Trevor Dailey's Weblog

Why am I wasting my time trying to learn a dead language?

I suppose I could continue to waste my time learning other dead subjects, including history, english grammar, and science, subjects I don't think are taught in school anymore; however, I have decided to add to my time wasting with the self study of Latin.

When I say Latin, I am speaking of the language of the Romans. This Latin, called classical latin today, was the spoken and written language of Romans. It is still used today in scientific literature, and was used officially until the 1960s by the Roman Catholic Church. Latin, like english, has changed over the years, and there are different kinds of Latin, e.g. the Latin written in official documents in England is not identical to the Latin of the Romans. I am beginning with Roman Latin.

Today, we see Latin in the english language in abbreviations and words. Some words in english are from Latin. This can be discovered by looking up words in a good english dictionary that lists the origin of english words. I used an abbreviation of Latin origin in the above paragraph:

e.g.

abbreviation

for example.

ORIGIN from Latin exempli gratia ‘for the sake of an example.’

Source: Oxford Dictionary

There are resources on the Internet to learn Latin, and I am learning from an old Latin school textbook (from when Latin was taught in school) that was digitized and placed online at the Internet Archive. There is lots of other Latin learning material there too. I am finding Latin not an easy language to learn, but it seems to make more sense to me than english does in the way that Latin is constructed as a language.

I might be wasting my time learning a dead language, but that isn't going to prevent me from learning as much Latin as I can. Besides, I believe one should never stop learning.

© Trevor Dailey 

VIDEO: Romans Go Home - Monty Python's Life of Brian