Why Latin?

English, as we have wearily heard repeated in dreary textbooks, takes about sixty percent of its words--either directly or via modern romance languages-- from Latin. Any student who has invested strenuous years in Latin, both reading and writing it, will own an obvious edge with English over those who haven't. Not only has that student learned what the words mean, he has learned what they have meant; he has seen them jostling and lounging in their original habitat. They've gamboled at his feet. "Liberty" never means the same thing after our backs have been burdened with the full Roman weight of libertas...
...If people have family trees, so have words, and tracing their branches through time and place reveals the complexity of their characters. memorizing them, as we must do when learning to use a language, stretches the mind.
Our brains become more capacious: the more we memorize, the more we can memorize. We begin to feel at home with those old words, and thus we feel more at home with their descendants in our own tongue. Once we have seen and used them, they're strangers no more. They're tactile; we can roll them in our hands. Commerce with them becomes easy."
~T. L. Simmons, Climbing Parnassus, p.168