Long ago, Latin was considered to be the language of religion, science, and of all intellectual endeavor…Then it became the bane of a lot of school boys… Now, while Latin is still a dead language there are some rather strange connections with English…
Latin has, as direct descendants, such tongues as French, Italian, Spanish, and even Romanian… English is basically a Germanic language…but English is almost unique in the total amount of borrowed words from other languages… And in this trove of borrowed words, Latin is supreme…
There are plenty of Latin words in common use in modern English, and more interestingly, they represent far more accurately what the Romans originally meant then the equivalent terms on most of the Romantic languages. This sounds strange, until you consider that these descendant languages evolved and changed over the last two millennia, whereas the borrowed words into English are what you might say are ‘sterile’… This means that these borrowed words are already ‘cast in stone for us simple barbarians of the north.
Here are a few (a very few) examples…
Forum
Fungus
Furor
Genesis
Genius
Geranium
Gusto
Gymnasium
Habitat
Helix
There are thousands more…
Latin lives on…
http://improve-education.org/latinliveson.html
Modern Day Uses of the Latin Language
http://www.ehow.com/info_7978044_modern-day-uses-latin-language.html
Ha! a close reader...good for you. The fact is that the word we use is from Latin gymnasium, from Ancient Greek γυμνάσιον (gumnasion, “exercise, school”).
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