Is Latin A Waste Of Time?

The ultimate challenge I am told is Vedic Sanskrit. It's a very ancient language with a handful of devotees.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7qxqKirJA-g

Here is a construction of how the baths of Caracalla looked in their prime:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ejxVEbOba2g

For some reason, the so-called case endings of Latin words disappeared, as in Spanish. So, in Spanish you only have "mujer" (a woman) or "mujeres" (women). In Latin, there were, Mulier, mulieris, mulierem, mulieribus and so on. It still means "woman" or "women" but the speaker has to use the correct form. Mulieris means, of a woman or belonging to a woman.
It seems people eventually worked out it's easier to just use one set word and then add a so-called preposition, such as of, to, from, by...and so on.
Compared to Spanish Latin is much harder. The question is whether cultural decline made Romans less able to master complex grammar. Probably there were less schools to push correct speech, so the people evolved simpler ways to express themselves. "Mulier" became "mujer" and use could be made clear by adding words.

It actually depend on your reasons to study Latin.

Is your main focus to communicate with other people? If yes, then learning Latin would be a total waste of time. Study a living language instead!

But if you'll look behind the mere purpose of communication, then studying Latin can give you various insights.

RMont25 wrote:It actually depend on your reasons to study Latin.

Is your main focus to communicate with other people? If yes, then learning Latin would be a total waste of time. Study a living language instead!

But if you'll look behind the mere purpose of communication, then studying Latin can give you various insights.

It's more the case of challenge. Ancient languages tend to be more difficult. Especially the case is you find misprints, small mistakes or differences in sources.
So far, I learned really fast because I tend not to use systems. I also avoided the bad mistake of trying to use refined speeches as a basis for language. In universities there was a tradition to bore students to tears with grammar drills. In reality we don't learn grammar that way but tend to automatically assimilate rules. It takes time too. The way Latin has been taught compared to French or Spanish reflects it as being a dead language, to be learned by the upper classes. For example, Boris Johnson taught Latin.

Could be a problem here. I checked all sources for the following sentence, which reads:

"Dicunt aliqui non in Marci honorem tantum Antonini nomini delatum, cum id Marcus adoptivum habuerit,"

The problem for me is that "nomini" = "to, or for the name" seems off. I guessed other versions might differ but all have the same. If you change that one case ending to "nomen" we get:

"Dicunt aliqui non in Marci honorem tantum Antonini nomen delatum, cum id Marcus adoptivum habuerit,,"

That now reads:

"Some say not only in honour of Marcus was the name conferred, when Marcus had it as adopted..."

I ran the words "delatum" and "nomen" through Google to see if Latin writers tended to use it. They do.

"Eius nomen delatum erit" His name will be deleted, conferred, attributed.

It will take time to decide if this could be a viable option. It just seems to make more sense.

I "might" have found a print issue here. These texts were often copied by monks and sometimes hand-writing led to tiny changes. I found iffy paragraphs before but then found other versions of the text had already corrected the issue. In the case above, all versions read the same way but to me something seems odd. To follow up I'll need a bit of background history. I can cross-read other accounts or it may be someone referred to this in their notes. The fun in Latin is that so few people are bothered to investigate such details. The language is dead as a doormouse and it makes no odds if a word might have been copied differently.

I got a basic grasp of Latin very quickly. It normally takes years of boring class study. A typical student would do a year of grammar (quite daunting), followed by class readings of Caesar.
My approach tends to avoid systems and complex terminology. Think about it. You don't learn to speak your own language through any system. You kind of pick it up. As to grammar, it's useful but my view is you don't need to get too bogged down.
To be fair, I have done Latin before, several years ago. When I restarted, most of it I'd forgotten. I made my approach interesting and not rigid. I read really racy material about banquets and sex so there's plenty of motivation to work out the texts. Motivation is a key to progress.
Here's something about a Roman taberna or inn. The food was probably even better than Spain or Italy.
https://holeinthedonut.com/2014/06/22/p ... eii-italy/

its about our visiting place on latin

Nothing in this world is a waste of time. It depends on the person

The weirdness of autism and the riddle only Asperger discovered. After just a few weeks my Latin is good enough to have noticed many online text misprints. I probably covered some years of study in the space of weeks. Maybe even discovered a new verb. However, this isn't to boast. Simply claiming autistics are "smart" like Rain Man isn't quite true. We tend, rather, to have very uneven processing ability. My learning ability under normal cicumstances is weak. Especially, I'm unable to learn from other people by explanation. My learning is slow and deep. In employment you need to learn interactive tasks quickly - which for me is impossible.
Asperger concluded autists tended to excell in linguistics and music, sometimes maths. Always in the theoretical aspect. That's how it works. Autists can be poor in some areas and show ability in others. Meantime, social intelligence remains pretty hopeless.
The way I see it is blessing and curse. Yet life is too short to despair. So, I'll keep learning Latin.

Nolo quod cupio statim tenere,
nec victoria mi placet parata.