How Latin has Helped Me

The first time Latin helped me was when I was watching a VSauce called How People Disappear.  In the video, he used a legal term that applies to people who have been missing for 8 years and are pronounced dead, "In Absentia".  My saucy Lain knowledge helped me to understand it as I knew in meant in, and I took a guess that Absentia was absent or not present since that word is identical to Absentia, and it turned out I was right.  In math class a few weeks ago, we were learning how to classify polynomials by their power and number of terms.  The word for a polynomial having a power of 4 or 5 is quartic and quintic respectively.  My expert knowledge of the numbers in Latin reminded me that Quatuor and Quinque were 4 and 5 respectively.  In ninth grade, the grammar I learned in Latin helped me to understand the grammar in English that we were learning.  Participles were the main thing I was struggling within English but learning them in Latin and how to translate them helped me to identify them in English. Throughout my life, Latin has helped me understand why words that have a singular ending in -us like octopus and nucleus have a plural ending of -i. This is because of the second declension noun endings of the nominative singular being -us and the nominative plural being -i (yes I know these two endings but not many others).  Lastly, in Rocket League which is basically car soccer., there is a car called the dominus.  My Latin skills helped me to realize that dominus was a Latin word, mostly by seeing the -us ending.  Whether on purpose by the developers or by coincidence, the word Dominus means master and its the main car used by people.

Latin has helped me in even more instances than in these examples throughout my life.  It has helped me so much in science classes, allowing me to understand words that I probably wouldn't have if I hadn't taken Latin.  I'm probably going to continue taking Latin in college since I want to study meteorology and there's a lot of Latin stuff in that field.

Connor Baldwin.