I refer to the article ‘Teaching Latin in the 21st century’ (The Sunday Times of Malta, August 16)) by Bagio Vella, honorary president of the Malta Classics Association.

Vella is repeating well-known arguments that learning Latin promotes logical thinking and is good for learning other Romance languages. Proponents of Latin often argue that it is a special language, giving birth to the whole Romance language family. However, there is linguistically nothing special about Latin. While it is worthwhile to learn diverse languages, Latin is no more interesting to learn than any other of the 5,000 or so living languages.

While it is certainly easier to learn Spanish if one has learned Latin before, the real comparison is whether one’s mastery of Spanish is higher after four years of learning Spanish or after two years of Latin followed by two years of Spanish. The outcome is so obvious that no one even bothered to test that.

Things even get worse if we consider empirical work on the effects of learning Latin versus learning French or learning Spanish. Students of Latin were actually worse at learning Spanish than students of French.

And in terms of modern languages spoken, these students of Latin were already one down. This indicates that, for the purpose of learning modern languages, learning Latin is a waste of time. There are still good reasons to learn Latin if one is interested in studying history or theology.

For anybody else, there are better ways to spend that time and effort.