Thoughts from Thursday: Pointlessness

When I was little, I complained about my math homework. “But it’s pooooointless,” I would moan to my mom, my dad, my classmates, and anyone else, whether they were listening or not. I disliked learning long division. I hated algebra. I despised geometry. The higher up I got in math, the more I detested it: this lasted all the way through high school statistics. I lamented that I was spending valuable time and effort on math, when I would never need to rig a lottery, design a bridge, or calculate a speed based on a number of seemingly unrelated factors. It was pointless.

I appreciate now that I’ve learned enough math to be able to understand difficult scientific concepts and I’m glad that I’m able to see the world in a mathematical, pattern-based mindset, however blurry the image might be. I will still never need to design a bridge or, at this point, even remember how to do long division, but I will need to know how to look at the world as a complex and logical system. I took one ‘math’ class in college, called Language and Formal Reasoning, and I actually really enjoyed it. I learned set theory, which is almost as much philosophy as math. It didn’t feel immediately useful, but it did provide some interesting insights into verbal arguments. I suggest googling ‘set theory’ and ‘metamathematics’, if you’re into that kind of thing.
I kind of thought I had gotten over that ‘this is pointless and I hate it’ problem around the time I discovered that I really liked learning. Apparently, though, it’s actually just a character flaw because now I’m in another class that drives me insane.

I’m a linguistics major, and that means that I have to take a language history course. The only one taught before my graduation and while I’m still in the US is Latin.

Ahhh, Latin.

I feel like I should be thrilled. It’s the root of all the languages I’m studying. It provided even English-speakers with a wealth of useful vocabulary. It is the true mother tongue. Unfortunately, it’s also dead.

Here’s the problem: I do not need to be able to speak Latin. No one does. Google speaks Latin as well as any human, because it never changes or adds new words or is used in new and interesting ways like living languages are. It’s vaguely interesting to see the origins of some things, but why on earth would I have to know how to conjugate Latin verbs? I can do verbs in Italian, French, and Spanish– I think I’ve got a handle on the basic concept of conjugation, enough to satisfy any linguistic requirement. And what would possess someone to learn noun declensions (five sets of them?!) in a language that no one even speaks? Isn’t it enough for me to know the idea of case marking in the world’s languages and call it good? Can’t I just find a good etymology website and research word origins there?

Historical linguistics is clearly not for me.

I’m apparently not the kind of person who can learn things just for the sake of knowing them, or at least not tedious, complicated systems that have to be memorized. I like learning about planets and the solar system because I can use them in fiction writing. I like psychology for the same reason. I enjoy learning Italian because I actually plan on speaking Italian in the near future. Latin? This feels like an extended test of ‘do you really want your degree, though?’ Yes. I’m paying you nearly a hundred thousand dollars for a degree. I really want it.

Why do we even still teach a dead language in schools? Can we teach Chinese instead, which is spoken by a huge portion of the world’s population and might someday soon become a majority language in American businesses?

If you have a real-world, actual application of Latin that does not involve translation of ancient documents, please, please comment. I have ten more weeks to learn it, and learn why I’m learning it.