by Jon F. McCord, Academic Dean, Classical Languages Teacher

There are many reasons schools and private instructors teach, require, and advise their students to pursue the study of foreign languages.  At NCA, we concentrate on Classical Latin for eight years and follow up this study with two years of Greek.

We study Latin and Greek to learn how to read ancient texts and then read those texts.  We compose, read, translate, and discuss texts in the original languages in order to better grasp the finer points from the ancient author, including the complex and simple beauties found in Latin and Greek.  We learn lexicography and semantics (how to discern what a word means in its context) and translational theory through these studies, discovering the beauty of the alien and mother tongues as the two come into relationship with one another.  This concentration and in-depth instruction, wrestling with the concepts and finer points of linguistic relationships, allows us to not only train and order the mind of the student at a macro-level, but also allows them to wrestle with the essence of communication and language, focusing their questions through their exposure to Latin and Greek.

There are two primary reasons we focus on Latin and Greek as opposed to other foreign languages (1).  The first has to do with the relationship between these languages and English.  Both Latin and Greek have a massive impact both lexically and grammatically on the English language.  Both historically and up to present day, these languages have affected the words, style, and content of compositions in English.  These relationships and similarities allow us to teach Latin and reinforce the students’ English grammar at the same time. However, we do not study with the end goal of helping with our English vocabulary or syntax or to help with allusions to historical references, these are simply bonus derivatives of the way in which we delve into the language.  The second reason is that due to the classical nature of our school we place an emphasis on the writings and persons of the classical world of the Mediterranean and Near East.  Latin and Greek allow us to access this arena of culture in a primary way which is somewhat mitigated through translation.  Learning Greek also allows us to access the writings of the New Testament and deal with theological and hermeneutical issues in the language of the Greek text.

At NCA, we concentrate on Latin both in time and amount of literature read, teaching Latin as a formal subject from 3rd grade until 10th grade.  This allows us to go deep into the workings of Latin, making sure the students are masters not only of the ins and outs of Latin but also of how Latin works in relationship and comparison to English and other languages the student might know.  This in-depth treatment of Latin allows the students to readily grasp Greek (a remarkably similar language syntagmatically and in basic morphological concepts to name a few) in their final two years at NCA.  Also, because of the relationship of Latin to other Romance languages and the in-depth way in which Latin is taught, our students are ready to quickly and deeply learn its daughter languages, including Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Romanian and others.

If you are interested in dialoguing more about why we teach Latin and Greek and the way in which we teach them, one of our language teachers would love to talk with you, because let’s face it, that’s what we do!  Feel free to get in contact with us by sending an email to office@ncaclassical.org.

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(1)  That is to say, there are many benefits Latin and Greek bring us as language learners that would also be brought by other languages, including grammatical concepts common to languages from across multiple families, whether Afro-Asiatic or Indo-European (nouns/concrete words, verbs/action words, adjectives, etc.), and an ability to bring a clarity and contrast to English study.