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I have read that one who knows Latin has a good command over English. Is this correct or just a myth? If it is correct, how does it work?

Oddthinking
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Biju jose
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    Not in any significant way. English is **not** a [Romance language](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_languages) – vartec Nov 26 '12 at 10:17
  • also, see [History of English in 10 minutes](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3r9bOkYW9s) – vartec Nov 26 '12 at 10:25
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    Depends on how good (or doubleplusungood) your English classes are. – Andrew Grimm Nov 26 '12 at 12:30
  • I think that learning any other language can help you with your English, if you're taught it well. I don't know whether Latin will help you any more than any other language. – Andrew Grimm Nov 26 '12 at 12:46
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    @Biju Jose - You should try asking on English.SE, as they'll have a lot more knowledge concerning the etymology of the language. English isn't a Romantic language (Latin/Greek based) like Italian, French, Spanish, etc. English is a giant mish-mash of blended languages, based more on Germanic sentence structures than Romantic and English uses *a lot* of borrowed words. "Water" has its roots in the Germanic "Vasser", but Aquaduct (a tube that carries water) refers to "water" as "aqua" which is a bit of borrowed Latin. Latin might help with about 20-30% of English words, as a very rough estimate. – MCM Nov 26 '12 at 18:57
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    [Welcome to Skeptics](http://meta.skeptics.stackexchange.com/q/1505)! We want to focus our attention on doubtful claims that are widely held or are made by notable people. Please [provide some examples](http://meta.skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/882/what-are-the-attributes-of-a-good-question/883#883) of places where this claim is being made. – Sklivvz Nov 26 '12 at 21:59
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    Related: [Does learning Latin first dramatically improve the ability to learn more languages?](http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/q/19497/8192) – unor Oct 17 '15 at 17:49

2 Answers2

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According to a widely-cited study on the English lexicon, close to 60% of English words are of French or Latin origin. At the very least, a knowledge of Latin would increase your comprehension of the English language, particularly when it comes words that are longer than two syllables.

The National Committee for Latin and Greek maintains that students who study Latin in high school do significantly better on their SAT scores, especially in the areas of reading and composition. (However, that could also be because Latin is not usually taught in your average public high school.)

Finally, bilingualism of any sort has all kinds of beneficial cognitive effects. A good summary of the critical literature on that topic here.

denten
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Latin defininitely improves English vocabulary. The higher SAT scores on the verbal part of the test can be explained by that fact

Fact Finder
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    [Welcome to Skeptics](http://meta.skeptics.stackexchange.com/q/1505)! Please [provide some references](http://meta.skeptics.stackexchange.com/5) to support your claims. – Sklivvz Mar 08 '13 at 16:42
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    Correlation is not the same as causation. And it may be a classical example of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_bias – Stefan Mar 12 '13 at 14:14