Is it pointless to learn Latin?
I’ve always wanted to learn Latin. I already speak Spanish and French – which are related to Latin – so that’s a nice advantage.
My high school doesn’t offer any Latin courses, so I was planning on taking them in university. The thing is, my dad says it’s “a dead language that will be useless to you in life.” He really doesn’t want me to learn it.
Is he right?
PS. I want to go into either International Relations, Anthropology, or Linguistics in the future.
Would knowing Latin help me in these fields?
I took three years of Latin in high school and it definitely helps in understanding sentence structure as well as many English words are derived from Latin bases. “Atom” means “no split” or “no cut” in Latin and it was thought in ancient Greek times that the atom is the smallest unit of matter or something which was unsplittable …which we know today is not true yet we still use the word atom to describe the fundamental building blocks of matter. It may be a dead language but many quotes in higher literature, medical terms and legalese are in Latin. Adding Latin phrases to reports or writings adds an element of sophistication to them in some circles And there is the matter of studying classical Greek writings of Caesar, Aristotle, Plato and others in their original wording…important for scholarly research especially Linguistics.
Semper Fi…the Marine Corp motto means “always faithful” in Latin….from Semper Fidelis. Fidelis is the root word for fidelity.
“Veni, Vidi Vici” means I came, I saw, I conquered quoted from Julius Caesar.
Some have jokingly converted it to “Veni, Vici, Visa” as to mean I came, I saw, I charged it on my credit card.
….a joking reference to women shoppers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito_ergo_sum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin_phrases