Latin – a useful language

“THE WORD ‘ curtilage’ bamboozled me when it turned up in a recent Courier court report,” writes a Perth reader.

“I had never seen the word before, but reckoned that it meant the vicinity or precincts of somewhere, since the accused was obviously not supposed to be there, and that the derivation of the word was probably French.

“My dictionary informed me that it was ‘a small court, yard or piece of ground attached to a dwelling-house and forming one enclosure with it’. And so now we know – and the word comes from Old French.

“I thought as much, as modern French for a courtyard is ‘cour’.

“Classical and modern languages no longer occupy as important a place in school curricula as they once did and many correspondents have a go at them, suggesting that learning them is time wasted.

“This is yet another example of how knowledge of other languages such as French and Latin can help with the understanding of technical, scientific, medical and legal terms in English – the more complicated the language in English, the more Latinised it becomes!

“I have found my Latin, French, Spanish, German and Russian knowledge very handy at times, but by far the most useful languages have been my Latin and French. By the way, each language helps with the learning of another – French with Spanish and Italian, for example.”

Bill Fairweather, of Perth has sent in this picture of the staff of Stanley School in the 1960s, which features his younger sister Jean. Back from left: Miss Paterson, Miss Lowe, Mr Coutts, Miss Miller, Mr Dunbar, Miss Ogilvie, Mr Reid, Miss McDonald,...