History of Philosophy (revised)

A couple weeks ago, as I was leaving my classroom between class periods and locking the door, I overheard in the classroom next-door another teacher expounding to his students (I think this was a "learning support" class) on a theme generally relating to personal responsibility, discussing the kinds of things we have control over and the kinds of things we don't have control over, his point being that ultimately we only have control over our own selves.  In support of the points he was making in this exposition he referred to the well-known dictum, "I think, therefore I am," (he did not include its almost as well-known Latin version, "cogito, ergo sum") which he attributed to the famous 15th century philosopher, Frederick Nietzsche.

I mentioned this occurrence to a couple other staff people, but quickly noticed from the expressions on their faces that my colleague was likely not alone in his unfamiliarity with some of the basic factual particulars of a couple major figures in the history of philosophy. I stopped mentioning it to anybody, and just started wondering about the general level of unfamiliarity with this sort of thing, and what that virtual nescience might mean, if anything.

It occurred to me that some months back I had taken note of a poem quoted and comment noted by Guy Davenport in his book, The Hunter Gracchus and Other Papers on Literature & Art (Counterpoint, 1996) in an essay titled "The Comic Muse," a review of The Oxford Book of Comic Verse.  The excerpt is from pages 310-311:

Why is this humble verse, poet unknown, comic?
     Carnation milk is the best in the land.
     Iʻve got a can of it here in my hand -
     No teats to pull, no hay to pitch:
     You just punch a hole in the son of a bitch.
Elizabeth the first would have laughed; Victoria wouldn't.

I noted at the time that if you haven't got a clue who Elizabeth the first and Victoria were, you haven't got a clue what his comment means.

There was an article in Time in its March 3, 1923, issue concerning the debate at Yale over the desirability of retaining Greek and Latin as requirements for the B.A. degree.  The author concluded:

If the great universities, with their manifold departments and courses and degrees retain no common courses in any way related to the history of the race they will graduate men and women who will have nothing in common but their clothes. They will not even talk the same tongue, though they may all speak a dialect of one language. They will be free and unrestrained individuals. And they will have no ancestors whatever.

If we have not quite arrived at that point, we are rather considerably closer than we were in 1923. 

Postal Service Pettiness

According to my Quicken program, it was on March 5, 2011 that I purchased a roll of a hundred forever (currently 44 cents) stamps and a roll of a hundred 17 cent stamps for $61.00.  On Tuesday, August 9, I used two of the last few stamps on that roll of a hundred 17 cent stamps to mail two number 10 envelopes that weighed - according to my fifteen or twenty year old postal scale - between one and two ounces each.  They were mailed from Bedford, Pennsylvania, that afternoon respectively to Levittown and McConnellsburg, Pennsylvania.
The following Saturday morning, August 13, the one addressed to McConnellsburg showed up in my post office box bearing a scrawled notation: "postage due 3¢".  I gave the clerk a dollar bill and a piece of my mind while she added three cents worth of postage to the envelope and returned my ninety-seven cents change. Apparently the envelope had been to McConnellsburg and back in the intervening four days.  Some fanatical bean-counter in the system somewhere a couple days away had decided to teach a postal regulation scoff-law (yours truly) a lesson and sent the thing back through channels.  The other one - same exact weight, same exact amount of postage - has never returned.
The clerk told me she thought the seventeen cent charge for the second and each succeeding ounce on first class mail had been changed to twenty cents around "tax day" (as she put it) - I suppose April 15 or whatever day this year tax returns were due.
I recall seeing nothing about that increase in postal rates.  Of course, that doesn't mean that there was no public notice given or that there was not some piece in the newspaper about that time.  But I genuinely don't remember seeing anything.  Nor has there been any notice posted in the post office, which I visit daily, since I have a post office box, about the three cent increase on the second ounce for first class mail.
Apparently I have been mailing things that weighed more than one ounce with at least three cents postage due on them since the middle of April.  It took me a total of about five months to use up the hundred seventeen cent stamps.  I am now the proud owner of a roll of twenty cent stamps (purchased August 11), which I have been using conscientiously.
My initial reaction was to feel ill-used by the Postal Service; however, now I am wondering whether a humble penitence would not be more appropriate.  After all, about four-fifths of my mailings of more than one ounce the last five months have been three cents short.  That would work out to a free ride of about two dollars and forty cents I have enjoyed at the expense of the Postal Service.  Maybe I should send them a check, or better yet, buy two hundred forty one cent stamps (or a hundred twenty two cent stamps or eighty three cent stamps) and just put them indiscriminately, if entirely unnecessarily, on envelopes until I've used them all up.
Still, I could wish the Postal Service had been as scrupulous about giving public notice of this rate change as it has been about warning potential armed robbers about the consequences of their intended crime, as in this poster prominently displayed on the door of my local post office:

There must be scores if not hundreds of drug or alcohol-addled, marginally literate, firearm wielding felons dumb enough to want to steal a bunch of junk mail, social security checks or rolls of twenty cent stamps who have been definitively deterred by this very scary, very red notice.  It certainly got my notice.

Contemporary Nonfiction - Latin used well; Latin used poorly

 I - Well

It was over the winter just past that I discovered David Foster Wallace, in the form of his essay for Harper's Magazine (April, 2001) entitled "Tense Present: Democracy, English and the Wars over Usage," ostensibly a review of Bryan Garner's A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, but actually a very winningly articulated discussion of the "usage wars," in which he seems to lay the groundwork for a kind of post-prescriptivism that would combine a friendly good sense with a sane respect for tradition.

He begins his piece with the tag: "Dilige et quod vis fac. - St. Augustine."  In a way this sums up his basic point about close questions of usage.  Who, however, would realize that?  The Latin is from the seventh of a series of homilies by this Patristic author on the First Letter of John in the New Testament.  In Latin the name of this collection is In Epistolam Ioannis ad Parthos Tractatus Decem.  Here is the section of this sermon containing this line:

Hoc diximus in similibus factis. In diversis factis, invenimus saevientem hominem factum de caritate; et blandum factum de iniquitate. Puerum caedit pater, et mango blanditur. Si duas res proponas, plagas et blandimenta; quis non eligat blandimenta, et fugiat plagas? Si personas attendas, caritas caedit, blanditur iniquitas. Videte quid commendamus, quia non discernuntur facta hominum, nisi de radice caritatis. Nam multa fieri possunt quae speciem habent bonam, et non procedunt de radice caritatis. Habent enim et spinae flores: quaedam vero videntur aspera, videntur truculenta; sed fiunt ad disciplinam dictante caritate. Semel ergo breve praeceptum tibi praecipitur: Dilige, et quod vis fac: sive taceas, dilectione taceas; sive clames, dilectione clames; sive emendes, dilectione emendes; sive parcas, dilectione parcas: radix sit intus dilectionis, non potest de ista radice nisi bonum existere.

You can find a translation at the New Advent website.  It can scarcely be more conservative and traditional than to cite St. Augustine for anything these days, but of course, like most condensations of wisdom, there is undoubted truth in this nugget, even if, misunderstood, half-understood, or twisted by fanaticism, it could be advanced as justification for the worst sorts of wickedness. 

Was Wallace familiar with the source - i.e., had he read Augustine in the original Latin - or was he aware of the quote from elsewhere - note that as a string in quotes the Latin sentence fetches some 227,000 hits on Google?  Or is the more pertinent question really what sort of readership had Wallace in mind. Consider the other sprinkles of Latin in the essay:

• Not more than a couple pages later, we encounter the second Latin expression:  "A Dictionary of Modern American Usage has no Editorial Staff or Distinguished Panel.  Itʻs conceived, researched, and written ab ovo usque ad mala by Bryan Garner."  (p. 42)  
• On the same page he appends a footnote [he loves footnotes] to the use of a cardinal number in stating the age of an individual: "(7. Garner prescribes spelling out only numbers under ten.  I was taught that this rule applies just to Business Writing and that in all other modes you spell out one through nineteen and start using cardinals at 20. De gustibus non est disputandum.)" 
• Another shot of Latin is not injected until page 46, again in another footnote: "19  Standard Written English (SWE) is also sometimes called Standard English (SE) or Educated English, but the inditement-emphasis is the same.    SEMI-INTERPOLATION    Plus note that Garnerʻs Preface explicitly names ADMAUʻs intended audience as "writers and editors."  And even ads for the dictionary in such organs as The New York Review of Books are built around the slogan "If you like to WRITE. . . Refer to us." (Yr. snoot rev. cannot help observing, w/r/t these ads. that the opening r in Refer here should not be capitalized after a dependent clause + ellipse -- Quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus.)"  
• Not until page 51 do we encounter a little more Latin, this time the title of a book, again in a footnote: "33  (Q.v. for example Sir Thomas Smithʻs cortex-withering De Recta et Emendata Linguae Anglicae Scriptione Diologus of 1568.)" [note that unfortunately a spelling error has intruded - Diologus should of course be Dialogus - and note if youʻre interested you can get a reprint of the book from Amazon].  
• The last bit of Latin appears at page 57: "Garner recognizes something that neither of the dogmatic camps appears to get: Given 40 years of the Usage Wars, "authority" is no longer something a lexicographer can just presume ex officio."  

I have provided links to Wikipedia explanations of all these expressions.  Note that Wallace never offers a translation or explanation (other than what may be gleaned from his immediate context).  But note as well that every use of a Latin expression adds something, ordinarily to the meaning itself of what he is saying, but in every instance certainly to the tone and style with which he says it.  Still remains the question what sort of person did Wallace expect would be reading this?  Certainly he was assuming a readership such that either he did not even consider using English equivalents instead of the Latin, or he considered and rejected the idea.

I pass over the fact that Wallace does not seem to have a solid grasp of the Latin abbreviation q.v. (quod vide).  He uses it on three occasions.  In each, as in footnote 33 page 51, he seems to really mean vide.  At least he does not use cf. when he only wants to suggest that the reader look at something else.

II - Poorly

In contrast to the deft and appropriate use of Latin in Wallace's article, consider this passage from another book I recently read, Diane Ravitch's "The Death and Life of the Great American School System", pp. 166-7: "When we define what matters in education only by what we can measure, we are in serious trouble.  When that happens, we tend to forget that schools are responsible for shaping character, developing sound minds in healthy bodies (mens sana in corpore sano), and forming citizens for our democracy, not just for teaching basic skills."  Here, the Latin is almost perfectly pointless.  It is nothing more than a sort of translation into Latin of the preceding English phrase "sound minds in healthy bodies" - I say sort of since it ignores the plural/singular issue so as to stay with the proverbial original.  It adds no twist or comment.  It is a mere redundancy.  It seems to have been added - and parenthetically at that - only as some kind of citation to ancient authority in support of the proposition that it is a good idea to have a sound mind in a healthy body.  For some 160 pages I had been following her arguments, thinking them pretty sound and pretty effectively marshaled, and only mildly annoyed by her habit of name-dropping, when this infelicity appeared.   It leaves me wondering why on earth did she bother dropping this Latin nugget into her sentence.  Recall that the author holds a doctorate in history, writes extensively on the history of education, and has filled a number of impressively named posts in government (Bush I and Clinton administrations) and private institutions.  This is all the Latin she could muster in support of any of the ideas in her book?

Poe's preface to The Pit and the Pendulum

What's up with prefaces in Latin?

Consider Poe's 1842 story The Pit and the Pendulum, which he introduces with this pair of elegiac couplets:

           Impia tortorum longos hic turba furores,
           sanguinis innocui non satiata, aluit.
           Sospite nunc patria, fracto nunc funeris antro,
           Mors ubi dira fuit, vita salusque patent.

He adds this note: "a quatrain composed for the gates of a market to be erected upon the site of the Jacobin Club at Paris." He apparently got the lines here.

This introduction sums up the entire story. The impia. . . turba. . .sanguinis innocui non satiata - the bloodthirsty Inquisition dedicated to rooting out and destroying religious heresy - can hardly not be equated with the Jacobin Club - the bloodthirsty revolutionaries dedicated to rooting out and destroying political heresy. This unholy mob has fed its longlasting insanity, but now the land has been made safe, the murderous pit has been eradicated and where once there was terrible death, now there is life and well-being. In short, the narrator will not die. There will be a rescue.

This might seem to imply that for the author the ending of the story has almost no importance [note that this notion derives some support from the very abruptness and brevity of the concluding paragraph of the story], that the key thing is to have his reader focus on the elegant effectiveness of his evocation of the dread, terror and despair of someone undergoing this sort of physical and psychological torture. Of course the ending is not without any importance. Probably it was also one of the objects of the author to induce by means of his artistry, not only the necessary suspension of disbelief for any work of fiction, but also a certain oblivion with respect to the already known outcome. In other words one wonders more at the power of the prose for having been duped by it into vicariously participating in the narrator's struggle for life in the midst of such desperate circumstances. Note that without this consideration, the whole conceit seems silly: since the tale is told by a narrator, obviously he must have survived the experience in order to be telling it. With the preface Poe puts the silliness on the table and says to his intelligent reader: "I know you know how it ends - I just told you - now come with me into the mind and body of this narrator and watch me recreate the experience."

Poe could assume a readership adequate to his Latin preface in 1842, a readership knowledgeable about the major events of the relatively recent (within the preceding forty or fifty years) upheaval in France. I doubt that this is any longer the case. Indeed it is probable nowadays that not one in ten thousand high school English teachers (nor one in a million of their students) can read and understand this Latin preface, or know a Jacobin from a jack-ass.

If only a very few actually "get" the preface and its relation to the story, what really is the point of teaching The Pit and the Pendulum in the modern classroom? Is there much left of the story without the preface besides overwrought 19th century guff?

More Movie Latin

Les rivières pourpres is the title of a 1997 crime novel by French author Jean-Christophe Grangé.   The book incorporates a pair of engagingly iconoclastic cops, some villainous academic types plotting world domination by eugenics and the fast pace of a typical pot-boiler.  The author teamed up with Mathieu Kassovits (who played Nino Quincampoix in Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain) to write a screen-play, and the movie (English title - The Crimson Rivers) directed by Kassovits, became a big hit upon its release in 2000, according to Wikipedia "grossing $60 million in worldwide theatrical release."

The novel doesn't have a word of Latin in it, the movie otherwise.  The headquarters of the villainous academic types is the Pôle Universitaire et Sportif de Guernon - somewhere in the French Alps.  The logo for the place looks like this:

This appears on walls, shirts, jackets, etc.  The Latin is, of course, the very familiar quote excerpted from Juvenal's Satires (10.356: orandum est ut sit mens sana in corpore sano.)

Besides this reference to the Silver Age satirist, a reference to one of the premier Golden Age poets shows up in a plaque that appears on a wall shortly after the arrival of Commissaire Niemans in Guernon:

Here we have a rendering in French of Vergil's line, Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas, from the Georgics (Book II, line 490), and kind of a subtle, clever little thing equally apt for the detectives who will get to the bottom of things and for the Dr. Frankenstein imitators who think they have thought up a way to re-engineer the race.  There is a reasonable possibility this is an intentional allusion on the part of the filmmakers since the phrase had shown up in an Astérix et Obélix story - Astérix en Corse (1973) - when the pirates experienced an explosion brought on by a Corsican cheese (Explosion provoquée par un fromage Corse), and since the line fetches over a hundred thousand French hits when googled in quotes.

So far so good.  However, things start breaking down when the Latin gets carved in stone, or what passes for stone in a film.  This appears above the entrance to one of the main buildings:

It looks like this is a Latin rendering of what Grangé has one of the murdered villains (victim #2) write in his notebook (from page 199 of the novel), with the addition of the word "Scientia" (knowledge) above it: 

NOUS SOMMES LES MAÎTRES, NOUS SOMMES LES ESCLAVES.

NOUS SOMMES PARTOUT, NOUS SOMMES NULLE PART.

NOUS SOMMES LES ARPENTEURS.

NOUS MAÎTRISONS LES RIVIÈRES POURPRES.

Note that the reference to surveyors has been omitted and the word "sumus" (we are) both prominently and ambiguously (but fittingly for a lapidary style) placed so as to seem to apply, one surmises, not only to "scientia" (which may possibly be in the ablative case - though that possibility may be no more than a happy accident and in which case the verb might more appropriately be "fimus" or possibly "facti sumus") but also to the other nominal and adverbial predicates in the French.  The problem is "purpereis rivis".  The case is right, since "imperare" governs the dative, but the spelling of "crimson" is amiss; it should be "purpureis." As a color adjective it should follow its noun.  The other troubling thing is that the word "rivis" is off as a translation for "rivières" -  "cours d'eau naturel de moyenne importance ou qui se jette dans un autre cours d'eau (opposé à fleuve)" (Le Robert Micro).  Better would have been any of the usual Latin synonyms for river: "flumen" or "fluvius" or "amnis."  A "rivus" on the other hand is a "small stream of water, a brook" (Lewis and Short).

When we get to the first murdered villain's notebook, things take a decided turn for the worse.  This is apparently the poor fellow's doctoral thesis and has a leather cover with another translation of the manifesto embossed on it, like this (sorry for the drastic cropping; couldn't get a good (legible) shot of the whole thing):

As best I can tell this reads:

DOMINI SUMUS. SUMUS SERVI.

UBICUMQUE. NUSQUAMQUE.

VERSAMUR PURPUREIS.

LUMINIBUS IMPERAMUS.

There are three problems with the Latin.  There seem to be way too many periods (why would we be dwelling, staying, living, remaining or abiding in or with crimson things; or simply being or being circumstanced or situated with crimson things; or being occupied, busied or engaged with crimson things - "versamur purpureis" - when it would make more sense to assert that "we are (or abide) everywhere and nowhere? i.e., take "versamur" with both preceding adverbs and "imperamus" with the two words preceding it, as it is in the French).  The translator has used the wrong word "ubicumque" (in whatever place, wherever; somewhere, wherever that may be ) for "ubique" (in every place, everywhere).   And somebody left the "F" off "luminibus" which without that "F" means "lights" not "rivers".  As might have been expected the subtitling is even worse:

This is subtitling so carelessly done as to seem surpassingly stupid, since there was no need to translate anything, just to read, i.e., print, the words written on the top line of the leather notebook cover: domini sumus. sumus servi. 

Is it impossible for a film with a 14 million dollar budget to get a decent quality Latinist on board?   What would the Latin look like in a better rendering?  There are no doubt dozens of possibilities, but here is one rather straightforward suggestion (restoring the surveyor reference but eliminating the anaphora):

Nos, simul domini servique, fluminibus purpureis imperantes, 

mensores, et ubique et nusquam versamur.

So, just a suggestion, Christophe, or Mathieu, or whoever does Les rivières pourpres III. . . Feel free to drop me a line the next time you think it's a good idea to punch up the symbolism in your next screen-play with a little Latin.

It has occurred to me since posting this originally that the fault may lie not so much with the contributor of the Latin rendering as with those who executed that contribution by preparing the stone inscription and the leather note-book cover.  Certainly it would be rather unexpected to have tech people and other artisans who had upper-level Latin composition skills.  I suppose that once the project got into the editing room - if indeed anybody even at that point noticed the problems - it was too late to do anything about it. 

time machine

I think I'll invent a time machine, kind of a cool looking box like one of those Apple computers, that start at $599, like this:

On my flat little squarish thing with rounded corners and the logo on top (note: I might skip the logo since the apple is probably proprietary and a watermelon would be too big, a grape too small, and a banana too long, yellow and phallicky. . . maybe I could try a negative image of itself - a slick drawing from a unique perspective - scaled down to about the same ratios as this one . . . oh, I don't know; I hate having to be creative) just as with this one, there wouldn't even be a button to start it.  You'd just put it on your desk or coffee table and it would apparently do nothing for what would seem like forever and then at some unspecified, undesignated, indeterminate time in the future it would just work and suddenly you would see some kind of touch screen in the air hovering over it with images and text for suggested times and places to go visit in the past - maybe clickable ads for popular venues and things to wear and drink when you're there - and a box you could type in some address or other like Google Earth with a date and time of day, and then, zoom, you'd just go there to that place and time.  Yes, you could type, because the thing would be projecting a holographic keyboard like this nifty little gizmo here:

The more specific the coordinates of the location on the space-time continuum you input, the better chance you would have of not ending up in a wall or a freeway or congress or something.

While waiting for it to become active, you'd just go about your daily life, such as it is and whatever it is.  Or you could sit and stare at it like a TV.  I could even invent a remote for it.  There would be no apparent effect from clicking up or down the range of channels, but the exercise might have something to do with the mechanism for the activation of the machine itself.  Probably most people would not notice any difference between doing this with the time-travel box and doing it with regular TV.

Whatever time and place you pick to time-travel to, the box would instantaneously give you fully developed skills in the language spoken and written there, so you could understand Homeric Greek or Elizabethan English or the Italian of the Renaissance or Rap Music without having to buy Rosetta Stone.  I think it would do this by a process of molecular transformation of your brain which would be necessarily incidental to the manipulation of the time-space continuum entailed by time travel in the first place.  Or maybe there would be a sort of wireless upload direct to the brain of something digitalized from the stem-cells of geniuses.  Wait, both those ideas sound a little unscientific.  This might be better.  The box, upon becoming active, does its little number and sends itself far enough into the future where somebody smarter than I am has thought all this out, uploads whatever app is necessary for it to handle this language thing and then returns to your desk or coffee table instantaneously as if nothing had happened and you were still just staring at it, waiting for something to happen, idly clicking the remote.

Ooh ooh, I just remembered, it probably would be necessary add a thing in the holographic touch screen so you could set a duration for the trip, since once you got back to, say, the Renaissance, you'd have to wait a significantly longer time for the box to be invented in order to program yourself back to the present.  Most people probably would not live that long.  On the other hand, suppose you changed your mind and wanted to stay there, or you're in the middle something you really want to finish and forgot what time it was. . . Needs more thought.  Or maybe I could just have the box include a life-expectancy enhancer as part of the overall time-travel experience which the box is capable of producing. . . yeah, that's it, some kind of a cross between a five hour energy drink, Viagra and penicillin.  Or, maybe, wait a minute, okay, got it now - the experience includes a mind operated homing device like GPS: you just think yourself back to your original space-time continuum coordinates.

Or would it be better to have the box create some kind of eco-friendly vehicle for your time-space transportation pleasure, maybe like this?

 

(All I did here was google "weird ass electric cars" and this is one of the coolest images that popped up.)

 Or maybe this one is cooler?  At least it's a little more aerodynamic.

(Believe it or not, this sleek little dark charmer was on the same page as the geek-mobile above.)

Nawh, that's not such a good idea.  Consider the effect on folks in the time and place you choose to visit.  I can't even imagine how freaked out the ordinary people of the time would be if either of these cool sets of wheels dropped out of the sky in the middle, say, of a medieval French village while peasants were just going about their late morning daily squalor and ignorance.  It probably would be necessary to do an immediate time-travel re-set to prevent a pitchfork attack by a mob of desperately stupid villagers.  Good thing I thought of that mind operated homing device.  But why not avoid all that in the first place and just skip the car thing?

I'm not sure what happens after the box becomes active and you start time-traveling.  I guess you could just go on time-traveling forever, although it is not clear what the term forever could reasonably mean.  Maybe the short answer is that there there would be no point to the question, since basically for the thing to have become active there would have to have been some kind of holistic paradigm shift in the composition of the universe of such a kind and nature as to have caused to be filled, of its own volition - as it were - and without any apparent physical explanation, a perfectly empty, though really cool looking, box with some kind of time-travel circuit wizardry.  Obviously, if that can happen then pretty much anything can happen. 

Latin and the SAT

There is some interesting statistical information for Latin teachers and students in the 2010 College-Bound Seniors Total Group Profile Report by the College Board.  It is accessible here: http://professionals.collegeboard.com/data-reports-research/sat/cb-seniors-2010

The information suggests a little inquiry into how students who take Latin fare on the Reading, Mathematics and Writing tests vis-a-vis students who take other languages and vis-a-vis students taking other subjects (not necessarily excluding foreign languages as well, I suppose).  The base line is the average for all 1.5 million test-takers (Table 1):

Table 17 offers SAT mean scores for students taking different foreign languages, both by language and years pursued (including AP/Honors Courses). 

In the total of the mean scores, Latin (1667) is exceeded only by Chinese (1702).  Latin is 50 to 60 points above the national average on each of the three mean scores.  Spanish is almost dead on the national average.  French - the other subject I teach - is in between.  There are almost 11 times the number of Spanish students as Latin Students and almost three times the number of French students.  As one would have suspected students who have taken an AP/Honors course or have pursued the study of a language at least four years or both, have significantly higher reading, math and writing mean scores than those who have not.  Unfortunately this particular sub-set of data is not broken down by language.  Where Latin stacks up with respect to correlations with other course work is more fully developed in Tables 15 - 18 (the others of which I am not going to cut and paste here).  In these the figures indicate that of all the other course work mentioned (ten for English, five for Math, five for sciences, ten for History, eight for the Arts, six for Computers, as well as the nine other Foreign Languages besides Latin), only those taking Calculus (total mean scores: 1748 for 356,931 students) and Chinese (total mean scores: 1702 for 29,231 students) have higher mean SAT scores than were achieved by the 76,904 takers of Latin courses (total mean scores: 1667). 

Just as one comparison - since courses revolving around the operation of computers seem to be proliferating - here is the same set of mean scores correlated with courses in, e.g., computer literacy, computer programming and the like.  Since these are all around or close to the average scores, there would seem to be little correlation between these academic pursuits and better than average SAT scores.

Table 20 offers the same data for students who took various subject tests.  I break this down into two tables, one for the language tests and the other for English, History, Math and Science tests.

This tends to suggest that for students with sufficient confidence in a subject to sign up for a subject test, among foreign language students Latin students are easily in the top position with respect to their mean scores in Reading and Writing, and second only to Chinese students in Math (by only 3 points).  I note that all the scores on this chart are way above the national averages, though again Spanish students are in the bottom position relative to the others.  The Latin students also outscore in their mean Reading, Math and Writing scores all others testing in English, History, Math and Science, with the exception of Chemistry and Physics students who outscore them in Math.  I suspect it is also noteworthy that the standard deviation on the three main tests for those taking the Latin subject test is the lowest of the whole bunch, indicating that these scores are all clustered more tightly around the numerical average. 

One other interesting comparison is found in the tables on the Subject Tests Score Distributions (tables 21 - 24).  I include here only table 24:

Table 23 shows similar distributions for Chinese, French, German and Hebrew.  It looks like Latin students were the least prepared to perform at the highest level on their particular subject test of any students taking any language subject test, and the distribution of their scores was almost even in each 50th from 800 down to 500.  Nevertheless, as was obvious from Table 20, there is something about this particular group of 2,874 students which is correlated with a set of very high mean SAT scores. 

I really don't know what that something is.  There may be something about Latin that leads those who pursue its study for several years to have a higher than average competency level in reading comprehension, mathematical reasoning and writing skills.  On the other hand, those who have higher than average competency levels in reading comprehension, mathematical reasoning and writing skills may gravitate (or be pushed) toward the study of Latin.  Maybe there is something to both explanations.

The other question - related but perhaps more perplexing - is why the number of Latin students is so relatively low.  Note that the number of students taking the Latin subject test is one percent of the total number of students taking subject tests.  Note that the number of students who reported having taken Latin (76,094) is about five percent of the total SAT test takers (1,547,990).  In my small high school (about 600 students fairly evenly distributed in grades 9 - 12), this year (2010-2011) there have been two Latin IV students and one Latin III student, zero French IV students and three French III students - i.e., about one percent in upper level Latin and in upper level French.  There are about 30 French and 30 Latin students altogether over all four grade levels.  There are more than twice as many Spanish students. 

One would think that if high SAT scores really mattered there would be a lot more students taking Latin.  Either hardly anybody has been paying attention to this batch of statistics (and they seem to have been pointing the same direction for years - check out Bolchazy-Carducci's [less than wholly candid] Latin advantage page), or perhaps only about five percent of the population actually has enough competency in reading comprehension, mathematical reasoning and writing skills to take Latin.