Latin – a life-saver for hacks everywhere

“How do you pronounce ‘principum amicias’? Is it hard ‘c’, soft ‘c’, or a hard ‘ch’?” my friend asked. She was working on the story of the newly discovered Shakespeare portrait.

I think I was right in suggesting a hard “c”. But before I knew it, we were debating the value of Latin – four or five of us. We had all hated learning it, but basked in what it had done for us. We shared accounts of what it had done for our own literacy and understandings of language construction.

For myself, as a journalist who has had to work in Francophone Africa and France herself, who has also had the good fortune to be based as a correspondent in Rome for a year, and who has worked extensively in central and Latin America, Latin quite literally saved my life.

Now, not even my best friend would argue I was any kind of a linguist. But I can make myself understood in French and Spanish and could probably keep my heart beating in Italian if I had to.

But what this improbable debate on the floor of a British newsroom concluded was that Latin had given us logic that extended beyond language. Not only had it explained language construction in its most basic form – the declining of verbs, the qualifying words, plurals and the rest – but it had given us routes to problem-solving in arenas beyond language.

A few months ago Dr Richard Gilder came to see me at our studios. He has pioneered the teaching of Latin in deprived New York schools – the cornerstone is the three-year-old Bronx Latin School. In the words of the founding head teacher, Leticia Pineiro: “The larger purpose is to get children struggling with literacy to read and do maths at grade level.”

Last year seventh graders in the Bronx Latin School enjoyed a significantly higher pass rate in the New York State English test than seventh graders in the surrounding South Bronx region.

Dr Gilder’s scheme is apparently now being pioneered in nine primary schools in London and Buckinghamshire.