I refer to the letter ‘Myths about learning Latin’ by Holger Mitterer (The Sunday Times of Malta, September 6), who said that learning Latin is a waste of time.

No form of any knowledge is a waste of time in our short life. As an expert of cognitive science (which includes linguistics) Prof. Mitterer knows that Latin is a mother language like Germanic, the mother of German and English.

Throughout my 53 years of teaching, I never met a student who told me that Latin was an obstacle to learning Italian, Spanish and French but rather the opposite – Latin was a helpful tool.

Since the Norman invasion of Britain brought with it old French, English has inherited about 60 per cent of its vocabulary from this language which had Latin roots. Almost all English words ending in –or and/or -ion are derived from the supine of Latin verbs: diction from dictum, doctor from doctum – that is how Latin helps good English spelling.

Prof. Mitterer said that linguistically Latin has nothing special – I cannot understand this from a person who studied Latin. Is there nothing linguistically special in Virgil, Horace, Catullus, Cicero, Caesar and Tacitus, to mention just a few?

What about the fact that well- known universities such as Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard publish hundreds of books on classical languages, Latin and classical Greek?

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