Look Not Askance at Latin

Look lovingly at Latin.

 

Liberty Common students are given a unique opportunity to combine intellectual growth and academic achievement while reinforcing the values of virtue, gratitude, and patriotism.  Liberty’s fidelity to the Core Knowledge curriculum, its embrace of classical education, and its emphasis on science, math, and economics develop and nurture young people who are well prepared for college, life-long learning, and citizenship.  Latin is an integral part of that preparation.

 

Latin builds powerful language skills. Phonics alone cannot explain the structure and meaning of many complex English words greater than two syllables.  A conservative estimate places fifty percent of English vocabulary, greater than two syllables, as Latin-based.  The study of Latin fills the gap. Consider the Latin verb faciō (principal parts, facere, fēcī, factum, and its combining stems -fic- and -fect-) meaning “to do” or “to make.”  Hopefully you can recognize factor, factory, or faction are English words derived from this verb.  Less obvious derivatives are perfect, defect, effect, prolific, terrific, magnificent.  There are hundreds of English words derived from this one Latin verb alone.  A student’s English vocabulary has grown exponentially after he/she has learned over a hundred Latin verbs.

 

Additionally, with an understanding of its highly-structured grammar, Latin students develop logical and analytical thinking.  With careful attention to detail, pattern recognition, and logical reasoning, students analyze sentence structure, identify relationships among words, and synthesize meaning from complex information.  Take, for example, line 165 and part of line 166 from Book IV of Vergil’s Aeneid (considered by most to be the greatest work of Latin literature):

 

“Dido and the Trojan leader arrive at the same cave.”

 

The Latin word order, as Vergil wrote it, reads: “the cave Dido leader and Trojan same arrive.”  Complete nonsense, right?  In Latin I and II, students are learning the skills to know that endings on nouns provide the function (i.e., subjects, direct objects) of the noun not the word order as English does. 

In Latin, the sentence could be written in any word order and it would still mean the exact same thing.  In Latin III and IV, students learn the word order can paint a word picture. The words for “the same cave,” speluncam eandem, surround the people Dido and dux Troianus (the Trojan leader is Aeneas), very much like a cave does.   In AP Latin, when students actually encounter this sentence, discussion further evolves. Students know that dux Troianus, “the Trojan leader,” is a noun-adjective pair in agreement with each other. However, since the placement of the word dux, “leader,” is placed closer to Dido, the queen of Carthage, the qualities of leader can be applied to her as well.   A discussion ensues about what it means to be a leader in Augustan Rome and whether Vergil, in the first century, granted that a woman could have the same leadership abilities as a man.

 

 

Latin is a remarkably expressive language.  Its flexible word order creates vivid word pictures (as seen above), which enhance its powerful storytelling.  The joy one feels in reading/translating  Latin authors and connecting with a civilization and its people from thousands of years ago is real.  In my classroom, the Roman poet Catullus, writing in the first century BC, bemoaning the end of his romantic relationship, elicits the same emotional response from my students.  While reading Ovid’s Metamorphoses (written in the first decade of the first century AD), students cringe at Apollo’s pursuit of Daphne, perhaps just as Ovid intended.  Was Julius Caesar, a contemporary of Catullus, only an egotistical general hungry for political preeminance or was he also a shrewd strategist and preserver of ancient Gallic society?  Encourage your children to read the words of these authors in their own language and engage in the discussion.  It is an incredible and enriching experience.