Why Learn Latin?

by Joseph Kennedy

The Latin language may be “dead” to many, but it still lives on in many important fields and studies.

 Not only is Latin heavily used in legal terminology, which many students have already figured out, hopefully, but it’s also used in medicine. In addition, Latin is the official language of the Roman Catholic Church and thus an important religious language for many people in the West. The English language, a Germanic tongue ultimately descended from Proto-West Germanic, has been heavily influenced by Latin in its long life, adopting words for scientific and religious reasons

Given English’s borrowings and incorporation of such words, I believe Latin to this day remains an important language to learn that furnishes the learner with many benefits.

Latin is an Italic language descended from Proto-Indo European, which is the reconstructed mother-tongue of all the Indo-European languages today that spread out to all corners of the world. This ancient tongue had many different branches, some of which are extinct. For example, the Anatolian branch consisted of languages such as Hittite and Luwian which have been long extinct. Another ancient branch that died out many years ago was the Tocharian branch, remnants of which have been found in modern day China.

 But among the many branches of this mother-tongue, Latin was of the Italic branch. Most people think that Latin was a “romance” language, but this is not true. Rather, romance languages are languages that descended from Latin. Our English, on the other hand, was descended from the Germanic branch, along with other languages like: Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Frisian, Dutch, Afrikaans, and German. The farther one goes back in linguistic history, however, the more similarities one sees in the morphology of the different Indo-European languages, coming to the realization of some common ancestral language. This is evident in Proto-Germanic and Latin. Both languages consist of highly inflected nouns, verb conjugations, three grammatical genders, and frequent SOV syntax (Subject – Object – Verb).

When one studies Latin, one can easily apply the grammatical properties one acquired to other Indo-European languages.

For example, this is very evident with regards to noun inflections. Modern English has lost most of its noun cases due to contact with Old Norse settlers and Vikings, as well as the Norman conquests of England. Contact with the different languages, along with heavy use of prepositions and speech patterns that already had been shaving off endings once preserved in Proto-Germanic, led to a concentration not so much focused on inflection to convey meaning but to word order and prepositional phrases. What once depended on inflectional forms to depict the noun’s role in the sentence was now depicted through means we use today as English speakers.

But this was not true of all languages. For example, German and Icelandic still maintain the noun declension system that Old English held. Here is an example of a noun declension pattern in Latin compared to Old English and Latvian.

Latin (vir – man, husband)

	Singular	Plural
Nominative	vir	viri
Genitive	viri	virorum
Dative	viro	viris
Accusative	virum	viros
Ablative	viro	viris

         Old English (wer – man, husband)

	Singular	Plural
Nominative	wer	weras
Genitive	weres	wera
Dative	were	werum
Accusative	wer	weras

 

         Latvian (vīrs – man)

	Singular	Plural
Nominative	vīrs	vīri
Genitive	vīra	vīru
Dative	vīram	vīriem
Accusative	vīru	vīrus
Locative	vīrā	vīros
Vocative	vīrs	vīri

         The Nominative is the subject of the sentence, the genitive is the possessor, the dative is used for indirect objects, the accusative for direct objects, and the ablative for prepositional phrases. The locative, in Latvian, is used in many of the same regards as the ablative in Latin to convey location, whereby in Old English and other inflected Germanic tongues the dative survived as the case for many of the prepositions that would have governed the ablative. By learning Latin, these simple and recognizable patterns will make learning other morphologically-similar languages easier. It will also make learning English grammar less burdensome.

 Here is an example of how these noun cases work. As opposed to English, which relies on word order to depict meaning, Latin just needs the cases, while its word-order can be relatively free:

• Regina fovet regem. – The queen cherishes the king.
• Aeneas cum amicis familiaque ad naves largas ex arce Priami fugit ut evaderet regnumque novum conderet. – Aeneas fled from Priam’s citadel to the large ships with his friends and family in order to escape and establish a new kingdom.

In English, the word order is crucial in order to depict meaning, whereas in Latin, the word order can be mixed up and still convey the same meaning, for example:

• Regem fovet regina.
• Fovet regina regem.
• Regem regina fovet.
• Regina regem fovet.
• Fugit cum amicis familiaque ex arce Priami ad naves largas Aeneas ut evaderet et conderet novum regnum.

Although the meanings in English would change or sound incomprehensible, the meanings in Latin stay soundly the same. This is the benefit of learning noun cases. You can then easily apply this to other languages like Russian or Polish that use declensions to depict the noun’s role in the sentence instead of the dependency on word-order. Besides increasing your knowledge of morphology, Latin will actually help law students with legal phrases.

Like said earlier, many of the legal terms we see in the classroom have Latin origins. “Res ipsa loquitur” literally translates to “the affair itself speaks”, also “ad hominem” means “to/against the person.” Just knowing these simple translations actually helps with learning the use behind the phrase. It can take the stress off of applying some weird words to a legal concept by letting the translation itself teach the concept.

Although there are many more reasons to learn Latin, like learning more about history by translating ancient authors, I feel that these are practical reasons for giving Latin a try, instead of dismissing it as just a dead language.