grammarians. Though the more accurate from the point of view of
Latin grammarians name for the case is that English has an "oblique case".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_case](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_case)

------
GnarfGnarf
In my 50-year career in IT, I have noticed a positive correlation between
success and skill at analysis, and training in Latin.

I was forced to study Latin for six years (plus two years of classical Greek
τα ζωα τρεχει). I was not interested at the time, and did not fully benefit
from the discipline that was imposed on me. I wish I had paid more attention.

------
sramsay
Gardini's book sounds like fun, but I want to put in a plug for an older one
that might be of more interest to this crowd: _Ad Infinitum: A Biography of
Latin and the World It Created_ by Nicholas Ostler.

This is a general-reader history of the Latin language that goes from its
origin up until its use in the present day (too bad the book was written
before the current obsession with the phrase "quid pro quo" in the US!).

Anyway, it really is a riveting tale, and it makes Gardini's argument for him:
Latin really was the "language of the West" for the better part of 1500 years,
and its ghost lingers on.

------
kmm
I had Latin in high school. While I liked reading the stories and deciphering
the verbs and case systems, I didn't see what the point of it was. I was
assured I'd understand later, with some spiel about how it's a great literary
language, how in medicine everything is (was) in Latin, how it is part of our
history etc...

More than a decade later, I'm convinced, without bitterness, that it's a waste
of time. Sure, it's not completely useless. The stories and culture were
interesting (most of it taught in my native language of course, nobody ever
learns to read it fluently, let alone speak it), and I'm sure learning to read
Latin developed me in some sense, but not nearly in a way that it was worth
that many hours per week, years on end. Time that could have been spent on
useful skills or leisure, and almost all of the supposed benefits of Latin
could have been gotten from learning a language that is still alive. Here in
the north of Belgium most of us get French, German and English anyway. Maybe a
non-European language would have been way more enriching.

Developing a passion for linguistics further cemented that view, because it
taught me a lot of the mythos around Latin is plain wrong, "bad linguistics".
Latin is not special, not better, not more logical or free or sophisticated or
expressive or anything else compared to other languages. Of course it's
beautiful and special, but every language is beautiful and fascinating and has
its own unique interesting features. And of course some of the literature or
poetry is unique and hard to express in other languages, but the same can be
said for Japanese or Dutch. Nor did Latin lie at the root of other non-Romance
European languages, Dutch and Russian and Greek are sisters and any
similarities are simply retained from some common ancestor (or from language
contact, which went both ways). Truth is, Latin is an unremarkable language
from an unremarkable branch of Proto-Indo-European. I'm not saying that as a
bad thing, the same holds for most other European languages, it's just that
the only thing that made it special was that its speakers took over the world.
Had history gone any different, we'd all revere Old Albanian, Common Slavic,
Proto-Germanic, Proto-Mongolic etc...

I'm open to having my mind changed on this (as long as it doesn't involve bad
linguistics), and of course, if people feel it personally enriches, I believe
them and I'm happy for it.

~~~
adrianN
> nobody ever learns to read it fluently, let alone speak it

That's probably part of the problem. Learning a language is no fun if you
can't actually use it.

------
azangru
If I understand the argument advanced by the article correctly (trivial though
it may be), it is as follows: things may be worth investing your time into not
just because they are useful, but because they are somehow emotionally
satisfying.

While I completely agree with this argument (precisely because it is so
trivial), I find it essentially pointless. While "usefulness" of an occupation
can be somehow quantified and used to convince other people that a particular
occupation is worth doing, emotional satisfaction is subjective and not
comparable between different individuals. While someone gets a kick out of
reading Latin, another may find pleasure in playing sports or gaming. One
pastime in no way seems better than the other.

She toys with this question by asking why not study German, Russian, Arabic,
or Chinese instead, and I think completely drops the ball with the answer.

The article can convince only those who share the author's aesthetic values.

------
kazinator
> _I won’t enter into a discussion on the meaning of “utility,” a concept with
> variations and stratifications that are centuries in the making, and which
> itself merits an entire book_

late 14c., "fact of being useful," from Old French utilite "usefulness" (13c.,
Modern French + utilité), earlier utilitet (12c.), from Latin utilitatem
(nominative utilitas) "usefulness, serviceableness, profit," from utilis
"usable," from uti "make use of, profit by, take advantage of" (see use (v.)).

[https://www.etymonline.com/word/utility](https://www.etymonline.com/word/utility)

------
toolslive
Latin by it self is utterly useless (I had it for 6 years in secondary school
sometimes even 12 hours a week, so I'm a bit biased). However, it's difficult,
and needs constant work and attention, and there are not many things in school
that are like that, so this has value. You could replace Latin with chess, or
violin or whatever other difficult thing that needs constant deliberate effort
to get any level and achieve the same pedagogical effect but with more fun.

------
simonblack
The biggest value of Latin in today's world is the existence of what are
called _Latin roots_ in English.

Latin (and Greek also) roots are building blocks which are 'clicked' together
to form many, many English words. We don't have to learn the meaning of
several hundred separate words, when we can learn a handful or so roots and
discern what an unknown word, new to us, means by disassembling it into its
component roots.

Examples: (Latin) vid/vis=see, audi=hear, equi=equal, voc=voice

    
    
              (Greek)  scope=see, micro=small, tele=far
    

Using these roots we can make up words like 'microscope', 'equivocal',
'auditorium', etc, etc.

So if we come across some new word like 'television' and break that down to
the Greek 'far' and the Latin 'see', we can work out that a television is
something that lets you see something that is far away. The word 'telescope'
does the same thing using Greek-only roots and also lets you see something far
away in a different manner.

In the past, it was considered bad-form to mix both Greek and Latin roots in
the one word, but since the arrival of 'television', it seems we aren't as
fussed about that any more.

~~~
edjrage
Actually, your examples just showed how useless roots are to make up words. I
wouldn't be able to guess the meaning of any of the words you mentioned just
by knowing their roots. So maybe they're easier to memorize than random
syllables, but that's about it.

------
vonnik
I happen to love this quote:

'If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin, they would never have found
the time to conquer the world.' -Heinrich Heine

------
ngcc_hk
A totally different comment: any one know if arbitrary word order so important
feature of Latin as a language, why no such thing in computer language.

Lisp is Most flexible I suppose but basically it is fixed form (verb x).
Whatever verb is it governs how x is interpret. Also you cannot eliminate ().
Hence the basic and simple structure is fixed.

Not sure any use of arbitrary word order.

~~~
kragen
Surprisingly nobody has mentioned Perligata yet.

Latin's (or Ancient Greek's, or Hungarian's) ability to reorder words because
of inflectional endings is not absolute; you still have things like
subordinate clauses and prepositional phrases, even though they're not as
ubiquitous as in Romance languages or English. You can reorder things locally,
but not over long distances, and some things have to move together.

Interestingly, lots of programming languages have the freedom to reorder big
chunks over long distances without altering the meaning, while I've never used
a natural language that had that feature. I think the reason for the large-
scale freedom is mostly that in programming languages you are usually defining
named entities (subroutines, methods, classes, variables, constants, inference
rules, predicates, rewrite rules, and whatnot) that the rest of the program
interacts with by mentioning their names.

Languages with named arguments allow you to reorder named argument lists
freely. My own Bicicleta takes that to somewhat of an extreme and also allows
it within "subroutines", depending on dataflow dependencies to drive
sequencing.

~~~
ergfdsdag
"Interestingly, lots of programming languages have the freedom to reorder big
chunks over long distances without altering the meaning, while I've never used
a natural language that had that feature"

wouldn't that be a cognitive burden that would hit our brains quicker than a
computer, namely short term memory?

Far off re-ordering would be like trying to do mental math in your head that
requires memorizing very many results.

~~~
kragen
Maybe, but this applies equally well to programming languages!

------
giorgioz
I'm an Italian Software Engineer raised in Rome and I did studied Latin in
High School. This is a topic that I care about deeply. LATIN IS BOTH DEAD AND
USELESS. Unfortunately most of italians strongly disagree on these two points
like the author of the article and my father. Latin is spoken by very few
people and it has very little utility. Latin is much less usefull and much
less spoken than all modern Latin derived languages. If you learn Spanish,
Portuguese, French, Italian or Romanian you will be much better off. The whole
argument of Latin being useful to learn later on another Latin language is
pointless. If you learn Spanish you will likely learn any other Latin derived
language much faster than if you knew Latin.

Latin is no more. Don't cling to the past. Move on. English, Spanish and
Chinese are the new Latin today.

------
ziftface
This article reads like a fever dream for me

------
kragen
> _When we study Latin, we must study it for one fundamental reason: because
> it is the language of a civilization; because the Western world was created
> on its back._

I think Greek fits this bill much better. Archimedes spoke Greek; Marcellus
spoke Latin. Plato and the scholarchs spoke Greek; Sulla, who burned the
Academy, spoke Latin. Euclid, Ptolemy, Chyrippus, and Eratosthenes spoke
Greek. The intellectual achievements of the Romans were, by contrast, as
pitiful as their military conquests were amazing. Even the Roman Empire
eventually switched to Greek, which is why the oldest surviving copies of many
Christian texts are in Greek, not Latin. (Perhaps the originals were even
written in Greek.) When the lost knowledge of the ancient philosophers was
translated from Arabic into a Western language, that language was, in large
part, Greek; Μανουήλ Βρυέννιος and Θεόδωρος Μετοχίτης, to which we can trace
the mathematical genealogy of Gauss and Euler, lived in Constantinople (the
capital of the Roman Empire) and spoke Greek.

And of course if we're interested in _fecundity_

> _Dante would never have composed his_ Divine Comedy _without the model of
> the_ Aeneid, _nor Milton his_ Paradise Lost

obviously the Greek Homer sang in is considerably more fecund, because the
_Aeneid_ is explicitly a fanfic of the _Iliad_ ; and Livy was explicitly
imitating Herodotus, and Cicero the Athenian rhetors.

More generally, the Renaissance Gardini wishes to flatter owes at least as
much _directly_ to Greek texts, both from ancient Athens and from Byzantium,
as it does to Latin texts. Gardini's attribution of the Renaissance to a
revival of exclusively _Latin_ culture is simply wrong. His complete omission
of the importance of Classical Greek influence in the Renaissance is so
glaring as to call his integrity into question.

So why, then, was Latin an important academic language 400 years after Μανουήλ
Βρυέννιος? Because of the Roman Catholic Church, which was the only refuge of
learning remaining in the violent, brutal, ignorant society of medieval
Western Europe until the Reformation; and because, after the fall of the
Caliphate, the Islamic world, which had been such a light of knowledge
throughout that darkest of ages, also succumbed to persecution of scholars and
extinguishment of wisdom. China and India had their own remarkable
advancements, but they were too far away to correspond much with European
scholars.

So Latin filled the role in Europe that Classical Chinese filled throughout
the East, being the language of scholarship and culture, permitting the
invisible college to transcend the pathetic national borders of the petty
thugs that call themselves princes and nobles. The great universities of
Europe mostly arose as seminaries, and for centuries all theses were published
in Latin. This continued to some extent up to the 20th century: a couple of
months ago, I was reading an anthropology paper published around 1910 about
folktales of the Native American Ute tribe, and at the point where Coyote and
Lizard start having sex, the paper abruptly switches from English to Latin for
a couple of pages, perhaps to evade the Comstock Act prohibition on
distributing obscene materials through the mails.

I think studying Latin is worthwhile in order to understand that history, and
there's a lot of it. But it's not because Western Civilization was built by
Rome; on the contrary, Western Civilization barely survived being conquered by
Rome, largely thanks to the Muslims.

~~~
patrec
Well, people like St Augustine, Erasmus, Newton, Leibniz, Descartes, Gauss and
so on also kinda matter, and even if there is no disputing that Ancient Greece
was intellectually far more important than Ancient Rome, the fact that Ancient
Greek has probably less of 100 years worth of really important stuff (ignoring
Homer) whilst Latin was used by the world's foremost minds for centuries (as
you note) also must count for something.

Also I don't understand your point about Western Civilization barely surviving
Roman conquest – surely much worse things could have befallen the Greek
heritage?

~~~
kragen
Indeed, we can imagine a past where Greece's learning was as lost as the Maya
codices. But we could also imagine a past in which the Academy wasn't chopped
down, where the Library at Alexandria wasn't burned but survived until the
present day, where Chrysippus's works on logic weren't lost, where
Archimedes's invention of the calculus (and whatever else he would have
discovered if he hadn't been murdered by Roman soldiers) didn't have to wait
until the 18th century, where there was never a Diocletian to condemn the
peasantry of half a continent to serfdom for a millennium and a half, where
perhaps we could read the literature of Carthage, where Egyptian hieroglyphics
were never forgotten, where the Antikythera Mechanism wasn't a dead end but
simply an early stage in a long line of calculating mechanisms that continued
to develop for centuries.

We could imagine Europe without a Dark Age, and we could imagine a world where
the progress of European science did not end even before the Dark Age began.
What would that world look like? I don't mean to suggest that it would be a
matter of sweetness and light — Athens, too, had its share of slavery, wars of
aggression, and political persecution, to say nothing of damned Lacedaemon —
but what if intellectual and cultural progress in Europe hadn't halted and
even gone backwards for more than a millennium?

Too, Ancient Greek's heyday was not a mere century. Basilios Bessarion, who
taught Johannes Argyropoulos in Padova, lived in the 15th century, around the
time of the fall of Constantinople. The wrestler Plato was born around 428 BC;
his Academy survived until Sulla chopped it down in 84 BCE. Ptolemy didn't
live until the second century CE. From Plato's birth to the fall of
Constantinople was almost 1900 years. I think that's substantially more than
100 years of really important stuff.

~~~
tremon
Also, Plato also didn't come into existence in a void. The exact creation date
of the Iliad isn't known, but it's assumed to be around the 8th or 9th century
BC. That means that Greece had a culturally stable society for some 500 years
before Plato was born, even though it was mostly composed of interdependent
city states rather than central rule. The first time that was achieved was
under Alexander the Great, so well after Plato.

------
ngcc_hk
Obviously as an extract the quote can only single out certain aspects of the
thing. Here Latin has arbitrary order, history, beautiful etc. Also should
have said it is the common root of or at least strong influence to European
language.

But still why today learn it depend upon the key question. If I do not learn
it what is the impact. Not sure. That is my answer.

Learning Hebrew for bible reading. If forced German for philosophical work.
Latin? Not sure.

~~~
umanwizard
Latin was the common international language of Western Europe for more than a
thousand years _after_ the Roman Empire collapsed. Even until the 19th century
there are some (admittedly by then a bit rare) examples of major treatises
composed in Latin rather than in a national language.

There is a gigantic body of literature, science, history, philosophy, and so
on, all written in Latin.

If civilization survives long enough, people will probably still be studying
English thousands of years from now for similar reasons, even if there are no
more native speakers.

------
nitwit005
As people put more and more effort into making the past accessible, the value
of learning older languages decreases. It used to be that the raw source works
were often all people had access to. Now you can find annotated translations
of amazing quality.

And for the most part, that's a great outcome. There was a tremendous cost to
teaching everyone Greek and Latin.

~~~
yarg
There's a huge value in understanding Latin, or at least some parts of it - it
allows you to derive a vast dictionary of words that have been subsumed into
the English language.

Sure there's derivability of terms in English, but the depth to which that is
true doesn't really compare.

~~~
umanwizard
Most of our Latin-based vocabulary came to English not directly, but via
French. So wouldn’t learning French be more useful as a means to building
erudite English vocabulary?

~~~
blaesus
Indeed, about 29% of English vocabulary came from French; yet another 29% are
directly from Latin[0].

Take your comment as example: excluding the Anglo-Saxon words, 5 are directly
from Latin and 2 from French:

Latin words: Latin, Latinus vocabulary, vocabulum directly, directus via, via
erudite, eruditus

French words: French useful

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_language_influences_in...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_language_influences_in_English)

------
drewcoo
An article about language with a confusing title[1]. I found that studying
Latin made me pay more attention to English use.

[1] [https://brians.wsu.edu/2016/05/19/bias-
biased/](https://brians.wsu.edu/2016/05/19/bias-biased/)

------
ergfdsdag
Ok, how do I learn Latin?

But what reasources are there to understand and read Latin? It seems every
resource wants to teach me I need to inflect, which I already know.

I want audio books, children's games, in short comprehensible input.

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Clifford Truesdale (1919-2000), arguably the best American Thermodynamicist
after Gibbs, insisted on writing his papers in Latin and opened his own
journal just for that purpose.

He also wrote his papers with a quilt.

