Latin Lesson 1

Read

A lot of students ask what good it is to study a "dead language" like Latin. To answer that, read "Why Study Latin?". Alternately, think of your own reasons, or tell if you think the reasons give in the article are true or not.


Here's an article called The Language That Rose from the Dead. You don't have to read the whole article, but do read the excerpted beginning and conclusion (below)

When it comes to expressing the eternal and immutable truths of the Christian faith, the only good language is a dead language.

Chesterton once made a disarming retort to the customary detraction of Latin as a "dead" language. He simply remarked that to say this is not a detraction at all, for quite in contrast to the detractor's intentions, it throws into profile the clear ascendancy of Latin over all the "living" languages of today. "It is the question of a dead language and a dying language. Every living language is a dying language, even if it does not die. Parts of it are perpetually perishing or changing their sense; there is only one escape from that flux; and a language must die to be immortal."...

.....The whole glory of Christian Latin is that it abides in the greatest present tense of all: the "now" of eternity. Never needing to be up-to-date, it stands free of the danger of ever getting out-of-date. And we who spend our hours speaking interminably about the things that pass, must be able to turn in theological reflection on God's unchanging mysteries, still inspired by a Breath from the land of the living.

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