Piney Woods Philosopher: Giving Latin another try

By BILL COBBS/Columnist

Piney and She were re-learning Spanish as they were spending some time in Tampa and there Spanish was the real second language.  It was comparatively easy for the two people as She had studied high school Spanish, and Piney had “contact” learning for a bit of Spanish.
But in the middle of learning Spanish, Piney unearthed among his pile of ancient books an 1852 edition of Latin, an aged grammar book, but with reading and writing assignments and very old histories in Latin.
Now, She Who Must Be Obeyed had not studied Latin in high school, but Piney had several years of it in high school from a nice teacher who had no knowledge of the language! But he learned a little!
It was always the complicated grammar and declensions and conjugations that confused Piney.
So, some years ago when the two had run a private school, Piney undertook the teaching of Latin without any attention to conveying grammatical rules. That step enabled his students to get interested in the 2,000-year-old histories and ignore the hard grammar.
The downside was that you could not write accurately in Latin.  So what?  Whom are you going to write to?  But reading Latin gives you firsthand knowledge of many, many things!
Best of all, it gives you a background for French, Italian and Spanish!  Let’s face it!  America is bilingual and speaking Spanish is necessary in our new and growing world!
And, an extra language learning wards off the bugaboo of “Alzheimic” deterioration!

A writer, Bill Cobbs divides his time between Southwest Virginia and Florida.