Why learn "old" languages like Latin or Greek?

Modern students tend to learn current languages for very practical reasons. They tend to select a language because it is one that they are likely to use, through either business or personal travel, or to enable a career, such as translator or working for an international corporation, or for public service or charity work.

But there is a very valuable reason that students for many generations learned what some dismissively call "dead languages," such as Latin or ancient Greek. Learning either Latin or ancient Greek provides a foundation for thought, not a language for day to day usage.

My brother, who is eleven years older than me, went to High School in the 1950's when Latin was still a viable option to select as a language. By the time I was in high school, just over a decade later, only four students in my entire high school were taking Latin (out of hundreds of students).

When I was in high school I did not opt for Latin for two reasons. One is that I already knew a fair amount of Latin by rote, which Catholics would pick up from attending Mass. Therefore I allowed myself to be attracted to the romantic aesthetics of the sound of the French language. I am, however, a very poor student of verbal language because as a second grader I attended draconian "speech therapy" forced on me and one other student (of an Italian family) to get rid of my "German accent," which was picked up from my mother by me. As a result I have a total mental block to learning the verbal component of any new language. I struggled in French (my best friend, a French major, helped me through a test once, thankfully LOL) and then struggled even worse in German in college, as I got my one course requirement out of the way. My brother, who spoke German for the first seven years of his life, and who was thrust into American school having to learn English on the fly, also struggled with German, which he had to master in order to obtain his PhD.

However, I always valued the intellectual stimulation of learning written languages. Therefore when I was in college, even though I was an "Aggie" (agriculture student) and was assumed to be therefore heathen, I took a four credit course in "Ancient Greek Philosophy." It did not stress the Greek language at all, but understanding Greek philosophers is essential to actually learning the language at a later date, not the other way around. I did pretty good in that class, looking at my college transcript here in front of me I earned a B+ in it during the Fall of 1973.

And now, the obligatory message and explanation for the cultists. Just because someone is interested in an ancient language or culture, they are not "blindly grasping" with drool running down their face to "remember" one of those "past lives" "hidden in the misty karmic past." (Here is also my obligatory reminder that reincarnation does not exist). Um, duh, it used to be that every student, even of very modest family station, learned ancient Greek or Latin, as I said, Latin being even as current as fifty years ago. There are many reasons why there is great merit to learning Latin or Greek, or even a more obscure language, such as ancient Chinese or Sanskrit. I will enumerate them in a minute, but first finish explaining my personal explorations of language.

In the 1980's when I was very vigorous with my rare and out of print book collecting, I became interested in learning Chinese written language, and also in studies of what are called the prototype languages. These were studies where just like today's genes can be used to trace ancestry, scholars using computers have learned how through word comparisons and extrapolations, they can trace various languages back in time to their root languages. I found that really interesting and liked cheering the scholars on in that endeavor, if you know what I mean. That is, I viewed it as a very interesting puzzle that humans had set themselves to do and I liked reading about it, so I collected books on that subject.

Eventually I wanted to take a try at ancient Greek and signed up for a class in the New School. I've blogged about this before but basically my old mental block from the botched "speech therapy" continued to hinder me, and the very deliberately insensitive instructor insulted me in front of the class due to my difficulty. I explained the situation to administration dropped the class from taking it for credit (which I was insane enough apparently to think I could handle, but I did not realize that Greek for Beginners would be filled with people who already spoke it on an intermediate level, thus I was totally out of place). I did not punish the language itself by despising it, even though I was treated very poorly (this was in 1995 as I recall), so I continued to collect books, just like my interest in the ancient Chinese language, that were dual language.

Here are the reasons why students have traditionally benefited from learning ancient Greek or Latin:

1. The learning of Latin or ancient Greek guarantees that the student becomes much more proficient and appreciative of the English language, since Latin and Greek are the roots of English. Thus students are inevitably more gifted and find English much easier when they have also learned or are learning Latin or ancient Greek.

2. There is nothing like reading a classic work in the original language, even if you can master only a small portion of it, such as phrases, poetry, parts of plays or a few pages of a book. There is a great insight that students receive when they realize how much nuance is lost when a passage is translated to English, even if it is most skillfully done. I think that is an important component of "cultural enrichment."

3. As I state in 2, this also allows the original languages of the scriptures to be read with fuller understanding and context. Reading parts of the scripture in either the Vulgate (Latin) or the ancient Greek is a very moving experience and works to strengthen faith as to how the authors were actually perceiving and experiencing their "witnessing to" the events of those times.

4. It is mood enhancing in an intellectual way! Here is an example of what I mean. One of my favorite ancient Greek expressions (yes, even more than their many expressions admiring moderation and what they call the 'golden mean,' referring to kind of a sweet spot of equanimity, not meanness as in cruelty, but mean such as in 'being in the middle of the balance') is the expression for "The soul is immortal." In English this sounds so factual, and it does not convey the spirit of what the writer or speaker intends. In ancient Greek it reads something like "Immortal... the soul" or you can also read and thus "hear" it as "Immortal IS the soul." In ancient Greek or Latin what seems like very difficult rules and confusing word order actually breathes much life into each phrase, bestowing what I'd call a poetry of emphasis.

5. Because they are difficult languages they provide students with a way to learn rigorous material and "survive it." Generations of school boys who have had to suffer through Latin and then say how valuable it was after they had made it cannot be wrong! Schools today make things so easy or rather, what they do is segment it to be easily digestible, if only the student pays attention, that many students miss the chance to learn something that is darned difficult to learn, no matter how kindly it is segmented and taught. Suffering through Latin or ancient Greek provides enormous confidence and skill sets, both intellectually and for life itself.

I hope you have found my thoughts on this subject helpful and interesting.