Gary’s Q&A

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Ja Teng asks What language do you find most fascinating? Would you want to learn it?

I began studying Latin during the pandemic, and I’ve been keeping up with it, although not nearly as much as I should be.

I know a smattering of languages, but not enough that I could really claim fluency in anything.

Many people think that Latin is easy because it is the basis for so many Romance languages and because there are so many words in English that have Latin roots.

From a strict grammar standpoint, that’s true, but the structure of Latin is very, very different from any of the Romance languages. Latin is highly inflected, which means that the ending of words determines how they are used in a sentence. The order of words is largely irreverent in Latin, and there are no articles like ‘the’ or ‘a.’

On top of the structure of the language, there is the whole ancient aspect of the language and how it opens the door to understanding the past.