Good and Bad Reasons to Learn Latin

You often hear people talk about the “practical benefits” of learning Latin, such as being able to understand legal, medical, and scientific terminology, expanding your vocabulary, and gaining a better understanding of English grammar. These certainly are real benefits to learning Latin, but, to be honest, at least on their own, they aren’t really very good reasons to learn the whole language, for reasons I will explain in a moment.

There are plenty of apologists for Latin out there who often try to justify learning Latin by listing these supposed “practical benefits” to learning Latin that apply to most people. The problem is that, if these benefits are the only reasons you are studying Latin, and you have no real interest in the Latin language or in reading Latin literature, then learning a whole new language may not really be worth it. There are, however, still very good reasons for learning Latin; they just don’t necessarily apply to everyone.

A super-cheesy video from 1951 about why you should learn Latin

In case you are unfamiliar with the usual arguments for why you should learn Latin, here is a video clip from 1951 that lays most of the major reasons out quite nicely. It has the added benefit of being unbelievably cheesy, which means you can laugh (or cringe) at the cheesiness as you watch along:

This video—as corny as it is—neatly covers most of the “practical reasons” that are usually given for why students should learn Latin. These are the exact same reasons that defenders of Latin are still giving today. They sound pretty credible at first. To be honest, though, almost none of these are actually very good reasons to learn Latin. They mostly just keep getting repeated because people who already like Latin feel the desperate need to convince other people of Latin’s benefits, so they keep repeating the same old reasons without really questioning them.

Let’s examine some of the reasons given in the video that are still given today for why everyone should learn Latin, in the order they are given by the students in the video. I am only going to address the reasons given by the students, since teacher mostly talks about the history of Latin and, as far as I could tell, does not actually give a clear explanation of why students should study it.

Before I debunk these reasons, though, let me first be very clear: there are legitimate and very good reasons for people to learn Latin. The reasons I am about to debunk are bad reasons for learning Latin. Once I have finished debunking the bad reasons, I am going to move on to describe the good reasons.

Bad Reason #1: Many legal, medical, and scientific terms are derived from Latin and you need to know Latin to understand them.

It is certainly true that many legal, medical, and scientific terms are indeed derived from Latin. It is also certainly true that knowing Latin will help you understand those terms. The thing is, though, Latin is an extremely complicated language and it is often difficult for English-speakers to learn. There is not much point in learning the whole language from start to finish just to understand legal, medical, and scientific terms when you can just learn the actual terms themselves.

For instance, to understand the term habeas corpus, you just need to know that it means “You must have the body” and that it refers to the legal principle that a person cannot be detained in prison unless the authority detaining them has a legal justification. You do not necessarily need to know that habeas is the second-person singular present active subjunctive form of the second-conjugation verb habeo, meaning “to have,” functioning as a jussive in this sentence, or that corpus is the singular accusative form of the neuter third-declension noun corpus, meaning “body.” All that information about the grammar is extraneous as far as the meaning of the phrase in a legal context is concerned.

Furthermore, it is worth noting the irony that a substantial portion of medical and scientific terms actually do not come from Latin, but rather from Ancient Greek. Oddly enough, though, you rarely hear anyone say that anyone going into science or medicine needs to know Ancient Greek in order to understand scientific and medical terminology. Learning Latin or Ancient Greek will certainly make understanding medical and scientific jargon easier, but understanding technical terms is not really much of a reason on its own to learn an entire ancient language.

Bad Reason #2: Latin helps you learn English vocabulary.

It is true that Latin can help you understand words in English. Of course, we once again run into the problem that Latin is a very complicated language. If the only reason why you are learning Latin is to improve your vocabulary, then you are putting in way more effort than you need to, since, instead of learning the whole language along with all its convoluted grammar, you could just learn the Latin roots that are used in English and leave it at that.

To understand that omniscient means “all-knowing,” you just need to know that the root “omni” means “all” and “sci” means “knowledge.” You do not necessarily need to know all the masculine/feminine and neuter declensions of the Latin adjective omnis, omne for all six cases in both the singular and the plural numbers, nor do you necessarily need to know all the conjugations of the fourth-conjugation verb scio in all three persons, both numbers, all three tenses, both voices, and all three moods. If you go to all the trouble of learning the whole Latin language when really all you wanted was to improve you vocabulary, you may just be putting in too much effort.

Once again, it is also worth noting that a substantial percentage of English words also come from Ancient Greek. Nonetheless, for some reason, there are very few Ancient Greek apologists out there advocating that everyone should learn Ancient Greek to help them understand English vocabulary.

ABOVE: Chart from Wikimedia Commons showing the approximate percentages of English words derived from various languages. As you can see, a large chunk of our words come from Latin. Learning the entire Latin language, though, may not be the most efficient way of learning to understand those words. If you just want to improve your vocabulary, you may be better off just learning Greek and Latin roots.

Bad Reason #3: Latin helps you understand English grammar.

This reason is often closely tied to reason #2. It is certainly true that learning Latin can help students learn to speak better English, because learning Latin helps you learn to think about grammar, inflection, and syntax in ways you do not normally think about when you are speaking your own native tongue.

The problem here is that Latin grammar does not correspond exactly to English grammar. In fact, many of the most absurd and annoying grammar rules in English are ones that were imposed on English by Latinists for no good reason during the Early Modern Period (lasted c. 1500 – c. 1750) just because those rules existed in Latin. For instance, the stupid rule about not splitting infinitives, the stupid rule about not ending sentences with prepositions, and the stupid rule about not using “they” as singular were all made up by Latinists to make English grammar more like Latin.

Indeed, not only does Latin grammar not always line up with English grammar, but the whole style of writing that is most commonly used by Latin prose authors has fallen almost completely out of fashion in contemporary English. There was once a time when it was fashionable for English writers to write in heavily Latinate prose, but nowadays people expect the authors they read to sound more like Ernest Hemingway (lived 1899 – 1961) than Edward Gibbon (lived 1737 – 1794).

In other words, Latin can help you understand English better, but English is its own language with its own rules and there is not always a direct correspondence between English and Latin. If you do not really care about the Latin language and you just want to improve your English, you are probably better off just studying English grammar, rather than studying Latin grammar and then trying to apply it to English. It is just more efficient.

Furthermore, learning any foreign language will help you improve your English. You can improve your English by learning German, Spanish, French, Italian, Greek, or just about any other language. Improving your English is hardly a benefit that is unique to Latin in particular. Even if you specifically want to learn a dead ancient language, Latin is still not unique in its helpfulness for understanding grammar. You could learn Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, Ancient Egyptian, Akkadian, Biblical Hebrew, or some other ancient language and it would still help you understand English grammar better.

ABOVE: Portrait of the English poet John Dryden (lived 1631 – 1700), who, as I explain in this article from January 2017, was one of the first people ever to criticize the use of a preposition at the end of an English sentence in writing

Bad Reason #4: By learning Latin, you can learn more about the government of the Roman Republic and the founding principles of our government.

First of all, there is actually no reason why you need to learn Latin in order to learn about ancient Roman government. There are books about Roman government in English and all the major Roman texts dealing with how the Roman government worked have been translated. Obviously, no translation is ever perfect and a translation can never do justice to the original, but, if all you are interested in are the basic ideas about how Roman government worked, those details are pretty clear in English and there is not much reason to learn a whole new language.

Also, the video drastically overstates the degree of influence the Roman Republic has had on American democracy. The ancient Romans did not invent the concept of justice; the concept of justice existed long, long before the Romans ever came around and probably predates civilization. There are ancient Greek texts that predate the earliest substantial surviving Latin texts by centuries that discuss the concept of justice, which was known in Greek as δίκη (díkē). (For more information, I’ve written an entire other blog post about the Greek personification of Dike as a goddess.)

The Founding Fathers drew on all kinds of models when they were designing our government. They certainly drew some inspiration from the Roman Republic, but they were actually most deeply influenced by the English government and by the ideas of the European Enlightenment. They may have also been influenced to some extent by the democratic government of ancient Athens, the government of ancient Sparta, and possibly even the government of the Iroquois.

ABOVE: Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States, painted in 1940 by Howard Chandler Christy, depicting how he imagined the signing of the Constitution of the United States might have looked.

Bad Reason #5: Learning Latin makes it easier to learn the other Romance languages later on.

It is certainly true that learning Latin will make it much easier to learn any of the Romance languages, like Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, or any of the others. The problem is, though, if you learn Latin first and then learn, say, Italian, you are actually putting in way more effort than you would have put in if you had just started with Italian. Latin is a whole language of its own and it does not make sense to learn one language just to make it easier to learn another language.

If you are only learning Latin because you want to learn one of the Romance languages, and you have no interest in learning Latin for its own sake, then, quite frankly, if would probably be better for you to just start with the Romance language you want to learn and forget about trying to learn Latin first. Maybe if you are planning on learning all the most common Romance languages, then it might be easier to learn Latin first, but, if you just want to learn one or two, there is really no point in learning Latin simply as a means of preparation for the language or languages you really want to learn.

ABOVE: Map from Wikimedia Commons showing Romance languages spoken in Europe, with the most prominent ones being Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian

Good reasons for learning Latin

Now that I have debunked some of the most common bad reasons for learning Latin, I want talk about the good reasons for why some people should learn Latin. There are actually quite a few very good reasons why some people should learn Latin, but they are, ironically, not talked about as much as the bad reasons because they do not apply to everyone and they are, for the most part, not viewed as “practical.”

The reasons I am about to list only apply to specific kinds of people. Defenders of Latin, on the other hand, often try to argue that everyone should learn Latin. They want Latin to be taught in every high school across the country, so they resort to unconvincing justifications like the ones I have just debunked.

The truth is, I do not think that everyone should learn Latin. There is simply no need for everyone to know Latin and, for people who do not enjoy Latin, who have no interest in Latin literature, and who are not interested in ancient Roman or medieval history, learning Latin would simply be a waste of time. We do need some people who know Latin, though, even if it is only to keep the ability to read the language alive.

Good Reason #1: You want to read texts that were originally written in Latin in the original language.

If you have a keen interest in ancient Roman or medieval literature, Latin may be the perfect language for you to learn. The earliest surviving complete literary texts we have that were originally written in Latin are the comedies of the Roman playwright Titus Maccius Plautus (lived c. 254 – 184 BC). A large bulk of texts written in Latin have survived from the first century BC onwards. Latin was widely used in western Europe as a literary language all the way up until as late as the beginning of the nineteenth century. Consequently, there are thousands of surviving texts of all different varieties about all manner of subjects that were originally written in Latin.

Obviously, all the most famous Latin texts have already been translated into English, but no translation is ever perfect and no translation can never fully capture the spirit of the original. This is especially the case when it comes to poetry. If you translate a poem literally from one language to another, the poetry is lost, so translators have to fiddle around quite a bit with their translations to make them poetic. As a result of this, when you read a translation of a Latin poem, you are really reading the translator’s words, not the original author’s.

If you are really serious about studying Latin literature and you want to read works of Latin literature in the original language, that is a very good reason to learn Latin. In fact, it is the reason why I am learning Latin.

Good Reason #2: You are interested in historical linguistics and the study of European languages, especially the Romance languages.

This is another excellent reason to learn Latin. If you are interested in historical linguistics and you want to understand the historical development of European languages, especially the Romance languages, Latin is a very good language for you to study. It is not wise to study Latin simply as a form of preparation for studying a Romance language, but if you are interested in the Romance languages as a collective and the history behind them, that is a very legitimate reason for you to study Latin.

Good Reason #3: You are a Roman Catholic and either you want to become a priest or you are simply interested in learning Latin because it is the traditional language of the Roman Catholic Church.

This reason is a bit niche. Obviously, not everyone is Catholic, so it does not apply to everyone. (I am not Catholic myself, so this reason obviously does not apply to me.) Nonetheless, if you do happen to be Catholic, this is a perfectly legitimate reason for you to want to learn Latin.

Roman Catholic priests are officially required to know Latin, although this requirement is not always enforced. Up until the reforms of the Second Vatican Council in 1962, Catholic mass was traditionally performed in Latin. Many Catholic prayers are traditionally recited in Latin. The version of the Bible traditionally used by the Catholic Church is the Latin Vulgate. Latin is still the official language of Vatican City.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Catholic priest performing mass. Up until the Second Vatican Council, Catholic mass was traditionally performed in Latin.

Good Reason #4: You have a lot of time on your hands and you want to learn Latin for fun.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to learn a language for fun. Mind you, learning Latin usually takes a really long time and is not always easy, but, if you have a lot of time on your hands and you really enjoy studying Latin, that is a perfectly good reason to study it. I have always thought that it is good for people to learn things they enjoy learning, even if they are not necessarily going to use those things in their everyday lives.

How Latin should really be promoted

I like to think of myself as a very honest person. I honestly have to admit that, in a lot of ways, Latin really isn’t as useful today as it might have been even as recently as a mere century ago. It certainly still has uses, but I will admit it is not for everyone. The main reason why I am learning Latin is because I am interested in reading ancient Roman texts in the original language.

I think people trying to promote Latin would be better served if, instead of trying to convince would-be Latin students of the supposed “practical benefits” of learning Latin, they focused on letting students know about all the fascinating and awesome things there are to read in Latin. Ironically, I think teachers often deter students from learning Latin by making them read texts that they find boring, like Cicero or Tacitus. (I do not necessarily personally find those authors boring, but I think many students do.)

There are all kinds of wonderful and amusing things written in Latin: the love poems of Catullus, the mythic tales of Ovid, the adventure-filled novels of Apuleius and Petronius, the erotic poems of Sulpicia, the obscene epigrams of Martial, and, from the modern period, the bizarre speculations of Athanasius Kircher. There is so much more to Latin than just Cicero.

ABOVE: Portrait of the eccentric German scholar Athanasius Kircher from his book Mundus Subterraneus (1664)

Other ancient languages aside from Latin

Additionally, I think there should be more people studying other ancient languages aside from Latin. Latin has acquired a sort of obnoxious, hegemonic status in the field of ancient languages. Latin is the only ancient language that is ever taught in high schools. If you ask someone on the street in the United States to name an ancient language, chances are, the only one they will be able to name will be Latin.

You will notice that the ancient Greeks did not even get a name-check in that 1950s video I showed at the beginning of this article. This is rather strange, especially considering the fact that, as I discuss in much greater detail in this other post I have written, there are about twice as many surviving ancient literary texts written in Ancient Greek as there are in Latin, since the ancient Greeks began writing literature about five hundred years before the Romans did and continued writing literature in their language through the end of antiquity and up to the present day.

It you have ever seen a complete set of all the works in the Loeb Classical Library, which contains nearly every major surviving work of classical literature written in Greek or Latin, you have probably noticed that the works written in Greek, which have green covers, make up nearly two thirds of the collection; whereas the works in Latin, which have red covers, make up only about a third of the collection.

It is true that there are many works of Latin literature that are not included in the Loeb Classical Library because they were written after the end of antiquity and the Loeb Classical Library only includes works written in ancient times. Nevertheless, the exact same thing can also be said of Greek; we have all kind of fascinating surviving works that were written in Greek during the Byzantine Period.

ABOVE: Photograph of a complete set of all the books in the Loeb Classical Library from Harvard University Press’s twitter page. The books with green covers are in Greek. The books with red covers are in Latin. Notice that about two thirds of all the books in the collection are in Greek.

Conclusion

Ultimately, if you want to learn Latin or another ancient language like Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, Biblical Hebrew, or Egyptian, that is your choice. You don’t have to study Latin and there is no reason why anybody should force you to, but, if you have an interest in Roman or medieval history and literature, in historical linguistics, or in the history of the Catholic Church, learning Latin might be a good idea for you.

If all you are looking for is to improve your English vocabulary and learn to understand jargon, though, it may be more efficient for you to study Greek and Latin roots first, rather than trying to go all-in and fully learn the language. Then, if studying the roots gets you interested in actually learning to read Latin, then you should take Latin.