The top 3 reasons you should study Latin

academics classics High School Latin
By Joshua

There comes a moment in the careers of most middle- and high-schoolers learning Latin, and also among some college students considering it as a possibility when picking classes; a moment when they ask themselves (or their parents, or their teachers), “Why do I need to study this?”  After all, Latin is a dead language; unless you plan to become a senior Vatican official, you are very unlikely to have to speak it as part of your everyday life.  To add to this apparent lack of practical utility, learning it involves memorizing seemingly endless grammatical rules (and exceptions to those rules).  For English speakers, in particular, even the concepts these rules embody are difficult to get your head around.  So why go to the trouble, when there are modern languages with less complicated rules that you could be learning instead?

1. It is the foundation of our civilization 

My own academic background is in history, so I’m going to begin with a historian’s answer.  Latin was the tongue of the Roman Empire: the language at the time when the foundations of our own civilization were being laid.  In the Middle Ages, it was the language not only of the Church, but also of almost all learning and philosophy in the West, and of a great deal of record-keeping, international correspondence, and literature.  By the Renaissance, even as interest in Classical literature increased, the importance of Latin for other purposes declined; but it continued to be the preeminent language of European diplomacy until the seventeenth century, and of western science until the end of the eighteenth.  Thus, if you’re looking at any area of European history before about 1500, or intellectual history up though the beginnings of the Scientific Revolution, at least some of your primary sources are going to be in Latin.  Many of these, of course, exist in English translation; but many more do not, and even among the former group, their interpretation often depends on the precise meaning of a single word.  Historians, art historians, archaeologists, and anyone who has a serious interest (even an amateur one) in the pre-modern period all have good cause to learn it.

2. It can help you learn other languages

The more important reason to learn Latin, however, has less to do with Latin in itself and more to do with how it can help you to learn other languages.  Just for a start, the complex grammar that gives so many students a headache can be enormously helpful, simply because it forces you to think about and understand grammar in much more depth than you probably would otherwise.  Over the years, I’ve found this a huge asset in writing English well, let alone other languages.  Moreover, once you’ve taken even the most basic elements of Latin, you have the key to all the other complex European languages—German, Modern Greek, Russian—because they share the same basic structure.  As a result, your non-Latinate colleagues will be sweating over the concepts of cases and moods and the plethora of tenses…that you will suddenly find are practically second-nature if you’ve previously taken Latin.  And finally, all of the Romance languages—French, Spanish, Portuguese, and others—are descended from Latin. Thus almost all of their vocabulary comes from Latin words, changed by centuries and circumstances, but recognizable if you know the Latin.  The same goes, incidentally, for much of our own technical and high-flown vocabulary: adjacent is “lying at”, saxifragous “breaking of rocks”, propinquity is simply the word for nearness with a “y” replacing a Latin word ending.

3. It enriches your understanding of the arts

Finally, there’s the fact that stuff in Latin is often pretty cool for its own sake.  Having been the language of the Roman Catholic Church for seventeen centuries or so, there’s a lot of great choral music in Latin, and you can often appreciate it a lot more if you actually know what the words mean.  (To say nothing of how easy it is to remember and pronounce them if you’re in a chorus.)  And then there’s classical literature.  You’ll probably start with Caesar’s Gallic War, whose author (like Daeron I, for my Game of Thrones geeks out there), “writes with an elegant simplicity, and his history is rich with blood, battle, and bravery” (G.R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings, 734).  And then you get to what I consider the good stuff.  No statesman ever used language more cleverly than Cicero; no one ever mixed theology and personal experience better than Augustin.  Catullus goes from writing about how great his girlfriend is to writing about how she dumped him and now he doesn’t know whether to love her or hate her in a way that’ll bring tears to your eyes even if you haven’t had the same thing happen to you (yet); and he can extoll a favorite place or be creatively rude to his detractors with just as much skill.  That’s just a selection; I could go on.  And sure, you can read them in translation, but come on.  In English you can’t admire the way they play with words; the music of the language doesn’t really come through.  It’s like reading a Spanish translation of Shakespeare or Wu-Tang Clan.  You really want the original to get the full effect.

And of course, that’s what Latin is for Western literature.  The Original.

Comments

topicTopics
academics study skills MCAT medical school admissions SAT expository writing college admissions English MD/PhD admissions strategy writing LSAT GMAT GRE physics chemistry math biology graduate admissions academic advice ACT interview prep law school admissions test anxiety language learning premed MBA admissions career advice personal statements homework help AP exams creative writing MD study schedules computer science test prep Common Application summer activities history mathematics philosophy organic chemistry secondary applications economics supplements research 1L PSAT admissions coaching grammar law psychology statistics & probability legal studies ESL CARS SSAT covid-19 dental admissions logic games reading comprehension engineering USMLE calculus PhD admissions Spanish mentorship parents Latin biochemistry case coaching verbal reasoning DAT English literature STEM excel medical school political science skills AMCAS French Linguistics MBA coursework Tutoring Approaches academic integrity chinese letters of recommendation Anki DO Social Advocacy admissions advice algebra artificial intelligence astrophysics business cell biology classics diversity statement gap year genetics geometry kinematics linear algebra mechanical engineering mental health presentations quantitative reasoning study abroad technical interviews time management work and activities 2L DMD IB exams ISEE MD/PhD programs Sentence Correction adjusting to college algorithms amino acids analysis essay art history athletics business skills careers cold emails data science dental school finance first generation student functions information sessions international students internships logic networking poetry resume revising science social sciences software engineering tech industry trigonometry writer's block 3L AAMC Academic Interest EMT FlexMed Fourier Series Greek Health Professional Shortage Area Italian Lagrange multipliers London MD vs PhD MMI Montessori National Health Service Corps Pythagorean Theorem Python Shakespeare Step 2 TMDSAS Taylor Series Truss Analysis Zoom acids and bases active learning architecture argumentative writing art art and design schools art portfolios bacteriology bibliographies biomedicine brain teaser campus visits cantonese capacitors capital markets central limit theorem centrifugal force chemical engineering chess chromatography class participation climate change clinical experience community service constitutional law consulting cover letters curriculum dementia demonstrated interest dimensional analysis distance learning econometrics electric engineering electricity and magnetism escape velocity evolution executive function freewriting genomics graphing harmonics health policy history of medicine history of science hybrid vehicles hydrophobic effect ideal gas law immunology induction infinite institutional actions integrated reasoning intermolecular forces intern investing investment banking lab reports linear maps mandarin chinese matrices mba medical physics meiosis microeconomics mitosis mnemonics music music theory nervous system neurology neuroscience object-oriented programming office hours operating systems