You Already Know More Latin Than You Think:
Using English to Master Latin Vocabulary
The primary purpose of this
section of the introduction is to demonstrate that the acquisition of
vocabulary, always an immediate concern to beginners, is unusually easy
with Latin. Non-IndoEuropean languages, such as Arabic or Swahili or
Japanese, have extremely limited lexical affinities with English, and
almost every word has to be learned in isolation from English; Latin,
by contrast, is not only IndoEuropean, but the source of most of the
words used in modern English.
In the first chapter of Alice through the Looking-Glass, Alice has to confess that she has only a vague understanding of the poem Jabberwocky:
`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And
the mome raths outgrabe etc.
She appreciates that the poem
is structured like English, but since so many of the words are quite
unlike real English words, she cannot know what they mean. She needs
Humpty Dumpty to explain to her that “Toves are something like
badgers – they’re something like lizards - and they’re something
like corkscrews ... also they make their nests under sun-dials - also
they live on cheese ... a rath is a sort of green pig” etc.
By contrast, since the vocabulary of modern English is fundamentally
indebted to Latin, we need no Humpty Dumpty to help us deduce the meaning
of the majority of Latin words.
It will also be reassuring
to note that Latin has a very small vocabulary. A Roman grammarian of
the classical period estimated that Latin has about 1,000 basic words,
verba primigenia (literally “first-born words”), from which
all other words and word-forms are derived by compounding and inflection.
For example, the noun horror has eight cognate adjectives,
horrendus, horrens, horribilis, horridulus,
horridus, horrifer, horrificabilis, horrificus.
This estimation is rather too
low; it is projected that, when complete, the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae,
the most comprehensive dictionary ever compiled for any major language,
will contain entries for some 50,000 words. Compound forms, of course,
appear under separate lemmata, and the chronological range extends to
c. AD 600, by when large numbers of words, mostly nouns, had been absorbed
from other languages, especially Greek. (Since, for example, Christianity
was introduced from the east by speakers of Greek, much of the vocabulary
of the church is Greek, words such as baptisma, ecclesia,
evangelium, martyr, presbyter.) Nevertheless, there
is a great contrast with English (which admittedly has a exceptionally
large vocabulary, much larger than that of any of the Romance languages);
the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, completed
in 1928, defined 414,825 words, the second, completed in 1989, 615,100.
The number of Latin words surviving
from the classical period is probably not much above 25,000. Since it
is estimated that a reasonably well-educated native speaker of English
is able to recognize about 50,000 words, this total will not seem daunting.
(In speaking, however, such a person uses only between 3,000 and 4,000
words. John Milton’s works contain c. 8,000 words, Shakespeare’s
over 15,000, an astounding achievement at a time when English vocabulary
was so much smaller than it is nowadays.)
The Thesaurus Linguae Latinae
published its first fascicle in 1900, has now reached the letter
p (but with the massive and challenging n so far omitted),
and is scheduled for completion around 2050. It is by far the single
most valuable tool for the modern study of the Latin language. Also
indispensable is the Oxford Latin Dictionary (1968-1982), which
is generally limited to texts from before AD 200 and is much less full
in its citations. There are no comparable lexical resources for medieval
Latin; such an undertaking would be very difficult, given that the vocabulary
has expanded so vastly. Since so much of this huge influx is found only
in particular parts of Europe, being borrowed from localized vernaculars,
it is all but inevitable that the various projects now under way to
produce dictionaries of medieval Latin should be geographically limited.
Unfortunately, only c. 2,500
words, i.e. about 10%, are found more than 100 times in the whole corpus
of classical Latin, whereas by far the greatest number occur fewer than
ten times. To take a particular case: the Amores of Ovid contain
a total of 15,981 words, drawing on 2,932 different words; only 14 very
basic words (meaning e.g. “I”, “you”, “and”, “not”,
“if”, “in”), occur more than 100 times each; rather more than
2,000 occur fewer than ten times each; most significantly, however,
1,314 words, not far short of half of the total of Ovid’s lexical
choice for the whole collection, appear in the Amores only once.
This illustrates an important
difficulty: reinforcing familiarity with vocabulary through frequent
exposure in reading, the method which has proved most effective in learning
modern languages, is possible with Latin only to a limited extent. No
Latinist, however experienced, can dispense with the aid of a dictionary.
The difficulty should not, however, be exaggerated. A vocabulary of
some 800 of the commonest Latin words will become familiar through the
exercises in this course; additional lists of c. 500 common words not
used in the course are given in Appendix 3; a further large number of
words appear, with an accompanying translation, in the sections Verba
Romanorum and Publilii Syri Sententiae. The maxims in these
sections have been selected primarily because they illustrate the grammatical
point introduced in that particular chapter, but they also provide a
first exposure to much new vocabulary and, in the case of the poetic
texts, to some of the forms of expression peculiar to verse. When students
first progress to reading complete texts, editors provide vocabularies
to obviate the chore of dictionary work.
Most importantly, however,
as explained above, even when a word has not been met before, the preponderant
influence of Latin on English ensures that there is a good chance that
its meaning can easily be inferred. To put the apparently ominous infrequency
with which Latin words occur into a proper perspective: those found
only once in the Amores include very many such easily translated
words as sacrilegus, Saturnus, senilis,
septem, serpens, sex, sinuosus, socialis,
spectaclum, speculator, spiritus, splendidus,
squalidus, statio, sterilis, stomachus,
stratum, studiosus, subscribo, suspendo,
suspicio.
If limited vocabulary is the
criterion by which to judge the suitability of a text, Caesar’s
Gallic Wars, with scarcely more than 1,300 different words, stands
out among the great works of classical Latin as by far the most suitable
text for beginners. They also have an elegant but simple style.
These factors, along with their military content, combined to ensure
that they were the first Latin texts read by generations of schoolboys
being groomed for the officer class in Europe’s armies.
Latin came in handy for the
British army in 19th century India. After capturing the province of
Sindh (in modern Pakistan) in 1843, General Sir Charles Napier reportedly
announced his success with a one-word telegram to the Governor General
of India, Lord Dalhousie: peccavi “I have sinned” [pecco
1]. The message will seem particularly apt if one bears in mind that
he was exceeding orders in attacking Sindh. Dalhousie himself is said
to have reported his occupation of Oudh [which rhymes with “loud”,
now Awahd in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh] in 1856,with the
even briefer telegram: vovi “I vowed” [voveo, vovere,
vovi, votum 2 “vow”].
The apparent simplicity of
Caesar’s style, however, is a ploy, intended to portray him as a straightforward
plain-speaking soldier, far removed from the devious sophistry of political
life. He needed all the devious sophistry he could muster:
When news came that Caesar
had attacked the Germans during a period of truce, and had killed 300,000
of them, everyone else thought that a thanksgiving should be celebrated,
but Cato kept urging that Caesar be given over to those whom he had
wronged, so that the pollution caused by his breaking the truce should
not be turned against them and the city (Plutarch, Life of Cato the
Younger 51).
It is perhaps unfortunate for
Caesar’s reputation that his only works to survive are the commentaries
on the Gallic and civil wars. He was one of the most respected intellectuals
of his time, and these works are unlikely to be representative of his
writings. When the emperor Marcus Aurelius complained that he could
scarcely find time for reading, his tutor reminded him that Julius Caesar
wrote a two-book study of Latin grammar during the conquest of Gaul,
“discussing the declension of nouns while missiles flew around”
(Fronto, Letters p. 224 van den Hout). He also composed poetry
while on military campaigns (Suetonius, Life of Julius Caesar
56.5).
Well over 60% of the vocabulary
of non-technical modern English is Latinate. This percentage would increase
very substantially if scientific terminology were included, but not
even the OED can keep pace with the deluge of new words constantly
being created in the wake of new discoveries in chemistry, medicine,
biology etc. To facilitate universal comprehension, almost all
such words are compounds of Latin or Greek, or a combination of both.
Many of these countless terms are known only to a small number of experts,
and most of them have little aesthetic appeal. To cite just one example
from the basis of all cellular forms of life, deoxyribonucleic
(coined in 1931, with the spelling desoxy-) is a farrago
of unhappily linked linguistic units: de is Latin, oxy
is Greek, ribo is an arbitrarily rearranged abbreviation of
arabinose [Greek or Latin with a Latin suffix], nucle is
Latin, ic is Greek. Isidore of Seville (the patron saint of the
Internet) might have taken against this term: “Words that are partly
Greek, partly Latin are called ‘intermediate’. They are also called
‘bastard’, because they corrupt the final syllable while leaving
the earlier ones intact” (Etymologies 1.7.13).
The majority of words in English
are Latinate, but that is not, of course, to say that either spoken
or written modern English pullulates with Latin. Perhaps only four words
derived from Latin, just, number, people
and very, find a place at the lower end of the list of the 100
most frequently used words in English, the others all being Germanic
(the first 25 of them accounting for about one-third of all written
English). There is no consensus on such statistics; to include four
Latinate words is perhaps overgenerous. It is noticeable that three
of the four Latinate candidates for inclusion are not monosyllabic;
the only Germanic word normally reckoned in the top 100 which is not
monosyllabic is water. (Perhaps surprisingly, however, a list
of the 100 most frequent words in modern German has only 31 monosyllabic
words.)
Of the 268 words in Lincoln’s
Gettysburg Address, only 57 are of Latin origin (21%; 43 different
words), as are only 44 of the 263 words of Hamlet’s great soliloquy
(17%; all different). The Hon. Edward Everett was the main speaker at
Gettysburg. Since he was a former professor of Greek at Harvard and
the ceremony had been postponed for two months to give him time to prepare
his two-hour address, he might reasonably be expected to adopt a more
expansive style than did Lincoln: of his first 268 words, 78 are of
Latin origin (29%; 71 different words).
Learning Latin is often said to be the best way to extend one’s English vocabulary, but it may be as well to bear in mind that “a mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details” (George Orwell, Politics & the English Language). Edward Gibbon was thinking more positively along the same lines when he noted that in his Memoirs “all licentious passages are left in the obscurity of a learned language”.
English vocabulary has been
influenced in many fascinating ways by its three most important sources,
Germanic, Latin and (Norman-)French. Some words have come to English
in two or more forms, both more or less directly from Germanic or Latin
as well as through French (e.g. from Germanic and French, ward
and guard, warranty and guarantee, from Latin and
French, catch and chase, dais, desk,
disc [disk], discus and dish, fragile
and frail, rotund and round, secure
and sure, straight, strait and strict).
“Grammar” and “glamor”
deserve special mention: both come through Latin from the Greek γράμματα
(grammata), “writing”, for spells to exert a glamorous charm
required knowledge of gramarye, thought of as “occult learning”.
Sometimes, a Latinate word
was added but did not supplant its Germanic equivalent, thus providing
English with synonymous terms (e.g. the Germanic wedding and
the French marriage, the Germanic kingly and not only
the Latin regal but also the French royal). Sometimes,
a Latin/French word was adopted with a significant change in its meaning.
The words calf, cow, sheep and swine are
all Germanic (mod. Germ. Kalb, Kuh, Schaf and
Schwein), and the modern French forms of their Latinate equivalents
are veau, boeuf, mouton and porc; whereas,
however, the Germanic terms refer to the living animals, which needed
to be looked after by the Anglo-Saxon peasantry, English derives
veal, beef, mutton and pork from the Latinate
forms, for it was the Norman conquerors who ate the meat.
Similarly, “deer” is Germanic
(mod. Germ. Tier, meaning “animal” in general), but venison
is derived from the Latin for “hunting”, venatus, an aristocratic
pursuit. On the other hand, however, “pullet” (mod. Fr. poulet)
refers to the living bird, whereas “chicken” (mod. Germ. Küchlein)
refers both to the living bird and to its flesh. Such double influence
involves other languages also; e.g. “isolate” comes from isola,
“insulate” from insula, respectively the Latin and Italian
words for “island”.
An English translation of the passage given in German and Latin on p. xvii of the textbook is hardly needed:
Hippopotamuses are big, fat animals, which live in Africa, in the river Nile. Many African animals are frightening and very fierce - crocodiles, lions, leopards, rhinoceroses, hyenas, scorpions, vultures, snakes (e.g. pythons, asps, vipers). But hippopotamuses are not timid. They have big bodies, big teeth, big feet, but little ears and a short tail. Africa is a sweltering land. Therefore hippopotamuses stay for many hours in the water of the river and doze, but, when the moon shines in the sky at night, they emerge from the river and devour the abundant grasses.
Hippopotamuses: or “hippopotami”.
Since the plural of “rhinoceros” is the improbable (Greek) “rhinocerotes”
(not “rhinoceri”) or the odd-looking “rhinoceroses”, perhaps
“rhinoceros” should be retained as a zero plural, as with “deer”,
“sheep” or “fish”. Hippopotamuses (and crocodiles) were displayed
in Rome for the first time in the games put on by Aemilius Scaurus in
58 BC. For the same games, Scaurus brought from Joppa in Judaea what
may have been the bones of a dinosaur, but they were billed as those
of the beast from which Andromeda was rescued by Perseus (Pliny Natural
History 9.11).
One expects a language to show a heavy lexical dependence on older languages that share its own particular branch of the family tree. Thanks to the Battle of Hastings, however, English may be regarded as an honorary Romance language. The extent to which English has been receptive to the influence of Latin will seem the more astonishing if one contrasts the conservatism in the development of the Romance languages in their descent from Latin. Perhaps not surprisingly, Italian has a particularly strong affinity to Latin. Not only the vocabulary, but also the word-forms and grammatical structures of the following poem, a eulogy of Venice, written as a virtuoso exercise by Mattia Butturini (1752-1817), are equally correct in classical Latin and in Italian, albeit with a slightly old-fashioned ring to it:
Te saluto, alma dea, dea generosa,
o gloria nostra, o veneta regina!
in procelloso turbine funesto
tu regnasti serena; mille membra
intrepida prostrasti in pugna acerba;
per te miser non fui, per te non gemo,
vivo in pace per te. regna, o beata!
regna in prospera sorte, in pompa augusta,
in perpetuo splendore, in aurea sede!
tu serena, tu placida, tu pia,
tu benigna,
me salva, ama, conserva!
“I salute you, nourishing
goddess, noble goddess,/O our glory, O Venetian queen!/In the stormy
and deadly whirlwind/You reigned serene; a thousand limbs/Fearlessly
you laid low in the bitter battle;/Through you I was not wretched, through
you I do not groan,/I live in peace through you. Reign, O blessed one!/Reign
in prosperous destiny, in reverend pomp,/In everlasting splendor, in
your golden seat!/Serene, calm, dutiful,/Kindly, save me, love me, protect
me!” See M. Pei, The Story of Language, revised ed., Philadelphia
& New York 1965, p. 337.
In 16th-17th century Spain,
writing prose and poetry equally comprehensible in Spanish and Latin
was a fashionable literary exercise. The Indian national hymn is composed
in old-fashioned Bengali, but because Bengali and Hindi are both descended
from Sanskrit, it is comprehensible in both of these rather different
languages.
Sometimes, modern English words
look rather different from their Latin origin. For example, carnival
is derived from caro, carnis “meat” and levare
“to take away”, signifying the abstinence from meat during Lent,
after the festival on Shrove Tuesday – though the popular etymology
caro, vale! “Goodbye, meat!” has a certain appeal. (The French
Mardi Gras “Fat Tuesday” reflects the same origin.) Cologne
(Germ. Köln) was founded by the Romans in 38 BC as Oppidum
Ubiorum “The town of the Ubii [a Germanic tribe]”; in AD 50/51,
the emperor Claudius renamed it Colonia Claudia Augusta Ara Agrippinensium
in honor of his fourth wife, Agrippina the Younger, who was born there.
Tracing the derivation from Latin of words that have undergone a radical
metamorphosis can be fascinating: joy and gaudium mean
the same but look quite different, whereas the sense of nice
is quite different from that of its source, nescius “ignorant”.
There are countless other such surprising, amusing, and informative
etymologies that can only be understood through specialized linguistic
knowledge, but such developments are, exceptional. It is important to
appreciate that, when English has adopted Latin words, it has done so
in a way that is generally systematic, and therefore predictable. The
vast majority of our Latinate words follow a small number of distinct
and obvious patterns of acquisition. The following small selection of
word-groups will make this process clear, and the patterns are also
illustrated in most chapters, in the section Thēsaurus Verbōrum:
decor, error,
pallor, tremor (no change)
argūmentum,
instrūmentum, monumentum, ornāmentum (remove –um)
frīgidus, horridus,
tepidus, timidus (remove –us)
consōlātiō,
dominātiō, meditātiō, prōcrastinātiō (add –n)
concubīna, disciplīna,
doctrīna, medicīna (change –a to silent –e)
mixtūra, nātūra,
pictūra, structūra (change –a to silent –e)
altitūdō, fortitūdō,
magnitūdō, multitūdō (change –o
to silent –e)
captīvus, fugitīvus,
furtīvus, nātīvus (change –us
to silent –e)
inēvītābilis,
memorābilis, probābilis, stābilis (change –ilis
to –le)
abundantia, constantia,
ēlegantia, ignōrantia (change –tia to –ce)
absentia, ēloquentia,
indulgentia, patientia (change –tia to –ce)
colōnia, familia,
furia, glōria (change –ia
to -y)
brevitās, dignitās,
gravitās, simplicitās (change –ās to –y)
audax, capax,
pugnax, vīvax (change –x to –cious).
Latin is still all around us,
and help with deducing the meaning of Latin words can be derived from
many and various sources. All twelve months of the year have Latin(ate)
names, as do all twelve sun-signs in the zodiac. Six of the eight planets
in the solar system are named for Roman deities. Earth is a long
established English word, Uranus is named for a Greek god (as is Pluto;
when William Herschel discovered Uranus in 1781, he had to be dissuaded
from calling it George, after George III of England). Most moons
are named for Greek mythological figures, but those of Uranus are mostly
Shakespearian figures, and the recently discovered moons of Saturn are
giants from disconcertingly miscellaneous mythologies.
Many Latin abbreviations appear
in the Periodic Table, especially among the elements discovered before
the 20th century ; e.g. Ag (argentum) silver, Au
(aurum) gold, Fe (ferrum) iron, Pb (plumbum)
lead. Non-Latinate elements that have been Latinized can seem rather
odd; e.g. berkelium (97), lawrencium (103).
Latin has almost a monopoly
in the naming of body parts. For example, the constituent parts of the
mid-section of the brain (cerebrum) is entirely Latinate: the
crustae, the tegumentum, the substantia nigra, the
tubercula quadrigemina, the corpora geniculata, the “aqueduct
of Sylvius” and the “subthalamic region”, this last being divided
into three layers, the stratum dorsale, the zona incerta
and the corpus subthalamicum (zona and thalamus
were borrowed from Greek already in the classical period).
It may be surprising that body
parts have Latin names, rather than Greek, given that most doctors were
Greek; dissection, however, was little practised in antiquity and the
pioneering medieval and Renaissance surgeons did not know Greek. Dissection
of human corpses was permissible at some periods in Alexandria, but
not elsewhere in the Greco-Roman world. Galen urges medical students
unable to travel to Egypt to grasp any lucky chance to examine bone
structure – a corpse washed out of its grave by a river in flood,
or the skeleton of a highwayman killed by a traveler whom he had attempted
to rob (On Anatomical Procedures 1.2).
It is obvious, but reassuring
nonetheless, that many place-names have survived almost or entirely
unchanged; e.g. Africa, Arabia, Armenia, Asia,
Belgium, Corsica, Creta, Ethiopia, Europa,
Germania, India, Italia, Libya, Macedonia,
Mauritania, Palaestina, Roma, Sardinia,
Syria. The names of many present-day countries are fashioned in
this Latinate manner; e.g. Argentina is the land of silver (argentum),
Australia the land of the South wind (auster), Liberia
the land of the free (liber).
Africa and Asia denoted not only the continents, but also provinces of the empire, roughly equivalent to present-day Tunisia and Turkey respectively. Mauritania was a Roman province, considerably further north than the present-day country. The names of many American states are Latinate, though not classical: Carolina, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Virginia. Florida means “flowery”; the word would be the same in Latin but, like Colorado and Nevada, it is Spanish, perhaps given by Ponce de Leon to commemorate Pascua Florida (Easter). Montana (“mountainous”) is presumably Latin, rather than Spanish (montaña), having been devised by James M. Ashley, governor of the Territory of Montana in 1869-70. New Jersey is named after the British Channel Island; the claim that it is a corruption of Nova Caesarea (cf. Nova Scotia “New Scotland”) is improbable. California was coined as the name of an island inhabited by black Amazons in Garcia Ordóñez de Montalvo's Las Sergas de Esplandián (“The Exploits of Esplandián”), a romance popular at the time of the region's discovery; he seems to have been influenced by caliph, the title given in Muslim countries to the chief civil and religious ruler, as successor of Mohammad.