Bookraft

There is a story in today's New York Times that is ...well like music to the heart. It is about the revival of puella puellae puellam ... err ... Latin in schools in the US. The growth rates are impressive ( measured by those taking the National Latin Exam from 100,000 in 1998 to 134,000 in 2007).

The revival is attributed to Harry Potter, SAT's , a touch of elitism among other factors. Harry Potter's influence because many of the spells and written secrets are in Latin, SAT's because there is definite truth to the notion that knowledge of Latin helps immensely in building English vocabulary but also make learning French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, Portugese and any other Romance language much easier.

Finally there is a touch of elite, snob appeal. It helps to sell the language to know that until the mid 19th century, Latin was the language of scholarship in the Art and Sciences throughout the world. Many towering scholastic works such as Newton's Principia are written in Latin.

But the language itself with its declension of nouns and conjugation of verbs has a lyricism that can be detected and heard in the songs and poetry of its Romance language offshoots. As well, Latin is inextricably tied into the English language as any glance into the etymology or derivation and life history of English words will show(try here, Podictionary.com for a delightful starting place). For those wanting to take a peek into the language, there is a wonderfully concise Latin grammar source at Ohio State and this in turn has a great set of links to many other free Latin resources. Also doing a search on Latin grammar at Wikipedia provides a solid set of references and links. Videte ipse vim verbarum latinarum!