Benefits of studying both Latin and Greek

[cdgni]

My DD will be attending a boarding school when she's 9th grade. (She is only 5th grade now.)

To tell you a bit about her, she is fluent in 3 languages and has a smattering of a fourth language. She isn't fluent in the 4th language, but understands what is being said to her it in. She doesn't speak it well. Each of these languages are in different language groups. (Romantic, Cyrillic, Germanic and a touch of Arabic tossed in.)

If you asked her what her favorite subject was-- she'd say math. She's a straight A student for most everything.


Now, my question. At one of the boarding schools that I'm looking at for her, the kids can study Latin and Greek as classical scholars. Can someone educate me about this idea. Is it beneficial in your a mathmetician, or a scientist? Aside from the pure knowledge, how will it help for university time? The school is excellent and I'm confident that if she pursued this route, she'd learn a lot.

While it will be somewhat her choice, I want to give input about it ahead of time.

[Laura Corin]

My boys are studying two modern foreign languages each, but also Latin and, in Hobbes' case, Greek.

I think that Latin is a more complex language than the others that the boys study (Mandarin and French) so it stretches their brains and forces them to think strictly and logically. Latin also has a great influence on the English language, helping them to enhance their vocabulary.

Hobbes studies Greek for fun, just because he enjoys different scripts. He wants to study Arabic later.

Laura

[Saille]

There's good info here:

http://www.promotelatin.org/greekOld.htm#why

[cdgni]

There's good info here:

http://www.promotelatin.org/greekOld.htm#why


Thank you. A great post.

As I was thinking about mathematics, I can't believe that I forgot how the language of latin is intertwined in many science words. I didn't even consider the Greek aspect of the language being in our scientific words.

I will now be encouraging her even more strongly in this area regardless of mathematics or not as her main area. This means three more years of Russian and French until 8th grade and then she can stop with those two languages while she studies Greek and Latin. I think reading/writing Latin will be easy to her after 8 years of French.

[Karin]

My eldest is a math/science dd in her freshman year. She's going to do Latin 1 & 2 for credit (she's already doing Latin 1), and then I'm going to make her do some Koine Greek. However, I'm going to let her do non credit Greek because she wants to do 4 levels of German for her language credits. She chose the Latin because it will help make it easier with scientific terms. I'm having her do Greek for that and because she has committed herself to being a Christian and it will be a useful tool for her in any Biblical studies she may choose to do later, whether for credit or just on her own. At the moment, the selling point for her is for science.