It saddens me that this is necessary. It wasn't long ago that Latin was part of the standard curriculum in grammar schools.
The people
For clarity: This is my answer, not the answer given by Plato (who argues that the guardians should guard themselves) or answer from Juvenal (who implicitly takes the position that this is an impossible problem).
Imho, for the same reason that schools shouldn't only teach OOP langs.
Ideas are expressed differently in different languages and there are often important nuances, where the real message is to be found, which are lost. For instance, it might have more of the intended effect to translate it as: "Who is watching the watchers?". A little paranoia here or there... today, the idea of 'guards' is pretty benign.
That Latin is a foundational language for most of the West is also an important consideration. It enables people to understand written or verbal communications which use words they haven't encountered before... Something like being able to understand a programming language you've never written in by virtue of its apparent syntax and flow control. A good illustration might be the use of "for".. you have for each, for x in y, or for(;;). Knowing the "root", "for", pretty much explains how to decode the ()'s contents in the lesser English-like C style.
Thirdly, there are many great ideas written in Latin. Those ideas have profound things to say and we risk cutting ourselves off, as a people, or maybe more importantly as individuals, from "lessons learned".
> Imho, for the same reason that schools shouldn't only teach OOP langs.
If you're going for linguistic diversity, why not go all-out and learn something completely unrelated to Latin? Maybe one of the Asian languages, for example. I know one guy who says he thinks differently when he speaks Mandarin than he does when he speaks English. Maybe that would be a little too hard, compared to Latin?
> Thirdly, there are many great ideas written in Latin. Those ideas have profound things to say and we risk cutting ourselves off, as a people, or maybe more importantly as individuals, from "lessons learned".
Surely we, as a people, can afford a few decent translators?
Because learning Latin trains the mind in logical thought.
Because studying Latin helps people learn about the grammatical structures which they use in their native tongue without understanding.
Because understanding Latin makes it much easier to learn any of the many Latin-influenced languages, or even to guess at what text means without knowing the language.
Because knowing Latin is a prerequisite for learning much of European history from primary sources.
> Because learning Latin trains the mind in logical thought.
How? Is there something magical about Latin? Would other, less dead languages have the same effect?
> Because studying Latin helps people learn about the grammatical structures which they use in their native tongue without understanding.
That's hardly unique to Latin.
> Because understanding Latin makes it much easier to learn any of the many Latin-influenced languages, or even to guess at what text means without knowing the language.
Why not learn another Latin-derived modern language, instead? You get some of that same effect, and you learn a language that isn't dead.
> Because knowing Latin is a prerequisite for learning much of European history from primary sources.
How many people are going to want to do that, ever? Consider the opportunity cost of learning Latin for those who won't. And then, of the people who will want to read those primary sources, how many of them would benefit from being able to read them in Latin rather than in a translation?
Because learning Latin trains the mind in logical thought.
[citation needed]
Really, there has been experimental research on this subject, and the best considered conclusion is that Latin doesn't have any particular virtue in training the mind in logical thought.
Note (as anyone who reads my HN profile will see) that I by no means disparage the study of foreign languages, dead or alive.
>Because studying Latin helps people learn about the grammatical structures which they use in their native tongue without understanding.
It would be much more helpful just to study those grammatical structures directly in the native tongue. Studying the grammar of your own language via latin is just an odd way of doing it. English and latin are not very similar grammatically.
Think of latin as the foundation of French, Italian, modern day Romanian, Spanish and a whole lot of other languages to a lesser extent.
Understanding even only the rudiments of Latin will give you tremendous insight in to the historical development of languages and will help you a lot in learning them as spoken today.
So, essentially, learning Latin will give you a bunch of cognates that may be very useful if you then go on to learn French, Italian, etc.? I can see how this would be useful if you wanted to follow the linguistic evolution of those languages, but if you want to learn to speak them, wouldn't it be more effective to learn those languages directly? Since they have common roots, I imagine that learning one of them would give some advantage when you go to learn the next one.
And yet if someone had not translated it, you could have googled for a translation and maybe learned a little Latin in the process. Which is basically how I learned enough Latin to understand it.
I wish more people knew Latin, too. My interest in languages is one of the reasons both that I am here and that I have a φ in my username. I posted the translation because I thought doing so would teach the most people a useful Latin phrase which I didn't know.
