I had a class on medical terminology when I worked at a hospital. No need to learn Latin. While Latin might make some feel superior, learning Spanish or Chinese would probably be far more useful. Most Americans are pathetic, unilingual speakers, while most of the world is multilingual. Having travelled throughout the world, I’m happy most speak English, or I can speak English & German. (3 years worth) Also got exposed to some Latin via my foray into the legal profession, albeit a short one.
Sent from Yahoo Mail for iPhone On Sunday, September 18, 2022, 5:54 PM, Bob Bridges <robhbrid...@gmail.com> wrote: Yes! I took two years of classical Greek (I was going to be a religion major, at the time), which was my first introduction to heavily inflected languages. When I went back to take some more French, I discovered that everything I had not understood about the subjunctive mood in French back in high school now made perfect sense to me. A prof at a medical college is supposed to have remarked that he can always tell the students who've taken Latin or Greek; when he names a bone or organ, often their eyes light up with comprehension. I'm not a medical student, but with a very little classical background words such as "pericardium" and "hemolytic" make sense even before the definition follows. --- Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313 /* The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected. -G K Chesterton */ -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU> On Behalf Of Joel C. Ewing Sent: Sunday, September 18, 2022 10:31 ....So many words in English and in many European languages have their roots in Latin that a knowledge of Latin gave you an edge in building vocabulary in multiple languages. For English-only speakers, it served as an introduction to language concepts that barely exist in English: of noun gender and declension causing the base forms of written and spoken words to change based on context. About the only examples of this in English are the subjective and objective forms of personal pronouns (I/me, he/him, she/her. they/them); and the flagrant misuse and abuse of these forms by public & TV speakers, who ought to know better, shows even this limited use of declension in English is obviously not understood by many. One could argue that a knowledge of the basics of Latin could serve as a bridge to understanding other languages (including English) in the same way that knowing the basics of one procedural programming language serves as a bridge to understanding other programming languages. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
