Latin for Everybody

Far from being outdated, studying Latin is becoming popular. (Via LRC)

...Culture is never independent of language. If you want to understand ancient Greece and Rome in more depth than you can get from 300, you need, ideally, to learn Latin and Greek. Although these languages are hard to learn well, it's fairly easy to get a smattering of Latin, especially if you already know Spanish or Italian. And to know even a little bit of Latin helps you understand how European vernacular languages emerged from the language of the Romans—and hence, how the societies of modern Europe and America emerged from antiquity. Linguistics specialist Nicholas Ostler, author of Empires of the Word, provides an impressively detailed account of how Latin has dominated later cultures and languages. His book, called Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin, does not aim to teach Latin, as Mount's does, but instead traces the whole history of Latin from its origins down to the present day—imparting some vocabulary along the way.

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