Latin is a dead language, As dead as dead can be, It killed the ancient Romans, And now it’s killing me.
Variations of that ditty have long graced the notebooks and texts of Latin students. The difficulties of learning this inflected language, which means that the endings of nouns and verbs rather than placement determine their meaning in a sentence, undoubtedly gave life to this lament.Yet Latin is far from dead. It lives on as the great influencer of Romance languages. While English with its Anglo-Saxon roots is considered a derivative of German, Latin and Greek account for some 60% of our vocabulary. In classical schools and among homeschoolers, Latin has made a comeback in the last 40 years, and to the chagrin of the Vatican, many American Catholics, including growing numbers of young people, favor the Traditional Latin Mass.
