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I am with you - as someone who was forced to learn Latin in school for four years. The reason given to us was exactly the same, just replace "India and beyond" with "Europe and beyond".

I'll repeat: it has zero value unless you happen to be a researcher or a linguist.

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I only took a year of Latin but I found it very useful in understanding my own language, English, as well as helping me in learning French (almost bilingual) and Spanish (competent). But the biggest benefit was that when I learned Russian, the whole idea of a case system was something that I was already used to, and the rest of Russian grammar (the verb) is incredibly simple in comparison to any other European language. Latin is an ideal stepping stone to fluency in Russian, and that is a very useful language to know in the modern world.

I studied Latin for six years and I don't remember anything about it anymore, but I'm far removed from the linguistic domain now.

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