In 1997, according to the language council, students taking Latin scored a mean of 647 on the Scholastic Aptitude Testing (SAT) verbal exam, compared with the national average of 505. "That's why a lot of kids take Latin," said Brian Thudium, a junior from Harleysville, Pennsylvania, who is enrolled in Latin III.
"Latin is the root of the English language," Powis said, and knowing Latin can help readers figure out the meaning of English words they've never before seen.
Just as college is driving the growing popularity of Latin today, it was colleges that drove Latin from high schools, said Marty Abbott of the foreign languages council.
Cultural and social upheaval in the 1960s prompted colleges to give students more of a say in what courses they could select, she said. "There was a lot of emphasis on exploring new avenues," Abbott said. Many colleges dropped the requirement that incoming freshmen study a foreign language in high school. High schools followed suit, and dropped Latin and other languages.
"In the mid-1980s, we started to swing back to a back-to-the-basics emphasis," Abbott said, partially because of a national report in 1993 that criticized the American education system's weakness in teaching science, math, and the language arts.
She said the "study of Latin has dovetailed nicely" with the back-to-the-basics movement. In Souderton, the number of Latin classes offered at the high school is up from six to ten since 1994.
Changing Methods
When Ramsey studied Latin in the 1960s, she said her first year of the class was strictly grammar. "It was like they loaded up a dump truck full of rules and dumped it on us," Ramsey said.
These days, she said, her first-year Latin students do some reading in Latin and learn Roman Empire history in addition to the inevitable grammar lessons. One recent day in Ramsey's Latin II class, for example, her students scoured newspapers for words with Latin roots. With an estimated 60 percent of English words coming from Latin, they didn't have much trouble.
The Latin that students learn today is classical Latin, which was used for writing, reading and formal speeches in the ancient world. The everyday spoken language of the Roman Empire was vulgar Latin.
Scholars say the Latin language became distinct from a predecessor language, called Indo-European, about 500 B.C. in the Italian peninsula. It then spread with the Roman Empire throughout Europe and parts of Asia and Africa.
By the seventh century, vulgar Latin dialects spoken in far-flung parts of the empire had evolved into early forms of the Romance languages, including Italian, French, and Spanish.
Latin never really died. It continued to be used by the Roman Catholic Church and by educated people of different native tongues to communicate with one another.
Dirk Linthicum, a Souderton junior taking Latin II, said he decided to take Latin after learning much of Spanish and English comes from Latin. "It's fun learning about how things that far back related to today," he said.
(C) 2001 Allentown Morning Call
