🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Dec23.145239.2468@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU>, ehp@poe.acc.Virginia.EDU ("Didi Pancake") writes:
|In article <Bzo3uw.FGo@nocusuhs.nnmc.navy.mil> yoshi@nocusuhs.nnmc.navy.mil (D M Yoshikami) writes:
|>Something that I forgot to mention.  One other very good way to learn
|>grammar is to take a foreign language such as German or Spanish.  If
|>you feel like going for the gusto, take Latin or Greek.
|
|I have ALWAYS maintained that the most valuable portion of my formal
|education was the two years of (required) Latin in high school. That gave
|me the background to understand (or at least take a stab at) vast numbers
|of words in a variety of languages and particularly in the scientific
|disciplines (useful since I'm a science librarian much of the time).
|
|Anyone else feel this way about Latin or Greek? or about some other
|portion of their formal educaiton? I'd be interested to hear other
|opinions.

I've posted this before, in a previous incarnation of this grammar
thread, but I'll repeat it.

What taught me English grammar was not the study of English grammar.  It
was the study of Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and to a lesser degree Spanish
and Italian.

The study of foreign languages also taught me the danger of expressing
problems in a language and trying to solve them there--if you have only
one language at your disposal, you are limiting the possible solutions.
Therefore I would also highly recommend the study of symbolic logic and
game and decision theory, as yet more languages in which a problem can
be expressed, to anyone who wants to be able to think clearly about
almost anything.

Thinking clearly (just to establish relevance to this group) is a big
step along the way to writing well.

-- 
--Fred, or another blind 8th-century BC  |  sasafw@dobo.unx.sas.com
        Hellenic poet of the same name.  |