I think Lazar meant that languages that are descendents of that which was once Latin are spoken by hundreds of millions of people, that is, the different Romance languages, that that classical Latin itself is spoken by hundreds of millions of people today; remember there was no real firm point at which the various forms of vulgar Latin suddenly stopped being such, and suddenly became different separate Romance languages.
I guess I should have inferred that from his post, Lazar, but I was referring to modern Greek. I know Ancient Greek is dead.
As for Latin, I still prefer to just learn Italian (or French, or Spanish, etc) and be able to speak a language that other living humans speak natively, rather than Latin. Maybe in Vatican City, but even that is not native.
Sander,
One may say Latin is not dead yet. It's not really living, but it's not buried.
Ack, that was supposed to be "NOT that classical Latin itself is spoken by hundreds of millions of people today".
Latin is currently on an artificial resperator.
american nic : yep, a bit like the pope.
Greg,
Another Latin phrase which uses ithe word "prepare" is Semper paratis "Always prepared", the motto of the United States Coast Guard. There is also the dictum of Publilius Syrus: Paratae lacrimae insidias, non fletum indicant which means "Prepared (or contrived) tears indicate an ambush, not (real) weeping."
It is difficult phrases like this one that make you realize that studying Latin is not like studying a modern Romance language where the syntax and the meaning are more straight forward. Translating Latin phrases usually requires some thinking.
Tiffany: They say that overall, Modern Greek is closer to Ancient Greek than Italian is to Latin.
mjd: Re: "Latin was offered at the high school I attended (I graduated in 1999) and at the university I attented, so the Classics are by no means totally forgotten." Interesting. The school districted I was enrolled in near Seattle dropped Latin as far back as 1965. The Catholic Church was changing the Latin Mass to an English one about that same time, but I don't know if that was a factor in declining enrollments for Latin in my community or not.
Sander: Latin was a limited language but you could kind of fake it with "television" if you had to and use televisio. The Vatican probably does. In Medeival Latin we find some invented words because Classical Latin had no words for them like rusus or rugus for "Russian"; glacialis for "Icelander", balingera "whale boat", pictae / cardae "playing cards" garsionarius "page boy", scorpionarius "crossbowman", even goldafinca for "goldfinch".
Brennus is totally right.
One advantage Latin has over Spanish/Italian/Portugese is that you probably won't have ancient Romans telling you that your pronunciation is terrible.
I think every language is worth learning. Considering firstly languages such as English has heavy Latin influences (through Latin or Romance languages), learning Latin will probably give a speaker of the English language a better understanding of the English language. Secondly, I have studied both Law and Science and the amount of loan words, phrases etc that these disciplines have from Latin or Greek (more so Greek in Science) is a lot!
Well, depends. Latin is really only useful for understanding Latin loans into English, which while large in number, really do not form the core vocabulary of English. If one is to study a major modern language which could help give one a better understanding of English, I myself would suggest German (Low Saxon being closer, but having lost much of the historical case system which existed in the past in English, unlike German, and also it what one'd call a "major" language, even though it's a significant minority language). However, if one doesn't mind studying a language which is not spoken today, then of course the obvious languages to study in this department would be Old English and Middle English.
Ack; that's supposed to be "and also it's not what one'd call a 'major' language".
Latin is the only only language I know of that survived itself in the sense that it was widely used as the language of culture long after its last native speakers died (I mean the Middle Ages, of course, right up to the 18th century). Therefore, it is definitely useful if you want to specialise in academic subjects like history or archeology, or even linguistics. Otherwise, for the average person of the street, it is not of much practical use, except if you want to learn Romance languages. I myself have profited somewhat from Latin when learning French and Italian (a little less so with Spanish, but even there it can be useful). But be as it may, if you happen to be a linguist, learning Latin is ultimately a way to train your mind into comprehending complex linguistic structures, because it has everything, from a case system to free word order, that are absent from living languages. If you master even some basic Latin, you will most probably find most languages (at least those of the Indo-European family) quite easy to learn (I mean mainly syntax, but in some cases also vocabulary).
Here people have to learn Latin if they study medicine or law. Even in some high schools everyone still has to learn Latin, but that is pretty rare. Nobody learns ancient Greek as far as I know (or modern Greek for that matter), but I actually like Greek and I would like to learn it. My sister studied law and she had to pass her Latin exam, even though her first foreign language was English. She also learnt French in elementary shool for a while. Unfortunately, I didn't have a chance to learn that many foreign languages at school, only English, which is bad because I like languages. But it was just a coincidence, I chose a profession where only English is important, and that is economics. LOL :)
I guess Latin vocabulary is much more usefull than Latin grammar.