How Studying Latin Sharpens the Mind
Studying Latin sharpens a student’ s mind in a notable way. In order to translate from Latin to English, a student must pay careful attention to many details. The most important of these are, famously for Latin, the endings of words. Unlike English, Spanish, and French, Latin is a highly inflected language, which means that there are many possible endings for nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and verbs, and each ending conveys important information about the specific meaning of the word to which it is attached. In English, the word lion might add an“-s” to make the word plural, or combine an apostrophe with the“-s” to indicate possession, but those are the only possible alternative endings. In contrast, the Latin word for lion, leo, has a set of 12 possible endings, including ones which indicate that the lion in question is the subject of a sentence, the direct object, and numerous other things. A Latin student must eventually master all 12 of those endings. To add to the complexity, other nouns have completely different sets of 12 possible terminations, and verbs and other parts of speech have their own large sets of endings that need to be mastered.( For example, by eighth grade, a student will have learned at least 24 forms that any verb may take.)
Mastering such a massive and complicated set of information, and learning how to apply this knowledge to render an accurate translation into grammatical English, is a task that might seem daunting to someone unfamiliar with highly inflected languages. However, progressing from the simplest and most essential elements of Latin word-variations in fifth grade, a student gradually hones his abilities until, by eighth grade, he can penetrate the intricacies of the language with relative ease.
This mental acuteness, the result of disciplined study, focused attention, and conceptual understanding, is a power whose usefulness extends far beyond working with Latin, yielding benefits in many other activities of the mind. This is similar to the mental training that studying mathematics provides.( It is not unusual for students who enjoy subjects such as math, computer programming, and physics, or who are simply drawn towards abstract thinking and understanding systems, to also take pleasure in Latin.)
How Studying Latin Strengthens Problem Solving Abilities
As students learn more advanced Latin in seventh and eighth grade, they work with increasingly longer and more complex sentences. The syntax, or order of words( subjects, objects, verbs, etc.), in a Latin sentence is usually quite different from word order in English, Spanish, and French sentences. Also, because of its highly inflected nature, Latin permits much more flexibility and variability when it comes to arranging words in a sentence. For these two reasons, students may initially find the translation of more complex sentences to be challenging. However, at this stage in their studies, they are taught strategies to successfully face these challenges.
20 • Saint David’ s Magazine