Navaho Gunleg

“Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur”

Over the recent years I’m having this increasing interest in history and the evolution of human knowledge, so to speak. The ancient Greek philosophers of course and stuff like etymology for instance quite interest me. It’s funny to see how words have evolved in different languages, coming from the same stem.

I’m a computer-programmer and it has been said that C is the Latin of programming languages. Ever since I was a kid I was interested in artificial intelligence and wanted to code a program that seemed intelligent and could interpret and even converse. Later in life I discovered a thing like the Turing test as well and the topic has always kept my mind busy; thinking of ways to ‘classify’ words, so it could interpret, conclude and react. An amount of understanding language is quite significant. Latin being the mother of modern western languages, I decided I’d study it.

Also, some knowledge of Latin comes in handy if you’re into plants. See, when watching English documentaries, sometimes ‘native’ English terms are used which I’m not familiar with. The Latin name of plants is the same everywhere. Thing is, those Latin names are hard to remember if you haven’t got a clue as to what they mean.

I also have this belief that keeping the mind busy, i.e. like learning a new language, is beneficial and keeps all the gears oiled-up, if you know what I mean.

So yesterday, I started picking up Latin from the book Latin for Beginners by Benjamin D’Ooge, which is quite nicely broken up into separate ‘lessons’ and so far it’s a good read and I’m actually picking up stuff. It’s good to find out that my 31 years, 1 month and 2 day-old mind can still suck up data — and the regular ‘aha-erlebnis‘, for instance when seeing how etymologically some words in different languages are ‘tied’ to eachother, keeps me interested too.