9 Mar
2000
9 Mar
'00
2:04 a.m.
--- "Merle K. Peirce" <at258(a)osfn.org> wrote:
I do recall, though, that studying Latin did make
things seem much
easier to me, if only because the language forced organised thought.
Ditto on the Latin - 4 years in High School. I think in my case, since
I had no decent formal training in English (my native language), learning
Latin grammar produced an understanding of English grammar. I do know
that learning Latin made it easier to learn Greek. I had an idea of
what sorts of phrases and subordinate clauses exist, and so knew to ask
how these concepts translated to Greek ("cum clauses", for example, or
the many uses of infinitives)
...I learned the Church Latin pronunciation, which
annoys everyone else, to
my gratification...
Ack! Heretic! :-) My Latin teacher told us a story of when _he_ went
to out High School in the 1960's - they learned Church Latin and it was
a supreme effort of will not to laugh when conjugating the present tense
of the verb "scio", to know.
For the confused reader at home, it goes... "scio, scis, scit, scimus,
scistis, sciunt" and in Classical Latin C's are hard, giving us "skeeo,
skiss, skit...". Church Latin uses a soft C here, resulting in "sheeo,
shiss...". Try *that* in a room full of sophmores.
-ethan
P.S. - if I've messed up the full conjugation, my apologies; it's off the
top of my head, 18 years later. The nugget of the story, however, is accurate.
-ethan
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