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Comment by nitwit005 | Hacker News Reader

As people put more and more effort into making the past accessible, the value of learning older languages decreases. It used to be that the raw source works were often all people had access to. Now you can find annotated translations of amazing quality.

And for the most part, that's a great outcome. There was a tremendous cost to teaching everyone Greek and Latin.

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There's a huge value in understanding Latin, or at least some parts of it - it allows you to derive a vast dictionary of words that have been subsumed into the English language.

Sure there's derivability of terms in English, but the depth to which that is true doesn't really compare.

You can learn living languages and still derive that benefit. Learning French taught me about a number of English words.

I can't say that alone would justify the effort to learn a language though.

Perhaps not, but my rudimentary understanding of Latin - learnt only in passing - has on many occasion allowed me to correctly derive and interpret words I'd never seen or heard before.

However, the rudimentary nature of my understanding has caused me on occasion to derive etymologically invalid words - such as enthnosupremacist - but fuck it, it's English - why can't I mix my etymologies?

(although in this case, I'd probably hyphenate it).

And to an extent far more versatile than anything on the English side of my understanding of language.

Most of our Latin-based vocabulary came to English not directly, but via French. So wouldn’t learning French be more useful as a means to building erudite English vocabulary?

Indeed, about 29% of English vocabulary came from French; yet another 29% are directly from Latin[0].

Take your comment as example: excluding the Anglo-Saxon words, 5 are directly from Latin and 2 from French:

Latin words: Latin, Latinus vocabulary, vocabulum directly, directus via, via erudite, eruditus

French words: French useful

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_language_influences_in...

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