ptolemyauletes wrote:As a Latin teacher I can't tell you how fed up I am with the question 'what job will Latin get me/my daughter?'
ptolemyauletes wrote:...But Latin, at an advanced level, IS useful, and I quite enjoy spotting words in these modern languages....
Lex wrote:This is why I don't think that classical languages should be forced on students. There is no really good practical reason why it should be taught, and it's a waste of time to teach it to a student who isn't interested in it for itself.
ptolemyauletes wrote:Jacobus, don't think of Classical and Vulgar LAtin as different languages. At best they are different dialects.
Jacobus wrote:...Forcing people to study Classics, in my opinion, completely ruins the mindset of the student....I think it's exactly the same for everything else, too, for what it's worth. For example, I hated history in school...
Latin may even mislead you when using the ultimately desired Romance language, due to a simple reason: in those thousands of years that ptolemyauletes points out, many words changed their meaning to a point where they no longer resemble their Latin meaning... I recently studied the deponent verb "populor, populari, populatus sum", which essentially means "destroy"... If you ask a native speaker of French ouwhat "peupler" is, or a native speaker of Spanish what "popular" is... they will give you something closer to today's "populate" in English.
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