Latin: Hear the dead speak.

When you learn Latin, you can read the original words Julius Caesar spoke describing the terrifying cries of blue-painted Celtic warriors charging towards him and his army. You can hear the hypnotic music in the poetry of Vergil. You can feel the intertwined draw of love and lust as Catullus tells you of the object of his desire. Reading an original Latin text allows you to feel the presence of the author in a way an English translation never can.

But this is only one reason to study a classical language, there are many more:

• Prepare for a career in the health sciences by learning Latin-based medical vocabulary.
• How can you be a lawyer if you don't know what habeas corpus means?
• Speak and write better in English: 60 percent of English words have classical roots.
• Learning the grammar of a classical language helps you better understand English grammar and thus speak and write in an educated way.
• Latin is the root language of French, Italian, Romanian, Spanish, and other Romance languages. Learning Latin makes learning any of these languages much easier.
• Translating Latin is an exercise in logic; training in these languages is training in a clear way to think about all issues and problems.
• Any historian of the ancient world must be able to read texts that have not been translated into English yet.

The University of Evansville offers courses in beginning and intermediate Latin. Take one of these courses next semester and rediscover an ancient world you only thought you knew.