Why Bother Learning Latin?
“Why bother? It’s a dead language.” This was the number one thing people would say to me when I told them that I took Latin in high school. I find it sad when people actually consider that a sort of witticism. I’d wager that most of us who have studied classical languages of any variety perceive the intelligence behind comments like those to be a lot less than those who do not see how pervasive and influential ancient languages can be. I can easily substantiate the influence of Latin on the English language with this statistic alone: About 60% of English words are derived from Latin Now, let me clarify that most of these words came from the French language, which is derived from Latin, which in turn is theoretically derived from Proto-Indo-European. The ultimate origins of these words are always a good source for debate (sometimes even scholarly debate). Nevertheless, the fact remains that Latin has had a massive, incontrovertible impact on the English language For those English speake
