And the same goes for academic knowledge increasing our understanding of Talmud. Here is a great example:
The Latin teacher at the local Jewish high school used to attend daf yomi. I joked one morning that she can help us understand all the Latin words in the Talmud. Just a few minutes later we discovered that the very first word in that day’s daf was “familia”, a Latin word that is cognate to the English “family”. My hand immediately shot up and I asked the maggid shiur why Chazal hadn’t used the Hebrew term, “mishpachah”. The Latin teacher jumped in, not even waiting for the maggid shiur, and informed us that the meaning of “familia” in Latin was not identical to the English “family” of the Hebrew “mishpachah” because it applied to ones entire household, including slaves and servants. Chazal were being extremely precise and knew exactly what they were doing! However, as the understanding of Latin was lost from our mesorah we can only understand what Chazal meant by relying on such “academic” knowledge.