Latin Alive: How Latin Survives in English and Romance Languages | History, Etymology & Language Evolution for Students & Linguists

This book is both enjoyably readable and very informative. I'm not a classics scholar or historian by any means, but here are some of the fun things I learned from this book:-The word "bed" in "flower bed" is the older usage of that word, and "bed" as a piece of furniture to sleep on came along later.-The fact that in high school I vastly preferred the 1st and 2nd (Latin) declensions (due to their easiness) as opposed to the 3rd, 4th, and 5th declensions turns out to have been a rather universal preference that had interesting ramifications for the Romance languages.-French really is harder to learn than Spanish for some valid reasons.One of the other Amazon reviewers stated this is "not for the amateur reader". I disagree. While I did take 4 years of Latin in high school, that was ages ago, and so I don't really remember any of it. (Even that bit about declensions above is me remembering my preferences, not how to actually decline anything.) I don't have any expertise in this area other than a love for etymology and occasionally reading about classical history, and I found this book very easy to follow.