By Dr. Karen Wieland and James Currie
More than HALF!
Did you know that 29% of the words in the English language are derived directly from Latin words? Another 29% are derived from Old French, and the vast majority of these words also can be traced back to Latin. That means that nearly 58% of English is built from Latin.
There are other world languages that contain more Latin than English. The Romance languages (those derived from the Roman – e.g., Italian, Spanish, French, Romanian, Portuguese, Catalan, and some older languages) are built from 75%-80% Latin roots.
Exempli Gratia (a/k/a “e.g.”)
And here’s an example where we can trace the adoption of a word through time from the Roman Empire to today: the word “romance” started out from the Latin word “rōmānus”, meaning “Roman”. That was adapted to the adjective “rōmānicus” which means “in the Roman Style”. Then the word was passed down from Classical Latin to Vulgar Latin to the Roman provinces, including Gaul, now France. In Old French “rōmānicus” became “romanz” which is a short hop, skip, and jump through Middle English (“romaunce”) to the Modern English “romance”.
As you can see from that example, studying Latin language serves to build knowledge of morphemes (meaningful word parts) that comprise English words and words in Romance languages. Latin study thereby sets the stage for learning any of the Romance languages more quickly.
The Decline and Fall of Latin
My parents were fortunate to attend Catholic schools during the decades when such enrollment involved the daily study of Latin language. For literally hundreds of years, the study of the classics – Latin and Greek – was the cornerstone of anyone’s education, and a requirement for admission to most universities.
In response to WWII, the rise of the Soviet Union and the ensuing Cold War, the U.S. government nudged Latin out of the educational mainstream. The National Defense Strategy Act, enacted in 1958, shifted the focus of education (read: “the funding of”) towards mathematics, the sciences and technology, and modern languages, which were all considered of a greater strategic interest to the U.S. than, say, a ‘dead’ language like Latin (we will debate this designation in a future post).
Most parochial schools abandoned Latin language requirements after Vatican II reforms were enacted by the Catholic Church in 1962. Some college-preparatory high schools retained Latin in their curricula, but the language soon lost out in popularity to other European languages such as Spanish, French, and German. More recently, Latin programs in college-preparatory schools compete for students against Mandarin Chinese and Arabic coursework.
Down, but not Out
Latin language study, however, has undergone a resurgence across the past decade due to the gradual increase in homeschool programs that emphasize classical education. Many families are discovering that Latin language study beginning in the intermediate grades creates a wonderful impetus for English meaning vocabulary development as well as for future world-language study.
A Worthwhile Challenge
Learning Latin is admittedly a bit harder than learning a contemporary Romance language, because the contemporary Romance languages are more simplified grammatically. However, studying Latin actually promotes the understanding of grammatical and syntactical structures across languages. It is a marvelously intellectual endeavor, and one I wish I had been engaged in from a young age.
How I Can Help
My Introduction to Latin course series on Outschool spans three full academic years of middle-school Latin, which combine to be the equivalent of about one year of high-school Latin. Students enrolled in my courses are encouraged to take the National Latin Exam each spring as a way to gauge and document their proficiency relative to other young Latin scholars.
I also offer private tutorials in Latin, both individually and in small groups, for high school level and college students. I customize each course to the student’s needs, be that a specific textbook series (Cambridge Latin, Henle Latin, Wheelock’s Latin), or at a specific level. For example, I am working with a student who is using Henle Latin in her Classical Conversations homeschool program. I also use Cambridge Latin with another student who aspires to start high-school Latin at the intermediate level, and Wheelock’s Latin with a small group of intermediate-level students who have already completed Latin for Children Books A, B, and C.
Teaching with multiple curricula and at multiple levels has fostered my own learning as well as that of my students. As the saying goes, docendo discimus—by teaching, we learn!
Copyright © 2024 by Karen M. Wieland, Ph.D and James E. Currie, Jr.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.