As you all know, I love language and have made working with languages - English and others - a cornerstone of my career. It's also, in a way, my hobby, since reading world literature is a favorite pasttime.

Latin was the first language I ever studied. My middle school, which was very traditional, required it, and I continued to study it in high school. Our teacher was so elderly that we used to joke that Latin was his native tongue! But we learned a lot, studying the classics of Cicero's legal arguments, Julius Caesar's texts on war, and poetry and prose by Ovid and many other famous authors. At that time, the 1960s and 1970s, Latin was still fairly common in American schools, but almost died out of the curriculum shortly after I left high school as people turned to more "practical" languages, especially Japanese, Chinese, and Spanish.

Despite his advanced age, now that I look back I realize our Latin teacher actually did a lot to make our Latin study relevant and even "fun." At the end of every school year he arranged a party where we all dressed in togas and brought in traditional Roman fare from ancient times, and took turns reciting classic poetry. I still have a menu - in the form of a classical scroll, of course - from one of these dinners. And every year he took our high school class to a state-wide competition where we participated in chariot races, poetry reading, and Latin grammar trivia contests. One year my team actually won the trivia, thanks to my sister who knew and remembered an impressive amount of detail about Latin's various declensions and cases.

Yesterday my husband - who never studied Latin and often makes jokes about the years I "wasted" studying a dead language - sent me a great article that I'm guessing was written by a Westerner whom I guess is about my age. It's called "A Vote for Latin." The author notes that 31 out of the 40 US presidents have studied Latin, including Thomas Jefferson, John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton and George Bush. the author also notes that after the 1970s, the number of Latin students in the US "plunged" from nearly 200,000 to less than 6,000 (I was a student right at the point of the "plunge," in the late 1970s). However, recently there's been a revival, with over 130,000 students signing up for the National Latin Exam in 2005. 

I'm a practical person myself, and I understand that in today's ever more competitive world, you'd want your children to learn more vital languages than Latin (or ancient Greek, or Sanskrit, etc.) In fact, my husband and I returned to China in 2004 in large part so our two daughters could learn Chinese to prepare themselves for their adulthood when China will be a world leader and the Chinese language will be pervasive. Trade Chinese for Latin? I wouldn't allow it.

But even so, I tend to agree with the author that studying Latin, especially for Western kids, can be rich and rewarding. As this author put it, " Know Latin and you discern the Roman layer  that lies beneath the skin of the Western world." This is true not only of English words, wherein you can often spy the Latin root, but also when you look at Western institutions and customers.

As the author notes, "With a little Roman history and Latin under your belt, you end up seeing more everywhere, not only in literature and language, but in the classical roots of Federal architecture; the spread of Christianity throughout Western Europe and, in turn, America; and in the American system of senatorial government. The novelist Alan Hollinghurst describes people who know history's turning points as being able to look at the world as a sequence of rooms: Greece gives way to Rome, Rome to the Byzantine Empire, to the  Renaissance, to the British Empire, to America." (What the author doesn't say is, that China is next in the sequence!)

This is very true for me - as I look around practically any Western city I can see the traces of our ancient Roman heritage written in the stones as well as in the language. Especially as the world grows smaller and more diverse, it's more important not to lose the heritage that makes us distinctive.

Let me close by teaching you a few Latin phrases, and a joke.

Elsevier's company motto is "Non Solus," which means, not alone. You can see it in the Elsevier logo: The picture is a tree with a vine climbing the trunk. This is an ancient printer's mark from the ancestral publishing house, Elzvir, from which our company takes its name. We think it means that together, scientists and publishers (the tree and the vine) are interdependent and lean on each other to help promote the fruits of scientific research (represented by the elder scholar under the tree). The motto, Non Solus, says that promoting science is an effort that calls on mutual aid and support - no one can do it alone.

Here's the joke: I attended Yale University, which like many older universities has a Latin motto. Ours is "Lux et Veritas," which means "Light and Truth." My sister (the one who won the Latin trivia contest) went to Harvard. Its motto is  just "Veritas" ('truth"). So of course we Yalies say that Harvard may have "truth" but otherwise they are "in the dark."