 Hi, my name is Pete. You might know me from my blog, MagistarPetrus.blogspot.com, or deadlinguist.blogspot.com. This series of videos is going to be similar to the ancient Greek series of videos I did, but this time it's in Latin. Well, it's not in Latin, but it's about Latin. Once again, we're going to do four videos. This one, the introduction, except instead of talking about why I learned Latin, which I'll mention, I'll talk about why you should learn Latin. And it's not for everyone. So don't feel bad if you're like, Dude, that sounds boring. I'll talk a little bit about the history of Latin. And I'll talk about some of the things you can use to learn Latin. And then, of course, a sample of what Latin is like. So let's begin. I started studying Latin in the late 80s. When I was in high school, my best friend in eighth grade came to me and says, What foreign language are you taking? And I said, I don't know. Maybe I'll take Spanish. And he said, No, you need to take Latin. My parents are making me take Latin, and I want to know someone. And I said, Okay, why not? And it turns out that Latin is really, really cool. So I studied up and drank, drank all that in. But the reasons you should study Latin, and you'll hear a lot of these, it'll help your spelling, it'll help your vocabulary, it'll help your written English, and all these things are true. But the fact of the matter is, those are all separate skills that you can learn in their own right, you can learn how to spell, you can learn vocabulary, and you can learn how to write standard written English without learning Latin. That's not to say that you won't learn these things if you study Latin. But there are other separate subjects that you can learn that way. The real reason you'd want to study Latin is, to my mind, to get a more comprehensive picture where we as Westerners, and when I say Westerners, I mean people whose cultural roots are in the Christian West, better known as Western Europe, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Britain. Among other places, lest you feel left out when I mention all of that. So yeah, you're going to be talking about Americans and Europeans and all of that good stuff. And that's where our intellectual and cultural heritage comes from. It comes from three strands, ancient Rome, ancient Greece, and ancient Palestine because of the because of the Bible. And those three fused together in the medieval era to start us down the track towards Western civilization as we know it. And the language that Western civilization traditionally spoke and wrote in was Latin, up until about the Renaissance. But even after the Renaissance, people were educated in Latin. And when I say people, I mean the elite. Yes, I'm talking about dead white men, the people who ruled countries and made scientific discoveries and did all the cool stuff. Don't you want to be like them and do all the cool stuff now? Of course you do. Who wants to be left out? So they were the elite and they learned Latin. The founders of the country that I live in, the United States, were absolutely steeped in Ciceroanian literature. I mean, when they cast off their ties to the United Kingdom in the 1780s, they didn't set up a kingdom. They set up a republic and they did this rather consciously, modeling it on the Roman Republic. Or at least that's my read on history for those of you who are professional historians, you may disagree. So there was a conscious aping of this. And then all through the 19th and the first part of the 20th century, the elites all studied Latin. And I guess what I'm saying in a rather long winded way is if you want to know where you're going, you've got to know where you came from. And for us in the West, we came from Latin. We also came from Greek and we also came from Hebrew. But the really big parts were written in Latin. So if you want to know where you are going, you've got to know where you came from. And Latin is where we came from. Again, I am not saying this to denigrate the study of modern languages, which are useful and wonderful and good in their own right. I am not saying this to denigrate non-Western cultures. I've watched my share of Japanese cinema and it's good. But I live in the West. Therefore, for me to know where I'm coming from, I study the Western past. Whereas if I were Japanese, I'd probably want to study classical Japanese to know where I was coming from. Again, this is not meant to be chauvinistic, oh, the West is better than anywhere else. It's just, that's where I live. And chances are reasonable that if you're watching this video, you do too. So again, if you want to know where you're going, you've got to know where you came from. And in the West, for us, Latin is a major strand in where we came from. And I think that's why, the real reason why you should learn Latin, to read the literature but not in translation, to actually read the literature in the language. Next up, a little bit of history of the Latin language.