Lindsay Puvel

While most students are wild about studying a foreign language like Spanish or French, many teens at Catoctin High School trek down the road a little less traveled — Ancient Greek and Latin.

Many city schools often regard Catoctin as a tiny, rural school with nothing to offer. But, what they don’t realize is that unlike any other public high school in the State of Maryland, Catoctin offers an ancient Greek class. And yes, Ancient Greek is a dead language.

A dead language. Why would anyone study a dead language? Well, the truth is that the language is really very much alive. Just because it is not spoken in its original form does not mean it has completely disappeared from our society, our cultures, our speech, and our general ways of life. "Seventy to eighty percent of English words are derived from Greek and Latin," says Frederick Brainerd, the instructor of both the Latin and Greek classes at Catoctin. And it’s extremely

evident, even in simple, everyday words.

The Latin word for people, populus, for example, gives our English word for population. Locus, Latin for place, gives us our English word for location. The Greek root Phil becomes a suffix in English to such words as bibliophile. Phil means love, ergo a bibliophile is a lover of books.

Latin and Greek aren’t strictly for just bibliophiles though. Usage of the Greek alphabet is immensely prominent in the science and mathematic fields. For example, area is represented in mathematics with the lower case symbol for alpha. Angle measure is represented by the symbol for theta and delta and epsilon are both used in calculus. In the sciences, the small symbol for pi represents bonding and the small symbol for beta signifies energy. The medical and law fields as well heavily rely on Greco-Latin roots.

Sometimes even more evident than the written word is the culture and history that can be gained from studying the so-called "dead" languages.

When the Greeks and Romans were at a loss for why something happened, stories were developed to explain the phenomena. Even in such cases as strange looking creatures. The Romans and Greeks invented an entire history as to how the scorpion came to be. The word hippopotamus, roughly meaning "river horse" also comes from Latin. What is really interesting and puzzling, though, is that recently there have been studies showing how some of these "stories" the Greeks and Romans told

might actually be based on more fact and less myth as was generally perceived.

Many of the students at Catoctin High School study Latin and Greek looking for ways to improve their achievement. The State Department of Education recently released the figures that 67% of Catoctin sophomores passed the graduation required English exam last year in comparison with the 58% statewide. Could this be because of the heavy Latin and Greek influences at Catoctin? Even students that were never enrolled into the Latin and Greek programs Catoctin offers are taught a basic understanding of the Greco-Latin roots concept in many of their ninth grade English classes. And of course, even more important than the tenth grade English assessments, are the dreaded SATs where the more grammar and vocabulary you know the better. And yes, grammar is very heavily drilled in Latin.

"I learned more grammar in Latin class than English class," comments one student. And it’s true. If you walk into a Latin or Ancient Greek class at Catoctin not knowing how to pick out a direct object or subject in a sentence, it’s just the opposite when you walk out.

Latin and Ancient Greek are

inflected languages,

meaning that each word sometimes has several different endings so that the word’s relationship to its peers in a sentence changes. You can tell if a word is a subject or direct object or verb just by the endings. Being able to distinguish these parts of speech so simply in Latin and Greek allows us to see the connections in English that we were unable to realize previously.

Catoctin’s Mr. Brainerd wrote the Ancient Greek curriculum in response to a rise in student interest. For eight years Ancient Greek has run every other year. Together, the Ancient Greek and Latin kids form somewhat of a "classical community".

Within this classical community, students can explore the different cultures of the ancient world through hands-on learning activities. For example, The Dead Language Society, a.k.a. the Latin Club, is currently constructing a genuine erupting model, with the aid of the Earth Systems Science Research class, of Mount Vesuvius, the volcano that buried the cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii in 759 A.D. Other events on the Greek and Roman calendars are also celebrated within this club.

You can visit the Catoctin Classical Community online at www.acad.fcps.org/fl/brainerd.