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Latin is dead, as dead as dead can be.
First it killed the Romans, and now it's killing me.
But not kids in Westchester County, it would seem.
The linked article also notes that the number of students taking the National Latin Exam has risen steadily in the last few years. As somebody who studied Latin in high school and who loves languages generally, that seems like a good thing. But I do have to wonder: why Latin?
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Comments
no oldest language
October 10, 2008 by coglanglab, 1 year 4 weeks ago
Comment id: 32341
Claims about one language being "the oldest" abound. Latin is one of the earliest languages for which we have written documents, but not the oldest by a long shot.
Of course, talking about the age of a language only makes sense if you are talking about a dead language (Latin is one, having presumably no living native speakers). This is because all languages evolve out of previous languages (with the possible exception of some sign languages).
For instance, while it is true that a language called "Hebrew" was spoken several thousand years ago and a language called "Hebrew" is spoken today, and there is a direct connection between the older and the younger language, the sense in which Hebrew is very old is mostly that it has retained the same name. Nearly every living language can point to an ancestor language as "old" as Hebrew. What is unusual about Hebrew is the name has stayed the same.
Back on the subject of Latin: maybe it does raise SAT scores. But wouldn't studying English raise SAT scores more?
Please try my web-based experiments
Re:Latin
October 10, 2008 by siva, 1 year 4 weeks ago
Comment id: 32339
Latin language is a oldest language in the world.Latin is more effective language on the SAT's.I realized that people who are more possessive on Latin.
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siva
Sreevysh Corp
Oldest language?
October 27, 2008 by coglanglab, 1 year 1 week ago
Comment id: 32555
Sorry, Latin isn't the oldest language in the world by a long shot. Nobody is sure when languages first came into existence, but estimates run from 40,000 to 100,000 years ago. Latin was spoken 2,000-3,000 years ago.
But that's a misnomer, too, because the Latin of Romulus and Remus would have been very different from the Latin of Constantine. That's a long way of saying there is no oldest language.
Please try my web-based experiments
Latin & Greek
October 8, 2008 by Anonymous, 1 year 4 weeks ago
Comment id: 32318
My daughter is a Classicist and has been teaching Latin and classical Greek for some years. Too bad that there are insufficient teachers to make classical Greek a standard curriculum offering.
SATs
October 8, 2008 by Anonymous, 1 year 4 weeks ago
Comment id: 32313
People have been spouting the idea that people who have studied latin are more effective on the SATs, most people do not realize that any romance language will have the same effect, as the 'roots' that you are learning are the same in all languages.