From the The Yorkshire Post
Martin Wainwright

One of the pleasures of modern Yorkshire is the range of languages  you hear in the street and out and about generally; a barmaid's  liquid vowels can only be Eastern European; when I chatted to a man  in Middlesbrough who was mending setts and using a lot of shishing  sounds as he talked to his friends, he turned out to be Portuguese.

It helps that I'm the inoffensive age where I can make personal  inquiries without being suspected of dubious intent. Through  eavesdropping unusual sounds and then simply, boldly saying: "I hope  you don't mind me asking, but where are you from?"  I've met an  Indian student, an Estonian doctor and an Uzbek engineer in as many  days; and that was just on the transPennine train between Manchester  and Leeds.

The bus up Kirkstall Road is even better, because at the Waterside  outpost of the Home Office's immigration department, the whole of the  United Nations gets on or off. All my life, I've enjoyed a more  parochial version of this game, just with Yorkshire talk: 'Bratford'  invariably marking out a Bradfordfordian, thee-ing and thou-ing  pointing you in the direction of Doncaster or Barnsley. But expanding  it on to a global scale is much more interesting; and a cosmopolitan  society is invariably livelier and wealthier than a monochrome one.

But there is one language missing, at least to the ear. With our eyes  we can see it everywhere. What is this script saying 'Pro rege et  lege' on anything to do with Leeds city council? Or Labor omnia  vincit above the main doorway to the old lanolin pressing sheds at  Esholt sewage works?

Get thee to your Latin dictionary. And this is an appropriate month  to do so, because on the 15th we pass through the Ides of March, one  of the three monthly stages of the Roman calendar along with the  Nones and Kalends. Calendar    Kalends     Next time you watch ITV's  regional news programme, reflect on the homage its title pays to the  language of Julius Caesar who was murdered at the Ides.

As a result, 'The Ides of March' is one of those expressions which  have entered the language. We all know that we must beware of them,  but if the study of Latin slides too far into the realm of rust and  moths, we may forget why, even with the powerful prompting given by  Shakespeare. Ditto with the Ebor Stakes at York races; we need Latin  to know the meaning of the word Ebor (which in Suffolk means "hello  brother", if you include a pause between the E and the bor). Here,  John Sentamu signs his name with it, because it is the short version  of Eboracum, the original name for York.

There are countless other examples, but my own motive for promoting  Latin is not the serious one of keeping our grammatical or historical  links with the past, but much more light-hearted. Once you know the  basics - and it isn't terribly difficult with modern, cheerful  teaching methods - you can have a high old time enjoying the  inscriptions going back to Roman days which still stand all over our  county.

Unlike modern electronic messages, which I constantly fear may be  wiped out by a meteor passing close to Earth, Latin comes carved in  stone or etched into brass. There are some cracking examples in Leeds  new museum (or rather Leeds' old museum which has at last re-opened,  most successfully, in the former Mechanics Institute and Civic  Theatre overlooking Millennium Square. Aldborough is another  excellent place to scout them out, and so is pretty much every church  and graveyard between Croft and Bawtry.

You don't have to be posh or private school to make a go of this  enthusiasm. A vigorous promoter of Latin called Peter Jones, formerly  of Newcastle University and now an emeritus professor there, has  popularised it all over the North of England. I remember going to  report a class at Chester-le-Street's Park View comprehensive whose  teenagers loved using ego and amo and the rest of it. An in-depth  session on the curious open-plan lavatories used by the Wall garrison  at Housesteads fort, not far away, may have helped. But classical  texts have always been a respectable way for school students to read  about things which they're not supposed to download from the internet.

Another homespun example of a Latin keeny is the great writer Thomas  Hardy, a builder's son who realised that learning the language was  essential to getting on in life. You couldn't, for example, got to  Oxford or Cambridge without it in his day, the end of the 19th  century. So he bought himself A Guide to the Latin Tongue at the age  of 12 and sorted it, helped by his own code of coloured crayons.  Ancient stuff, you say? Not so. My own sons' Leeds comprehensive  offered Latin, and still does, as a come-on for students who want to  try Oxbridge. It was taught in the boys' time by a marvellous woman  who declaimed the ancient language like a member of the Senate,  waving fingers ornamented by chunky jewelled rings.

Floreat Latin, then! And perhaps we can go further and revive  classical Greek, as used by Aristotle and Plato. And also by kebab  houses all over Yorkshire in its modern form.