LATIN
How Grammar Can Save Your Life by David Lindemann
I’M
not a Latin teacher; I'm a doctor. I didn't learn Latin growing up, other than maybe the conjugation of amo, but I'm learning it now as I teach my children. I have heard many times about the benefits of Latin—not only how it helps to build vocabulary knowledge, but how it helps you to better understand and master English grammar. Grammar is indeed important. We are linguistic creatures. There is something about the structure of language that reflects things that go very deep into our souls. As a doctor working with PTSD patients, I have seen this again and again.
David Lindemann trained at the University of Kentucky and Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation (PM&R). He retired from the military in 2017 to pursue his current work assisting clients healing from chronic health issues related to trauma. He and his wife, Jenn, live in Kentucky and have seven children.
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How Grammar Can Save Your Life
One morning in 2015, I was seeing a patient suffering from PTSD at Eisenhower Army Medical Center in the Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Clinic in Augusta, Georgia, where I was a physician. I had not planned to teach a grammar lesson that day, and yet I found myself reviewing basic categories of verbs with a patient. I asked her, "Are you safe?," which is an existential "I am" question. She answered using an entirely different kind of verb: "No, I don't feel safe," which is an attributive "I feel" statement. So, having repeated her answer, I asked my question again: "I know you don't feel (attributive) safe, but are you safe (existential/identity)?" And then a wonderful thing happened. She paused, looked around, and started to implicitly distinguish between existential verbs of being/identity ("I am") and attributive verbs of internal experience/ physiology ("I feel"). MemoriaPress.com
