Though nominally a dead language, Classical Latin has enjoyed a remarkably vibrant afterlife. Employed first as the de facto lingua franca throughout Europe following the dissolution of Roman power in the west, then as the common language of Renaissance academia, and lastly as an enduring staple of modern-day higher education, from the Dark Ages to the Space Age, Latin has remained an indelible fixture of Western culture.
And for my part, I would hope to see that it remains as much. I first fell in love with the native tongue of Caesar and Cicero as a freshman in college - it was, in fact, my gateway to Classical Study as a whole - and I've not looked back since, pursuing my Latin studies all throughout my undergraduate career, into my postgraduate program, and in no small measure on my own time as well. As part of my MA curriculum in the UK, I was given the opportunity to provide supplementary instruction to beginning Latin students, and would like to carry on my Latin tutoring now that I've returned to the United States. By my lights the Classics remain every bit as relevant today as in centuries past - if not more so - and I mean to do my own part, however modest, to ensure the knowledge of the field's true native tongue is handed on to future generations.
(An aside: while such have been neglected as subjects which the qualified tutor may explicitly mark out as areas of expertise, I would be remiss if I failed to mention Gothic and Old English as objects of similarly intensive linguistic study. My interests have always ranged well beyond the Classical ambit, and in particular I've always been drawn to comparative Germanic philology. Given its antiquity and concatenate conservatism, Gothic (as preserved by Wulfila's fourth-century translation of the Bible) remains the chief point of departure for any serious investigation of the Germanic branch (as a whole) of the Indo-European family; Old English, by way of bequest, has committed to posterity one of the largest literary corpora of any ancient Germanic tongue - and if they have not yet been included as subjects in which a tutor may be officially certified, I remain confident in my ability to offer instruction in either or both. If anything, my conversance with Gothic and Old English is in fact greater than my knowledge of Latin.)
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