Forget Mandarin. Latin is the key to success

Adrian Hilton

"But it may also be due to the differences in the curriculums that are typically taught in state and private schools."

Curricula.

I agree: the basics of Latin grammar and syntax are indispensable.

ollie

Education needs - urgently - to be taken out of the hands of the Left and given back to people who understand common sense, rigour and setting the bar high instead of pandering to the lowest common denominator.

I'm for any subject that teaches the value of discipline and encouraging pupils to think.

Fergus Pickering

If you don't know Latin you are cut off from the Classical world, our world. If you don't know Mandarin you my find it more difficult to get a job in China.

Herbert Thornton

“If I’m on an EasyJet flight with a group of European nationals, none of whom speak English, I find we can communicate if we speak to each other in Latin,”

Of course it does - if they all speak Latin.

REPay

It is niave to think that English education, as is treated by the education establishment, and by the Labour Party, is really about teaching skills. It is essentially about making society more equal and using the poor results of the state sector the occasion for levelling down exams to get more equal outcomes, thus allowing university entrance, school to be more susceptible to government pressure for social engineering. Despite record expenditure our performance has declined internationally on all basic measures yet the last government consistently claimed educational standards to have improved with little contradiction from the media or those educated by the system (surprise, surprise.)

Rhoda Klapp

How odd that special pleading does not seem to have a common latin expression as applied to many of the other logical fallacies.

Dimoto

Unconvincing article.
If English was taught as it was 50 or 60 years ago, it would have similar benefits ... at a considerable cost in time.

As for Mandarin, about 1000 years older than Latin, for 3000 years a "continental language", probably the world's most complex and sophisticated literature, and a writing system which it is estimated, takes an extra two to three years to learn compared to western (alphabetic) languages, but gives extraordinary pleasure in use ?

Probably correct not to recommend our children learn it, it is just too challenging for our feckless pupils.

Pedantic Virgo

"[I]t may also be due to the differences in the curriculums" A shame that, in an article on the value of Latin, you did not give a Latin word its correct, Latin plural. O fortunatam natam te consule Romam! (with apologies to Cicero).

Cynic

I studied Latin to A Level (at a state grammar school). When I went to university and took up Russian ab initio there was no problem at all understanding declensions, conjugations, cases and the need for adjectives to agree in number, gender and case. Latin trains the mind.

ndm

The author of this post should skip the latin lessons and learn about correlation.

There need be no correlation between British private schools being the best in the world and the study of latin therein. I had a few drinks with a senior executive at Facebook last night and, I'm afraid, Mark Zuckerburg's knowledge of Latin didn't quite make it into conversation before final orders.

Bill Chapman

I am all for the learning of Latin, but there is no need for the sideways swipe at Esperanto. Latin has challenging linguistic challenges, wehereas Esperantyo is rtelatively simple to learn and use. There is room for them both.

Christopher Bowring

Mr Young did not give the Latin plural of 'curricula' because he is writing in English, not Latin. Both 'curricula' and 'curriculums' are acceptable plurals according to Chambers.

FF

If Toby Young were just a little bit better educated he would know that Chinese (there isn't really a "Mandarin" language)
doesn't conjugate verbs. But it does include a crash course in ancient history and cosmology and it is the history and mythology of the ancient world. Chinese deals with plenty of goddesses, warriors and much more beside.

And, yes, I learnt both Chinese and Latin.

yank

“Latin is the maths of the Humanities,”"

.

Well, he's partially right, although I think many foreign languages might be substituted for just Latin alone. Little excuse that students anywhere should remain unexposed to the rigors of learning and using a foreign language, whether Latin, German, French, Spanish or yes, Mandarin.

And let's focus on the other half of his statement, the "maths". A proper education should include this as well. I find it ridiculous that we here in the US graduate college undergrads who've studied nothing further than high school algebra. I'd make them pass precalculus with analytic geometry and trigonometry and statistics, minimum.

And might as well throw in a full year of chemistry, physics and biology as well, including labs.

All that and 2 years of foreign language would weed out those who did not belong. Our professions would clean up quite smartly, as well. Those who can't get through that can't go on to muck up any further. Think of how many useless politicians we'd be rid of, if we forced these troughers to actually learn, rather than slough their way through some bogus whajamajigger "studies" nonsense.

In the immortal words of Judge Smails, "The world needs ditch diggers, too."

It also needs trades and crafts people. It also needs to be rid of useless troughers who fake their way into position, absent academic rigor.

In2minds

OK Latin lovers it's your moment - "their ability to read Latin inscriptions". So what does SPQR mean?

Adrian Hilton

"Both 'curricula' and 'curriculums' are acceptable plurals according to Chambers"

But not according to the OED.

The irony is that by advocating an anglicised plural, you negate the logical rigours of Latin which Toby Young champions.

Herbert Thornton

Cynic says that Latin made it easy for him to understand declensions, conjugations, cases and the need for adjectives to agree in number, gender and case.

No doubt it did. But Latin "trains the mind" only in a very limited sense. It helped him (as it helped me) only because there happen to be some similarities between Latin and Russian language structure.

The kind of mind training undergone in the study of Latin has little relevance to the kinds of thinking necessary in other fields such as mathematics, engineering, biology, learning a Bantu language, or even learning to drive a car.

Fatbloke on tour

Toby

Give it a rest would you?

If it will shut you up, I suggest we do a whip round to get the cash to send your sprog / sprogs to the good fee paying school you desperately want them to go to.

Is it just me or does everyone in SpeccyLand automatically think of Jack (Jr) Nicklaus when they hear you rabbiting on about some aspect of education?

Stephen S

I can honestly say that I owe much of what I know today to having studied Latin at school. Apart from its historical/literary/etymological benefits, the sheer discipline of learning Latin is valuable in itself.

Yorkshire Pit Village

Fat Bloke @ 12:00

It's just you, put it to the vote if you like.

As usual you are in a minority of one.

Fergus Pickering

I should have said that the kind of mind-training required for Latin and for Mathematics is very similar.

Richard Manns

@ Dimoto

No natural language is older than any other; try speaking modern Mandarin to Confucius. Someone speaking Latin, on the other hand, might have had a shot at understanding an Indo-European herder from 5 millennia ago.

paulo

Latin lies behind so much of European culture, and I'm glad I took it from the age of 7 until 12 at prep skool....

My smattering of Mandarin is useful in China and Taiwan, my smattering of Cantonese helpful in Hong Kong, especially the swear words. My fluent Thai makes life in Thailand a breeze, especially when I want to order a double scotch in a short glass with 3 lumps of ice, crushed.

My fluent French serves me very well in France and affords me better treatment by the French traffic cops than I might otherwise receive, and my smattering of German comes in useful in Germany and Austria.

I do however wish I could speak Japanese because I love the culture and growling like a drunken Samurai would be cool!

I didn't make any of this up. I spent 27 years in the Far East but there is hardly a day that goes by in my life that my Latin has not come in useful and enriched it.

Finally - the most important word in any language, IMHO, is 'thank you'. I can do it in 35 languages.

Xie Xie

Ian Walker

"While it’s true that 70 percent of independent schools offer Latin compared with only 16 per cent of state schools, that’s hardly a reason not to teach it more widely. According to the OECD, our private schools are the best in the world, whereas our state schools are ranked on average 23rd."

Here's a bit of Latin for you: cum hoc ergo propter hoc.

You'd be better off teaching Esperanto. It has the same effect of improving other learning, especially language, and it has the advantage that it's quite widely spoken in China, so you don't need to learn Mandarin!

daniel maris

Compulsory Latin is the key to keeping the the oiks out of your PFPS (Publicly Funded Private School). And keeping the oiks out is what it's all about for Toby and co.

mankso

"Forget about Esperanto". So U.K. language teachers are still peddling this line then?! That's what they told this teenager too way back in 1950. Thank God I was obstinate enough to resist - it eventually led me into a career with languages and linguistics, and opened up the wonderful world of language(s)and foreign travel. And communicating on an EasyJet flight in Latin?!
That's a laugh! - although I have communicated with random Esperanto-speaking strangers in Esperanto in railway stations in Zagreb, Budapest, Amsterdam, Vienna and Hamburg. And here's something for the W. London classics teacher to ponder: "Ignoti nulla cupido".

Hayward Maberley

I did Latin to O level back in the early sixties at Catholic
school. It was taught by people to whom, at that time it was in some sense a living language,

I enjoyed it particularly reading the the Latin version of Asterix et Obelix.It does help me in the writing of English for when I want to be sure about clear expression I often think of what it might have been oun Latin.

Later on I did Mandarin and Japanese, though only a few semesters of Japanese. My spoken Mandarin is a bit rusty but I am still intelligible to most people. Written is another matter as they have simplified so many characters in the past 20 years.

There is a lot to appreciate in the learning of Mandarin, as FF has noted

Austin Barry

"If I’m on an EasyJet flight with a group of European nationals, none of whom speak English, I find we can communicate if we speak to each other in Latin,” says Grace Moody-Stuart, a Classics teacher in West London. “

The sort of pretentious tosserology you'd expect from someone called Moody-Stuart. I'm sending it to Private Eye's Pseuds Corner.

teledu

"...there is actually a substantial body of evidence that children who study Latin outperform their peers..."
I would guess that a similar result would be acheived by comparing children that were taught to play an instrument and read music to those that weren't.
I'd love to see state schools (assuming they could find enough teachers with the necessary skills) forced to teach Latin and Music to all pupils. Today my 17 year-old daughter heads to her state comprehensive school for one of her two days of "PHSE" instruction. Gordon Bennet!!

Olaf

At the moment when little Johnny doesn't know how to use a full stop we don't stop and teach him grammar instead we tell the rest of the class not to use punctuation because Little Johnny feels disadvantaged.

We need to accept that every child is not the same, some people are cleverer than others, some people WILL be left behind. Then we can start to make teaching more rigorous and go back to teaching maths and hard science from which young people might achieve something.

Latin, I did one hour of Latin a week for one year at school and I still found it useful at university when studying parts of medicine and biology.

SPQR - Senatus Populusque Romanus
Signature of the government of the Roman republic.

Rhoda Klapp

If you are on an Easyjet flight, what makes you think your life has followed any sort of optimum course, Latin notwithstanding?

Fergus Pickering

I think Grace Moody-Stuart is rather sweet and not pretentious at all. And I expect Ian Hislop to agree with me. But then we have the Latin. I must admit I am sorry I never learned to play a musical instrument. All those wasted hours doing Science could easily have been sacrificed. I noticed when helping my daughter to pass an exam in anatomy how easy it is to mug the stuff up. You can't mug up piano playing. Or Latin, come to that.

PayDirt

In2minds _ It stands for Queens Park Rangers, but the latins often get the word order back to front (barbarians that they were). Come on the hoops! Premiership acoming.

In2minds

More Latin, sport, poetry, environmental issues, political correctness, multiculturalism, needlework, sex education, bell ringing. Not much time left in the school day for reading and writing is there? This is the problem with the Latin salesmen like Toby Young and others who would flog their pet subject.

My approach would be learn to learn, forget teachers, do it yourself. Several people have mentioned music, "I wish I could play". So why not just buy an instrument and start? On the other hand why not learn HTML, then you could run a website? Or perhaps posh people don't do things like that!?

Whoops! Sorry Olaf, didn't mean you, thank you for the translation. PayDirt, thank you too, although I think I'll double-check on Wikipedia after sax practice.

William

Latin v. Mandarin, you're comparing apples to oranges.

While we're on the subject, almost, would Mr Yank please explain why our colonial cousins shorten mathematics to math?

CS

***Education needs - urgently - to be taken out of the hands of the Left ***

I don't think that it's necessarily the Left per se that's the problem, Ollie. It's that schools should be freed from those who believe that chldren exist to give teachers guinea pigs on which to practice their social theories and given to those who believe that teachers exist as tools to develop the skills and curiosity of children.

Publius

Christopher Bowring writes:
"Mr Young did not give the Latin plural of 'curricula' because he is writing in English, not Latin. Both 'curricula' and 'curriculums' are acceptable plurals..."

Agreed.

I'd add that the immense value of Latin and Classics generally is certainly not diminished by the kind of prissy objections of some on this thread.

Some may like to say "curricula", but as far as I'm concerned all this does is identify them as tight-arsed hyper-correctors. The kind who find fault with sentences that start with "And" or "But".

I suppose, in the same vein, they'd insist on "stadia" instead of "stadiums", and "musea" instead of "museums". And what would they do with "hippopotamus" I wonder. Or "ignoramus" (pluralized by prissy illiterates as "ignorami").

The value of such classical study, as others have pointed, out, is that it trains the mind. What that means is that it combines the practice of complex thought with a profoundly enriching intellectual and emotional experience of a far distant, yet greatly important world that is not our own.

By seeing and understanding that world, we better understand not only that world, but also our own - and ourselves with it. "Nosce te ipsum", or for the Graecophiles among you, "Gnothi seauton".

Not only our language, but, more importantly, all our important thinking is dominated by the classical thinkers. There is no education without them.

Cheeky

Senatus Populusque Romanus

The Senate and people of Rome

yank

William, I had the similar question of you Brits, as to how it is you came to call it "maths".

Dimoto

Richard Manns - a pedant speaks.

Actually, an erudite modern Chinese would probably have no great difficulty communicating with Confucious - by written language naturally.

As for "Indo-European herders", You would be far better off studying ancient Persian (you might like to look into their aryan, monotheistic religion too, rather than that cobbled together Greek derivative followed by the Romans).
BTW, is this "Latin" being lorded on here, that strange, mispronounced, anglo version favoured by the high church ?

Brian Barker

Yet another attempt to denigrate Esperanto, the international language.

However during a short period of 123 years and despite persecution by both Hitler and Stalin, Esperanto is now in the top 100 languages, out of 6,800 worldwide. It is the 22nd most used language in Wikipedia, ahead of Danish and Arabic. It is a language choice of Google, Skype, Firefox, Ubuntu and Facebook.

Native Esperanto speakers, (people who have used the language from birth), include financier George Soros, World Chess Champion Susan Polger, Ulrich Brandenberg the new German Ambassador to NATO and Nobel Laureate Daniel Bovet.

The language study course http://www.lernu.net is now receiving 120,000 hits per month. That can't be bad.

Cynic

Latin trained my mind, Herbert, because it also helped me with learning French, Spanish and Italian (just as learning Russian helped me with Polish and Czech).

Herbert Thornton

Cynic - What you say about Latin being a help in learning other Romance languages, and Russian helping in learning other Slavonic languages is undoubtedly true.

But I think you may be missing my point. My disagreement is with the theory that learning another language (whether Latin or any other) so trains the mind that it more easily acquires skills unconnected with language.

Even when someone who has learned Latin later learns, for example, Cantonese, or Kiswahili, I do not believe that his success owes much to his Latin: to the extent that he succeeds, it is far more attributable to natural aptitude.

But I go further than that. To my mind, learning Latin does nothing to stimulate original thinking.

It would, arguably, be truer to say that learning Latin tends to put the mind in a strait-jacket.

Publius

Herbert Thornton writes: "It would, arguably, be truer to say that learning Latin tends to put the mind in a strait-jacket."

-- Your comments provide a clear indication of why there must be choice in education. I would never want to attend a school, or have my children attend a school, where such an attitude as yours prevailed.

In the end there is no argument that will persuade the thick and the philistine of the value of the training of, and the life of, the mind. By filling a school with a philistine majority, all you end up doing is trampling the rare plants that ought to be nurtured.

FF

You learn Latin, Chinese or any other subject for their own merits. The exciting thing about both, I found, was after having struggled with difficult texts, I gradually understood what the author was saying, and then I was able to communicate an idea from someone who lived two thousand years ago.

But let's be clear, knowing Latin or Chinese doesn't make you a better person than someone who plays the saxophone or who can turn out a decent piece of woodwork.

Toby Young's argument is ignorant. Ironic, given the point he's trying to make.

Andreas Gollan

It is a little curious how these threads often devolve into sniping.

I write as an Australian born, Kentucky resident, Latin teacher with a passion for speaking as well as reading and writing the language. Latin has manifold benefits supporting other pursuits by firming up a love of language qua language, helping learn other Indo-European tongues (especially but not limited to the Romance languages), opening the wealth of the classical tradition, the medieval period, and (to my mind the greatest delight) the renaissance.

Put like that, who could say no? But I would not make its study compulsory, nor claim its utility or delight over and above its competitors. Follow your passion and interests, I say. Study and immerse yourself in what you love. I love Latin, others Esperanto.

Let us simply encourage our children to be passionate about the life of the mind, to find enrichment in the intellect, to be interested and interesting, to eschew more than a dalliance with the electronica bedevilling our lives. There is the crisis: our youth, often with the connivance of their parents and teachers, choose ease over interest, follow sports more than playing them, whittle away their short lives in addictions to trivia while allowing the best game system ever invented (their own minds) to fall into desuetude and decay.

Intellectual passion and the myriads of worthwhile avenues to apply it are the solution to our problems; not sniping about the relative merits of one language over another, one area of human endeavour over its brethren.

Herbert Thornton

Publius' disdainful dismissal of my suggestion that Latin tends to put the mind in a strait-jacket actually seems to demonstrate my point.

Andreas Gollan on the other hand is obviously not so handicapped: his final paragraph evinces a far sounder intellectual attitude.

It is interesting that in his early schooldays, Albert Einstein took no interest in Latin, and was consequently written off by his teachers as a boy who would never amount to anything. So far as I know Einstein continued to regard learning Latin - at least in relation to himself - as a waste of time.

Publius

Herbert Thornton writes: "put the mind in a strait-jacket..." etc.

I do wonder how you manage to distinguish between 'strait-jacketed thinking' and views that do not agree with your own.

I also wonder how you determine that the teaching of Latin in schools produces strait-jacketed thinking, whereas the teaching of other subjects, one assumes, does not. Or do all subjects produce what you describe as strait-jacketed thinking?

Furthermore, no one is suggesting that you, or your children if you have any, should be forced to learn Latin. Merely that those who want it should have the opportunity of attending a school where they can.

drlouigi

I wish all schools should teach Latin and at least one modern language. I studied Latin in 8th and 9th grades in Jr HI school, and had the same teacher for English, showing us the crossover between the two languages. He also used fun ways to learn, like translating nursery rhymes into Latin:
"Humpty Dumpty in murum sedebat,
Humpty Dumpty lapsum habebat.
etcetera, etcetera"
10th grade Latin was NOT fun; the teacher made it dull as dishwater and in 11th grade I switched to German for two years.
Having studied both languages helped me imensely in college and also in my daily life. My five children did not have the opportunity in their schools to study Latin, but did study (and spoke) Italian, German, French, Spanish, and a bit of Greek. Learning a language and the sulture of the country where it is spoken is a mind stretching experience, and benefits one in a host of ways.

Herbert Thornton

Publius - you "wonder" how I manage to distinguish between strait-jacketed thinking and views that do not agree with my own.

Quite easily, Publius. I manage it in much the same way as I manage to distinguish between an apple and an orange.

I am aware of the claims about Latin - I first heard them from my Latin teacher at school where most of us (especially those with an aptitude for mathematics) treated his assertion with derision and then applied ourselves more eagerly to other subjects that we found more interesting. When I continue to read assertions that the learning of Latin has not only improves thinking, but makes a better job of it than do other disciplines, I have to say that I seen no evidence that it is well founded - rather the opposite.

I refer again the example of Einstein's early teachers who believed that because Einstein was uninterested in Latin, he would never make much of his life. The thinking of those teachers was, it seems to me, very much in a strait-jacket.

And for another example, take Bishop Usher who - I assume - was well versed in Latin: his thinking about the age of the earth is now known to be so blinkered that he was laughably wrong.

My belief is that curiosity combined with an open mind encourages thinking far more than does the learning of Latin. I am fully aware that some benefits can come from it, but it is obvious that its benefits are often very much exaggerated.

Imagine yourself in an airliner. The pilot announces that it has just lost an engine, but he believes he can land it safely at a nearby airport. A sympathetic stewardess says to you - "Don't worry. All our pilots have had special training to deal with situations like this." Would you then say to the stewardess - "That's all very well - but can he speak Latin?"

Tristram Jones

I understand that in Finland, Latin is written and spoken widely - it is the Finns second language.

Andrew

"If I'm on an EasyJet flight with a group of European nationals, none of whom speak English, I find we can communicate if we speak to each other in Latin"

Jesus wept, where the hell is she flying to?

If anyone can find the percentage of Latin speakers by country, I'd be grateful, but I'd hazard a very safe guess that it's far lower in any European country than English, French, German, or Russian. If she wants to do an experiment with this, and record it, maybe I'll change my mind.

Personally, I find that if I need to communicate to my neighbour on board a flight, I've got far more chance with English or French.

Gus R

Of course Mark Zuckerberg is studying Mandarin as well now...

John

OK, if I learn Latin, I can understand a few languages and maybe 250 mil people. If I learn Mandarin, the number is closer to 1.1 billion. If I know Mandarin and English, its about 4 billion world wide. (so why Latin again?)

James

I spent a few minutes yesterday (2-9-11) speaking with a retired elementary school teacher. I specifically asked if she noticed a "step change" in childrens behaviors and learning around 1970 - 1975. She stated that, yes, there was a change. In classrooms of around 30 students the number of students needing one on one attention rose dramatically during that time period. From her observation the % of students having high needs went from around 10% to around 50%. She stated she would go home feeling she had accomplished nothing for the day due to the time spent with individual students taking the very valuable time away from students who could understand the lessons and move forward. Learning Latin may alleviate some of this problem, but it seems to me that there is more to this problem and it's not only much deeper, but has much more than one root cause. Have any other of you seen a similar change? Do any of you have any thoughts as to a solution to the problem. As a parent of two school aged children this problem directly affects me. No, I'm not a teacher, just a people watcher with an unusually high curiosity about how everything works.

Chris Hawkins

If you study Spanish, French, Portuguese or any living romance language you'll learn all of the same roots that you'd get studying Latin...and you'd know a language that people use. Also studying any foreign language gives you new insight into your own grammar- I don't think Latin is special in that regard.

James

I have another question. How many languages did Helen Keller speak?

ken in sc

Cheeky is right, SPQR = the Senate and the People of Rome.

T J Sawyer

“If I’m on an EasyJet flight with a group of European nationals, none of whom speak English, I find we can communicate if we speak to each other in Latin,” says Grace Moody-Stuart, a Classics teacher in West London.

Obviously, Grace Moody-Stuart has never been on an EasyJet flight with a group of European nationals. They all can speak English fluently as their second language. English is the language that allows the European business community to function. My four years of Latin have great value. But communicating with it among live Europeans is not part of the value.

PacRim Jim

Those who don't speak Latin have far more money in aggregate than do speakers of Latin.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc.

Doug Collins

I have to wonder about 'speaking' Latin as opposed to reading it. How does anyone know how it was pronounced?
There is a story about Voltaire meeting Hume. Voltaire spoke no English at the time, at least no scottish accented English, and Hume spoke no French. No problem - they decided as classically educated men, that they would speak Latin.
It was an exercise in incomprehension. The differently accented Latins may as well have been Mandarin. Neither could understand the other.

Susan

I have taught Latin in Virginia for over 40 years. I am passionate about its contributions to one's overall education. Reading these comments has been one of the most moving experiences of my career. I am cursed with being able to see both sides of the issue, but I truly believe that if one has the experience of studying with a truly gifted teacher of Latin, geology, Mandarin, economics, Sub-Saharan history, Hindustani, or whatever, one will find the inspiration to defend that particular course of study throughout one's life, no matter what others may say. Cuique suum.

ossian

As one with six years of Latin (plus the major Romance languages as lagniappe) and an MA in Chinese language and philosophy, I can say from 40 years of professional experience that Latin is far more helpful. Even if you are living in China, most of the Chinese with whom you are dealing will have had 15-20 years of English, the world's lingua franca, as also in India. As to communicating with Confucius in Mandarin as a spoken language, save your theoretical breath. You might as well use medieval Hungarian. The Beijing dialect is not much older than 800 years, as supposed Chinese speakers would normally be expected to know. And not one of you Brits has thought to quote Alan Bennett's immortal: I couldn't be a judge because I didn't have the Latin.

Keith

It's a mistake to try to find utilitarian reasons for studying a subject because one can always find other subjects which provide the same benefits. Latin trains the mind (so does Mathematics); Latin helps with English grammar (so does German); Latin is not a soft option (neither is Physics).

Education (as distinct from training) always involves induction into a cultural tradition. Our culture is the Western tradition, and Latin is an essential part of that tradition. No-one in the West can consider themselves educated unless they know Latin; for that reason alone, it must be on the school curriculum. If learning Latin brings other advantages, then that is an added bonus.

Studying Shakespeare may be very useful if a child grows up to become an actor; but that is not why we have Shakespeare on the curriculum. He is there because he is an essential part of Western literature.

Mandarin, obviously, is not part of the Western tradition; therefore there is no need to teach it in schools. (That dooesn't mean it isn't worth learning, of course.)

Therese Z

I took college Latin because I was tired of Spanish left over from high school. It is a gift I use every day, and it was just plain fun, a nice break from science and math classes!

Nathan Cook

Knowing Esperanto has helped me learn Latin - lots of the vocabulary is similar, and like Latin, Esperanto is highly inflected, with free word order.

Peter

I have taught Latin for more than a decade here in the Colonies, and I would argue that Latin does provide something in the way of intellectual and cognitive heft. And it no doubt helps sorting out the "who" - "whom" and other similar grammatical conundrums. At the same time, if one truly wants to investigate language in the western tradition at a deeper, richer and more complex level, I would recommend classical Greek. For instance the English word "hypothesis" is from the Greek word meaning "to order," "to stretch out beneath" as in establishing a template, "to put down a foundation," and, interestingly enough, "to submit to." Another use of hypothesis, or a closely related word, was the plan upon which a mosaic would be formed, and then used as a map or template should the mosaic need to be shipped and put together elsewhere. Amazing stuff, language.

Molendinarius

I find the comparison of Latin and Chinese fascinating. From the fall of the Roman Empire, until the early 1700's, almost all educated Europeans were di-glott, in the vernacular, and in Latin. Almost the entire literary and cultural production of Europe - not only in technical subjects - was written in Latin from Roman times, through to the 1700's. We forget this now, but a uniform Latin-based university system united minds across the continent. The rise of the nation-state, with a deliberate focus on the vernacular, dealt Latin a death-blow. Despite this, Latin lingered in many disciplines as a publication language until the 1800's. Prior to this, poets such as Milton published in Latin to international acclaim. Playwrights and novelists across Europe wrote in Latin for similar reasons. Some of the greatest poetry ever written in Britain was composed in Latin, not English. Yes how few now even know of the existence of the Latin output of the metaphysical poets, or have read Milton in Latin? Latin in Europe has never only been about the Romans - it is about the shared cultural heritage of an entire continent, a universe of letters. Increasingly, this cultural production is now accessible to all of us, through open digitisation projects. Simply type 'haec est' into google books as an experiment. My thesis is that Europe without knowledge of Latin would be as culturally bereft, as China without Chinese. Almost none of the post-Roman cultural production of Europe in Latin has been translated - and most of it never will be - it is only accessible through Latin itself. Much of the 'idea' of Europe, the cultural and philosophical ideas that underly the secular parts of our society, have their fount in texts written in Latin. Without Latin, Europe would be even more blinded than it currently is to much of its past, and bereft of an enormous segment of its cultural history and artistic literary production.

CB

This article is an absolute abominaiton of the the laws of correlation and causation. I suggest Toby Young checks both out before he starts opining on how a study of Latin caused Einstein to be an expert nuclear physicist or some similar nonsense.

He writes:
"According to the OECD, our private schools are the best in the world, whereas our state schools are ranked on average 23rd. No doubt part of this attainment gap is attributable to the fact that the average private school child has advantages that the average state school child does not."

Yes, private schools do have one very big advantage over state schools, Mr Young. They get to choose their pupils via academic selection. If you cream off the top 25% of students in any given year, is it really surprising that the school gets better results than one that does not?

John.

Yank: Because it's "mathematics" not "mathematic".
Another reason that state schools do so badly by their brighter pupils is that the grammar schools have been abolished, so no stepping stone to success is any longer available to gifted poorer children. Latin used to be on the grammar school curriculum and Classical Greek was also usually available, which certainly did the pupils no harm.

roberto fantechi

I would think that about two thirds of italians in the Parlament know, or think they do, latin; in fact quotes in latin abund in oral as well as witten statements, just today our esteemed berlusconi insulted a journalist using that language

simply put latin might help you conjugate better the verbs you use, but it is how you use them the tells volumes about you, in the case of our leaders a de profundis is the motto

saluti

Brennus Legranus

Correspondent complain that they cannot speak Latin -- and Attic. Yet there are several gatherings in Europe and the United States where this skill can be practised. Go to http://www.latinitatis.com/vita/circuli.htm
for short period gatherings and I can recommend http://www.septimanalatina.org/ for a week.

Juan

I'm a PhD student of Classics. I've got published translations of Latin and Greek authors into Spanish... and can confidently say that Toby Young doesn't know what he's talking about.

Latin does nothing of what he says he does, at least not better than any other modern language.

Eternal Pessimist

Dear oh dear, reductio ad absurdum.

I learned French and Spanish at school, learnt Portuguese, from that learnt some Italian, and have a passive understanding of Catalan, Galician, and Romanian - oh, and Latin too. After Spanish grammar, even such idiosyncracies of Portuguese grammar as the personal infinitive and future subjunctive

I have nothing at all against the teaching of ancient history, nor of ancient languages - the ancient can complement the modern. What I do object to is the way that they are put on a pedestal and revered as 'Classics'.

Indeed, if a knowledge of an ancient language is so important, then why does it need to be Latin or Greek? Why not Old Norse, to which English is far more closely related, and to which modern Icelandic is very similar?

You don't need to learn Latin to know about inflections or declensions and you don't need to learn another language to know about English grammar. We may no longer have a distinct subjunctive tense in English, but we can still say 'if I were to have'.

There is an international language based on Latin, Interlingua, which is more practical than Esperanto, which is mixed between Lation, Germanic and Slavonic languages. Unfortunately, it no longer has verb inflections, so 'io es' is literally 'I is' as per Ali G. That said, Grace Moody Stuart would fare better speaking Interlingua with Romanians than Latin, although I get by with them in a mix of French and Italian, and only if their English is limited.

Eternal Pessimist

Correction: 'even such idiosyncracies of Portuguese grammar as the personal infinitive and future subjunctive are not that daunting'

Alan Aversa

Does anybody know when this press conference was during which he quoted Virgil's Aeneid in Latin? Thanks

Ali

I studied Latin at school. I think the benefits that are given for studying it could all be gained by studying any other languages. It may be useful for specific people such as scholars but for most people I think it is a waste of time because they could apply the effort it involves learning an actual language like Frech