Articles From The Classical Teacher

Letter from the Editor
by Martin Cothran
Classical Teacher, Spring 2007

I was talking with a friend recently whom I hadn’t seen in a few years. Her granddaughter, it so happened, is one of my Latin students, and she was there to pick her up that day. The question inevitably came: “So, what is Latin good for?” I have, of course, answered the question a thousand times, and although I never answer the question in quite the same way, there is one point I always make to those inquiring why, in the 21st century, anyone would want to study a dead language.

As Andrew Campbell points out in his article, “Why Study Latin and Greek?” (see pp. 12-13), the point you hear most often is that it increases test scores. That is true enough, but, as a teacher, that is the last thing you tend to think about—or notice. What you notice as a teacher is not how students score on some test later on in their academic career, but what it is doing for them now.

It is popular these days to talk about “critical thinking skills,” as if it were a subject unto itself. But traditionally, critical thinking skills were not skills you studied directly, but were instead acquired by studying other subjects—subjects that lent themselves to the inculcation of mental discipline.

This requirement of mental discipline is the most important benefit Latin has for students. The study of Latin involves paying close attention to what you are doing and taking care that you are doing it right. In the world of Latin grammar, you have to master several concepts at once and make sure they are all in correct relation to one another.

How does Latin help a student to do this?

Latin is a grammatical language. For one thing, it is inflected, which just means that not only do verbs have different grammatical forms for different grammatical purposes (as in English, Spanish, and French), but so do the nouns (as in Greek, German, and Russian). Because of this characteristic, the student must precisely decipher the part of speech for each word in a sentence in order to properly understand the language and to properly translate it.

When I have my students translate from English to Latin, they are forced to pay very close attention to the grammatical function of each word. If the word is the subject, then it must be in the nominative case, which requires one kind of ending. And if it is the direct object in the sentence, then it must be in the accusative case. And so forth.

But the nominative ending is not always the same. It will be different depending on which of the five kinds of nouns is being used. The same is true for the accusative case, the dative, the ablative, and the genitive. There are a thousand ways you could translate the sentence wrong, and only one way to translate it right.
Someone has pointed out that there are 17 mental steps involved in matching a Latin adjective to the noun it modifies. It must match in case, gender, and number, and each of these involves discriminating between the several kinds of nouns and adjectives.

It is no wonder that it was said of the Romans that they were able to conquer the world only because they had conquered Latin first.

The Romans were an organized, disciplined race of people, and they bequeathed to us an organized and disciplined tongue. And this is why Latin is particularly good for us. It requires us to inherit the discipline of their language into our understanding of our own.

The English language is great and versatile. As Elizabeth Kantor has written in her wonderful new book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature, the versatility of English—with its combination of a concrete Anglo-Saxon substrate and an abstract layer of Latin—has produced the richest literature in the world.

We should be thankful. But at the same time, like Latin, English says something about the people who developed it. The structure of the English language betrays all the strengths and weaknesses of the English people. We do not lack for creativity, but we do come up short when it comes to discipline.

And that is what Latin is good for.