John Hall wrote:
> Eugene.Leit:
>
> This is the same argument you tend to hear for learning Latin. It won't get
> you a job, except perhaps as a classics professor, but it will improve your
> mind ...
>
> John Hall:
>
> Well, yes. But it is critically important to ask if the claim is true.
> Latin and Greek were dropped in part because cognitive research showed that
> they did not 'train the mind' and help teach you to think. Learning Latin
> and Greek mostly just teaches you to read and write in those languages. The
> domain knowledge doesn't transfer to, say, physics.
Actually, I disagree. I never took Latin or Greek as language classes, but I
had an English teacher back in public school who (oddly) spent most of the year
teaching us Latin and Greek vocab, syntax, etc. I know that it both improved my
English vocab *and* my ability to map quickly into new terminological spaces in
English... I don't think that they teach you to think any better, but they do
improve ability to contextually understand and quickly assimilate jargon in
other sublanguages where the words are derived from those classical languages...
$0.02,
jb
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Apr 29 2001 - 20:26:21 PDT