A large number of non-fiction books occupy my shelves. Many are quite scholarly and more than a few of them are sprinkled with Latin quotations. Many authors are thoughtful enough to provide translations (usually at the bottom of the page as a footnote). However some make the assumption that if you are scholarly enough to read their book then you must certainly be fluent in Latin and so don’t bother with helping the poor reader out. Since my formal Latin training has been confined to what was covered in high school Latin umpteen years ago and now long forgotten, I have often been left scratching my head.
Granted a surprising number of English words are derived from Latin, it is dimly possible to get a sense of the gist of what the quotation means. For example, nauta is Latin for sailor, hence our modern word of nautical. Circum means around and has found its way into circumference, circle, etc. But other words are more ambiguous. The word Acta in the above quote can mean several things. It can be a noun meaning seashore. But depending on how it is conjugated, it can also be a verb meaning ‘to act‘ or ‘to drive’. The precise meaning of the above phrase is ‘Deeds, not words’. If you have no idea how many different ways Latin words can be parsed, you might inadvertantly read the above as ‘Acting is not talking,’ or ‘the seashore doesn’t talk’. Yipes!
This just won’t do, of course. So rather than curse the darkness (so to speak), I’ve decided to light a candle and relearn Latin. With many English words derived from Latin, acquiring a basic vocabulary isn’t too difficult. The real challenge is grappling with all those conjugations and declensions. The late British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, described in his autobiography My Early Life his introduction to Latin at the boarding school he got incarcerated – ahem – enrolled in. It’s obvious from the dialogue that the Headmaster was a sadist who had no interest in teaching children, only in collecting the money the parents of the unfortunate child paid for the poor little sod’s education.
So what are conjugations and declensions? Declension, to put it as simply as possible involves changing the ending of a noun as a way of indicating its position in a sentence. For example (in Winston’s case), the sentence, ‘the table is in the room’, has table as the subject (referred to as the nominative) so it would be mensa. If the sentence is ‘I have a table’, then the word table is now the direct object (or accusative) and would be mensam. In ‘The room has a chair with a table’, table is now an indirect object (dative) so would be mensae, if it’s ablative, it would be mensa often spelled with a little line over the letter ‘a’, called a macron, to help distinguish it from the nominative singular. The sentence, ‘The table’s color is red’, has table as the genitive, meaning possession, so it would be mensae. The Mensa or ‘O table’ young Winston was baffled by is known as the vocative, which is what you use when greeting someone. To give you an idea of how complex declensions can be, be aware there are five declensions in Latin, based on whether a word is feminine, masculine, neuter, and so forth.
Conjugations follow the same pattern only with verbs. There are four conjugations, all dependent on person, gender, tense, mood as well as other factors. The verb endings tell where the verb falls in the sentence, whether it’s plural or singular and so on. No wonder poor little Winston was so confused! Having only covered the first two declensions myself, I can already appreciate the frustration countless schoolchildren before me have experienced. Context is everything and you must always pay close attention to a word’s position in a sentence as well as what the sentences around it say to give you an idea of the word’s correct meaning. To help in my memorization I have written down the declensions and conjugations on large size index cards for quick reference as I go along.
Then there’s the matter of pronunciation. There are two ways of speaking Latin. One is called the Classical way, meaning the way we think Latin was spoken by its natives at the height of the Roman Empire. This was introduced by 19th century scholars, after their research seemed to indicate this is how it was pronounced by the original Romans. Since nobody has Mr. Peabody’s Wayback Machine, there’s no way to go back in time to verify this so it’s really an assumption rather than an established fact.
Then there is what is called the Ecclesiastical way, meaning as it was spoken in the fading years of the Roman Empire going forward into modern times in the Catholic Church. The differences between the two are relatively minor. In Classical Latin the letter ‘c’ is given a hard sound, as in catch while in Ecclesiastical Latin, it’s often given a soft sound (circle) or a ‘ch’ pronunciation. The letter ‘v’ in Classical is given a ‘w’ sound while it’s spoken the modern way in Ecclesiastical.
There seems to be a fuss going on about the merits of either system which is strange if you think about it. After all, this is a language nobody but scholars and Catholic clergy speak anymore. To me it’s all a tempest in a teapot. My goal in learning Latin is to just be able to read it. How it’s pronounced is a minor matter to me. I am using two self-education books, Getting Started With Latin and Keep Going with Latin by William Linney. His preference is for the Classical pronunciation so I’m following his lead. Someone online was thoughtful enough to scan the Oxford Latin Course :Part 1 (second edition) into PDF format which I have downloaded. They also seem to favor the Classical pronunciation. Wheelock’s Latin (7th edition) which I purchased secondhand from Thriftbooks also uses the Classical while a discarded high school first year Latin book (which looks like the one used in my high school class) which I found up at the local recycling station also seemed inclined to Classical though in a desultory sort of way. If your preference is for the Ecclesiastical that is fine. I doubt the Latin Pronunciation Police are going to come down on either one of us.
So if you are chafing from boredom under the Lockdown, you could do worse than to introduce or reintroduce yourself to Latin. Unlike poor Winston you won’t need to fear a thrashing from your Headmaster. You can take your time, review and practice to your heart’s content without worrying about a semester deadline. And best of all – NO FINAL EXAMS OR TERM PAPERS!
