Dead Language Society

Do they speak Latin in Latin America?

Latin?!?  Why teach Latin?  It’s dead!

True, no one speaks “High Class Latin” anymore,  but  “Vulgar Latin” is spoken every day!  Romance Languages are versions of Vulgar Latin, like French, Spanish, Romanian, Portuguese,  and  Italian.  And a “Renaissance Man” is often multi-lingual.  When we left Spanish to teach Latin, my son would find that a lot of the words he learned in Spanish were the same in Latin!

You know some Latin already and probably do not even realize it, like pro and con, vice versa, via, and status quo.  Did you realize “am” and “pm” are Latin, and our government uses many Latin quotes like on money “Annuit coeptis”  which means “he favored our undertakings”  or “Novus ordo seclorum” which means “A new world order.”  Latin (and Greek, but that is another post) is also a common language used  in medicine and science.  My son was having a hard time keeping the Revolutionary war and the Civil war straight and it helped him to look at the meanings of the Latin roots of these words to try to remember which war was which (he is only 7).  Learning Latin roots(and Greek) will really help them in the future with advanced science and history classes.

We started Latin when our son was in first grade and this is our second year.  I really enjoyed the first book “Song School Latin” by Amy Rehn.  It teaches approximately 100 words in 32 lessons, through songs and jingles on an accompanying  CD.  We personally only teach Latin to English, since we do not expect him to speak it for now.  In addition to the book, we make flash cards and you may not agree, but we keep a bowl of jelly beans and reward him for his correct answers.  But the flash cards help to retain the old words, and the jellybeans help to motivate.  We are now on the second book in this series.  In addition we have some playing cards called Rummy Roots.  These are a mixture of Latin and Greek roots, though they are made to play Rummy, which I do not know how to play, with young children they are great for a version of “Go Fish” , memory, and drill.  We try to spend atleast 15 minutes a day doing Latin, on weekends because of the jelly beans, it is easy to get my son to drill.

I hope that this might encourage you to consider Latin, and if you have any thoughts or suggestions, please feel free to contact me!  Song School Latin is available on Amazon    Song school Latin