one of my more problematic takes is probably the fact that i'm a bit sad i never got the chance to learn latin in school.
of course, it's only rational when people don't really use the language anymore. even the people who learn liturgical latin barely even use it. still, as a hobby linguist, i often think about the utility latin must have had even just a couple centuries ago as a lingua franca (lol) of sorts within the western european world. being able to use it to communicate with others, but also possessing the ability to discern more roots and etymologies of words is a very powerful feature that i feel people today don't really appreciate enough. i understand the rationale that people don't care about etymologies and just want to "speak the modern language" (whatever it may be) as fast as possible, or that having to pay attention to these things is too difficult or inaccessible somehow. maybe that's true for them, but i just find it difficult to relate to that sentiment, that people should ignore how these glosses were derived and just memorize the dictionary; that they should ignore the patterns and processes that generated these ideas to begin with.
i've been learning japanese for around the past two years, and one aspect of it that's always been my favorite has been learning archaic japanese. tracing the descension of words and particles from proto-japonic to modern japanese, understanding the phonological shifts and mergers that occurred along that timeline, realizing that many modern itidan verbs are derived from archaic nidan verbs and memorizing the katuyouhyou (remind me to rewrite this in proper japanese when i'm not typing this on an ssh terminal window) for these verbs and the other irregular class verbs, the six different kei, learning the old vowel substitution rules and realizing how a bunch of particles were derived from these... all of these things required me to distinguish patterns in how the language is spoken today and follow these threads back to information about kobun, and for that, i feel my experience learning the language has been greatly enriched. each time i notice another pattern, each time i suspect i've realized the etymology of another word, i go sprinting back to the dictionary, to wiktionary, to wikipedia. each time, i have genuine fun thinking and more deeply comprehending the language and the processes which contributed to it instead of simply rote memorizing a deck of anki cards as everyone appears to swear by.
in the same vein, i feel that people don't appreciate the role of greco-latin in english today very much. we have an astounding number of words that are derived from roots provided by these languages and a nearly infinite assortment of ideas we could generate from them, like snapping together these well-fitted linguistic building blocks (this is one of my favorite features of agglutinative languages) to form new ideas as we wish to express them. yet, the more time goes on, the more it appears that most simply wish to memorize words instead of consider by what processes they were constructed. of course, that's not to say that greco-latin is being lost in english (we still have the medical field to thank for using it to invent novel words for conditions by the day), but there is something about the elegance of it that makes its falling into unproductivity somewhat bitter for me.
if you've been anywhere arond the present generation of the internet, you likely know well the "wilting" meme, represented by a wilting rose emoji, and by proxy, the "blossom." the ideas that these are intended to express are relatively self-explanatory, as these expressions are naturally a somewhat innovative means of conveying the polarity of the reaction one has to a given stimulus, and i find that they serve this end amusingly well. however, i got to talking with one of my friends today about what one would use to describe something that makes you "blossom," something that is apt to make one "bloom." i think it's easy to immediately try to awkwardly wedge together a new word using common english suffixes like "blossomful" or "blossom-inducing," and for what it's worth i won't deny that these probably get the job done if they're just being said as a joke. but why simply leave it at that?
if we look towards greek, for instance, we know that we can use the suffix -gen to generate words carrying the meaning of "producer of." things like "allergen," "mutagen," "oxygen," etc. likewise, we might know that "anthos" is the greek root for "flower," so we could affix these roots together to create a word like "anthogen," something that produces flowers, or as an adjective "anthogenic." already i find that this sounds not only less stilted but more logically rigorous than prepending common english suffixes (which i think are mostly a closed class at this point anyway?) to create a new word for a new idea. however, we can then take it a step further and note that "antheros" is the adjectival form of the previous root "anthos," and carries the meaning of something being "flower-like" or "in a state of blooming" (as a flower would). hence, we can apply the same process as before and arrive at "antherogen," or as an adjective, "antherogenic."
maybe it's just me, but doesn't this sound so much more interesting? just imagine telling your friends "wow bro that's so antherogenic" instead of "that's so blossom-producing bro." isn't there just something so much more lively and elegant (not to mention amusing) about the former? moreover, i daresay that if you were to ship this word across the ocean to western europe, people would still be capable of at least hazarding a guess just as well due to the shared influence of greco-latin, especially among romance languages.
realistically, i know that this is all just an exercise in futility. the trends in language are set by the habits of the wider populace, and o how the wider populace hath spoken. nonetheless, even if greco-latin largely stops being productive in modern languages, i would still like to have fun with it while i still have the time, and i would like to encourage others to do so as well. it's not everyday you get to coin new words in increasingly analytic languages like english, and i think there is a certain kind of fun in having this ability to produce concise, eloquent, and cross-linguistically highly intelligible words with just a set of roots that makes it all worth it.
...that and also the clout :P
