Canes Careers

First, it is no secret that Greek and Latin require dedication and intelligence to master, and that the process of learning dead languages by its very nature requires mental discipline somewhat greater than that required by many modern languages. Thus, successful students of the ancient languages have what almost amounts to an extra credential when they graduate.

In the second place, and with special reference to students bound for health-professional schools, it need hardly be said that droves of students emerge at the end of their four years with that stereotypical mark of the premed, a biology or other science degree. Students interested in the sciences ought to major in them; but you should know that a science degree is not a requisite for admission to the health-professional school of your choice, and may even be a hindrance. An admissions officer may be faced with hundreds of applications from (say) biology majors, which form a great gray mass distinguished by perhaps a few tenths of a grade point from top to bottom of the applicant pool.

The MCAT is the single most frightening and difficult hurdle for prospective medical professionals. Classics Majors can therefore take comfort from the following statistics collected on the 1997 applicants to allopathic (MD) medical schools in North America tabulated by acceptance rate to medical school and sub-tabulated alphabetically by major (NB: not all majors for which data is available are tabulated):

In the GRE examinations which applicants bound for graduate schools take, the average scores of graduating seniors, tabulated by intended field of study (data collected 1996-1999) reveal that Classics majors have by far the highest verbal average (605) out of the 270 fields tabulated.

TOP TWELVE FIELDS WHOSE STUDENTS SCORED HIGHEST IN MEAN "VERBAL" GRE:

It is worth adding that not only did Classics rank first out of the 270 fields in the Verbal portion, but it ranked fourth in Quantitative and fifth in the Analytical! (See the ACL Newsletter 24.2 (2002) p. 5)

But the data collected for the SAT college entrance exams plotted against eventual choice of language majors also tells a story familiar to admissions officers:

But the advantages do not end with health-related studies. Here are two testimonia interesting to pre-law students:

"My scores on the SAT and the LSAT were dramatically improved by my knowledge of Latin. As you know, much of the vocabulary on those tests is rooted in Latin. Unfamiliar vocabulary on those tests became easily decipherable because I was able to identify and translate the Latin roots." W.C. Chaney, JD, UT Austin. (Full text.)

"Law schools report that by yardsticks of law review and grades, their top students come from math, the Classics, and literature - with political science, economics, "pre - law," and "legal studies" ranking lower" (Harvard Magazine, May-June, 1998, p. 50)

From the e-book Real Property by Prof. Robert G. Natelson of the University of Montana Law School:

§ 1.3.4 Why all the Latin?
Pierson v. Post, like many other Anglo-American legal writings of the time, is filled with extensive use of Latin. Why? The judges were not showing off. Writing Latin was as natural to them as driving a car is to you today. (Skills natural in one era may seem exotic in others!) At the time Pierson v. Post was decided, Latin had been the international medium of ideas for 1800 years. It was known to all educated Europeans and Americans, and spoken easily by many.

Latin had been the official language of the western half of the Roman Empire. As the western empire became less cohesive in the 4th and 5th centuries A.D., among the common people Latin evolved into the modern Romance languages -- French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, Italian, Catalan, and others. Among the educated, it continued to be spoken and written (in somewhat modified form) as an international medium of communication.

It is difficult for us to understand today the inestimable advantages of Latin as an international tongue. Latin enabled people in places as alien from each other as Poland, England, Italy, Sweden, and South America (including South American Indians!) to communicate freely across national boundaries without the expense and problems of translation.(19) Because virtually all historical writings were composed in Latin or had been translated into that tongue, any literate person with access to books enjoyed access to the entire European heritage. The language was equally useful for diplomacy, religion, law, medicine, and scholarship. It enabled Europe to create a truly international university system, for all lectures were in Latin. (To ensure fluency, university students were forbidden from speaking any other language.) Among those whose works were composed in Latin were Augustine, Galileo, Grotius, Newton, Pascal, Aquinas, and Mercator.

Beginning around 1600, writers began to use their own national tongues more and Latin less. School history textbooks sometimes seem to applaud this development, but in fact it was a tragedy of the first magnitude. Fragmenting ideas along linguistic boundaries certainly contributed to ignorance and misunderstanding. This erosion of humankind's first and only truly international tongue probably was not a wholly natural development; it seems to be have been promoted by rulers of newly powerful nation-states -- all of whom had incentives to promote "standard" national languages, disconnect their subjects from inconvenient historical writings, and discourage the free flow of ideas across national borders. The resultant damage was great, and is being partially repaired only now with the rise of the Internet and of English as the new international language.

In sum, Latin terms appear in legal texts for the same reason as in books on medicine, biology and other fields of learning. In the case of law, moreover, the use of Latin was reinforced by extensive Anglo-American borrowing from Roman law.

Some legal scholars have observed the fact that because today Latin is not commonly spoken outside the Vatican has the effect of increasing its value as a source of technical vocabulary because meanings do not change as quickly from generation to generation. Stability enhances precision.

For those interested in teaching Latin, there is this interesting datum: "...the sharpest appetite is for Latin majors...Recruiters are eager to find college graduates who majored in Latin because high school students in significant numbers continue to want to study it." ( LA Times , 5 October 1999 )

In fact, if there were ever a time to enter the profession of teaching Latin at the Secondary School Level, this is it. There is a national crunch in the number of Latin teachers while the numbers of students desiring to take Latin goes up year by year.