U.S. Study of "Dead" Latin Is Making a Comeback

Frank Devlin
Allentown (Pennsylvania) Morning Call

June 14, 2001

Carol Ramsey smiles when her students use the so-called dead language to
talk about the latest Ben Affleck movie. After all, students can say or
write just about anything in her class—as long as it's in Latin.

Students even get credit for "hands-on" projects—including a Roman burial scene complete with tiny robed men sculpted from clay—that decorate Ramsey's classroom at Souderton Area High School in Pennsylvania.

It's all part of Ramsey's effort to put Latin in context for students, to make the language that once dominated the Western world more than vocabulary and grammar no one uses anymore.

Some days, Ramsey's students hear stories about ancient Rome. "You're learning a little history along with the grammar," said Chris Powis, a senior and Latin II student. "How the government worked. What schools were like."

That's exactly what the teacher wants. "I don't think you can teach Latin in a vacuum," Ramsey said. "If you can't make it relevant for today's students, they're not interested."

To highlight the connection to ancient times, Ramsey said, she and her class once discussed how the Greek myth about Pygmalion was the backbone of a recent movie with the decidedly non-classical sounding title She's All That.

Roots of English Language

Bringing the ancient language into modern times is part of a comeback of the dead language.

In the 1970s, it looked as though Latin might disappear from American high schools. In 1962, about 700,000 ninth- through 12th-grade students took Latin, according to the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. By 1976, the number had fallen to 150,000.

But a comeback was on track by 1994, the last year for which the council has figures, when about 190,000 ninth- through 12th-graders took Latin.

While new teaching techniques are keeping students interested in Latin, the belief that Latin increases a student's chances of getting into a good college also is driving increased enrollments, teachers and students said.

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