What the Romans did for the English language

‘Apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?’, asks the leader of the People’s Front of Judea in Monty Python’s 1979 film Life of Brian .

The appearance on the left ( sinister ) side was considered an ill omen, hence our modern word ‘sinister’

We, too, might think of the Rome’s legacy largely in terms of infrastructure projects such as roads, sewers and public baths. But there’s an even more obvious and ubiquitous bequest: the words we speak and the context and concepts that gave birth to them. Almost a third of English vocabulary derives directly from Latin. Add the Latin words that entered English through French, and nearly 60 per cent of our vocabulary tra