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[P. Kerim Friedman]

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Latin today

Roman rebound

Dec 18th 2003

So you thought that irksome language was dead?


TO SCARY music, a furtive Jewish nationalist of the first century
paints on a wall the words Romanes Eunt Domus. A centurion enters:

Centurion: What's this, then? ? ‘People called Romanes they go the
house?’
Nationalist: It—it says, ‘Romans, go home’.
Centurion: No, it doesn't. ‘Go home’? This is motion towards. Isn't it,
boy?
Nationalist (being savagely beaten): Ah. Ah, dative, sir! Ahh! No, not
dative! Not the dative, sir! No! Ah! Oh, the...accusative!Domum, sir!
Ah! Oooh! Ah!
Centurion: Except that takes the...?
Nationalist: The locative, sir!

The scene, from “Monty Python's Life of Brian”, marked the apotheosis
of Latin in film—until last March. At that point Mel Gibson,
star-turned-director, announced that his new film “The Passion”, about
the last hours of Christ, would be made entirely in Latin and Aramaic.
At first, the hero of “Thunderdome” and “Lethal Weapon” did not even
want subtitles. When he realised that audiences needed to know, just
roughly, what the characters were saying, he reluctantly backed down.

You can read the Bible in Latin,Roman works or medieval Latin texts.
Langmaker.com has information on Latino Moderne. The University of
Notre Dame offers aLatin dictionary and grammar aid, while the
University of Kentucky will host a conversational Latin seminarin
August 2004. You can apply tostudy Latin with Reginald Foster, who has
recorded the sermons of Pope St. Leo the Great. Or you might prefer
Jukka Ammondt, the Finnish professor who sings Elvis classics in Latin.
Also see Latinteach.com andYLE (in Finnish—and Latin).

The milites1 in their caligae2 are now being coached in barrack-room
conjugations by Father William Fulco, a professor at Loyola Marymount
University in Los Angeles. They are taking to it quickly, he says;
sometimes too quickly, with a steep slide into Italian-waiter accents.
Italian is in fact his rough guide for pronunciation of first-century
Latin, about which there is much debate. Subtitles will still be waived
for soldier-talk, which Father Fulco has derived from graffiti found in
Roman camps. You could argue, as he does, that Greek would often be
more appropriate, and that the conscripted troops in Judea spoke little
Latin. But, as the language of an oppressive superpower, Latin can't be
beat.

As for Mr Gibson, he positively brags about making a film “in two dead
languages”. Not dead enough, some may think, remembering tear-stained
sessions with Sallust and those cloth-bound small books, blotted with
blue ink, in which scouts were forever crossing rivers and winter camps
being struck. No wonder the world has galloped so gratefully to
English, which has little use for genders or gerunds and never, if it
will have been able to help it, employs the future perfect.

Yet hold on a minute (festina lente, as Caesar would have said, while
gripping some hapless Gaul by the neck). Latin has a surprising number
of advocates in the modern world. And these are not merely classicists
or arty types entranced by the glories of Virgil, the cockiness of
Catullus or the breathtaking fall of the rhythms and words of Horace.
They are people who believe Latin has a future, as well as a past.

Totium orbium lingua3

Latin was, after all, the original world language—and not just up to
the moment the Vandals carbonised Rome, but long afterwards. In early
16th-century Europe rulers and ambassadors still corresponded in Latin,
forming thereby a common cultural web that brought Europe closer
together than at any time since. Ordinary people, too, still used Latin
as the warp and weft of their prayers, and carried Latin primers round
with them. Despite the inexorable advance of the vernacular, Latin was
alive and routine among the literate.

Deep into the next two centuries, too, it remained the preferred
language of philosophy and science. This was not just because it
crossed borders, but because it kept an antique purity. While mongrel
English found its words encumbered with changing meanings, Latin
preserved a precision that scientists increasingly needed. The deeper
Isaac Newton went into formulations of physical laws, the more he wrote
his notes in Latin, the closest approach in words to the utter
directness of mathematical symbols.

Modern-day champions of Latin make a special point of both these
qualities: universality and purity. No matter that Latin, in the last
decades of its heyday, was as dog-eared and scatty as any other
well-used language, and that the Latin of the street (or, for that
matter, the walls) often ignored the rules. This is still a language of
striking conciseness and clarity, with the added bonus of a sort of
timeless abstraction. To read a news story in Latin is to set it sub
specie aeternitatis4 indeed, its importance or triteness brightly
exposed by the translucence of the words.

Small wonder then, that some people still prefer their news in Latin,
and that the centre of Latin news broadcasting nowadays should be
Finland, a country of translucent birches, lakes and blondes, and with
a language the opposite of universal. The Finnish Broadcasting Company
(aka Radiophonia Finnica Generalis, or YLE) puts out a five-minute
bulletin, “Nuntii Latini”, every week, and has done so for 14 years.
The bulletins are broadcast worldwide, and are also collected and
published as books. The conjunction of Latin with Finno-Ungaric makes
for some bizarre listening and reading, as in

Anneli Jäätteenmäki, quae munere ministri primarii a mense Aprili
functa est, a praesidente Tarja Halonen dimissionem petivit et
accepit.5

But people in more than 50 countries, from East Timor to Uruguay, are
tuning in, sending Latin letters of appreciation and begging for
ancient Greek.

For these listeners, “Nuntii Latini” is not only a lifeline but a
repository of proper usage. Pace the French Academy, no language is
more closely guarded or monitored than a supposedly dead one. Each
expert believes himself privy to the real sound and oratorical shape of
the Latin Cicero spoke, perhaps forgetting that the pronunciation of
even 15th-century English still divides the scholars. Latin
websites—dozens of them, at the last count, including Latinteach.com
(“Where Latin teachers meet in cyberspace”)—feature loving translations
of Dr Seuss's “Quomodo Invidiosulus Nomine Grinchus Christi Natalem
Abrogaverit”6 and show the most tender care for third-declension
loan-words. One-upmanship, too, goes with the territory. Ever since
last July, when a bit of scatological Latin strayed into the pages of
Private Eye, a British satirical magazine, delighted letters have
poured in about the applicability of the genders of nauta (sailor,
masculine, feminine form) and bollocae (guess).

If Latin, spoken or written, is ever to catch on again, perhaps it
needs justifying. Among the XVIII slightly desperate reasons for
learning Latin to be found on Latinteach.com, the most attractive is
“Explain the passive periphrastic to your significant other,” and the
most topical, “Learn to conquer the world and claim it was
self-defence.” Or perhaps, discarding justification, the language just
needs modernising. Henry Beard's handy little tome, “Latin for All
Occasions”, is designed to recycle old Latin tags for the present time.
(Eg, rara avis: There is no car hire available7.) Many have pointed out
that “Been there, done that”, was originally coined by Caesar when he
proclaimedVeni, vidi, vici8, though he did not wear the T-shirt.

Others are trying a serious and comprehensive updating. David Theodore
Stark has devised what he calls Latino Moderne, a version that strays
close both to modern Italian and to Esperanto. It has the letters k and
w in it, as well as a definite article, le, which is “correct for all
cases, genders and numbers”. It dispenses with gender anyway: “All
nouns are considered neuter unless they refer to things that are
actually masculine or feminine (such as men or women). In poetry, this
rule may be relaxed.” The sentence structure, too, follows modern
English or French, hence le homine ambulava inar le domo, “The man
walked into the house”. Verb endings become rather Spanish. The whole
website primer is pleasingly free of consuls and verbs of killing; it
is recommended for international businessmen. But the conditional and
the gerundive have by no means been banished outright.

In Vaticano claritas9

Purists, of course, abhor the very thought of simplifying, and nowhere
more fiercely than in that last redoubt of living Latin, the Vatican.
All official papal documents are redacted in Latin. The language,
naturally, cannot easily express modern concepts and things: for popes,
that is part of its charm. But in Rome the challenge is not to chop and
squeeze the language into new shapes, but to translate modern words
into the full, but precise, complexity that Latin requires. Every
Thursday, a five-man team meets to argue it out. And it is somehow
heartening to discover, as supposedly serious people wage the war on
terror or struggle to mend the world economy, that some others spend
their working hours deciding that the Latin for “hot dog” should
bepastillum botello fartum10. (Which encyclical was that again?)

The result of their labours is the new “Lexicon Recentis Latinitatis”.
At £70 ($116) for 700 pages, and with Italian, rather than English, as
its second language, this is not a volume for the ordinary bedside
table. Nor do the Latinised phrases always trip off the tongue.
Universalis destructionis armamenta is thunderingly good for “weapons
of mass destruction”, and even harder to lose in the sand-drifts of
Iraq; conformitatis osor, a hater of conformity, is a nice turn for
“hippie”, while benzini aerisque migma, for carburettor, gives the
magic impression that air mixed with benzene might make you fly. But
tempus maximae frequentiae is far too elegant for “rush hour”, while
iazensis musica (jazz) bears in that “z” the whiff of falsehood.

Latin's greatest virtue, its conciseness, is too often betrayed by
stretching it instead. Thus vesticula balnearis Bikiniana (a little
bathing garment from Bikini) becomes sadly unskimpy, and sonorarum
visualiumque taeniarum cistellula (a little box of ribbons of sounds
and sights) does over-fussy duty for a videocassette. Other words are
instantly fossilised when Latinised. Crisps areglobuli solaniani,
“circular forms of a plant of the deadly nightshade family”, or salty
oblivion in a bag. A boy scout is puer explorator, surely a useful
little slave with a sling and pebbles, rather than a lad in shorts with
a penknife.

The front-man of the translating team also cuts a surprising figure. He
is an American Carmelite priest, Reginald Foster, Latin's loudest
advocate in the modern world. Bumptious, bespectacled, in overalls and
from Milwaukee, he is so devoted to Latin that he greets visitors with
“Ave!” and is renowned for speaking not just the classical version, but
the Carolingian and the medieval, if asked. For more than 30
years—chalk in one hand, wineglass in the other—he has conducted a
Latin summer school in Rome, holding many classes sub arboribus11 in
the conversational style of the ancient world. His students have been
seen in Pompeii, reading Pliny's letters aloud as they stroll the
streets, and at the Fons Bandusia near Rome, pouring wine into the
water while reciting Horace. Year by year his classes grow more
popular, though you need to be well past amo12 and fundus13 to apply.

As Father Foster himself admits, shaping Latin to the modern world is
not the way to save it. His massive dictionary is something of a game,
when all is said, as are the tourist phrasebooks and the Finnish
broadcasts. Latin's salvation—or, at least, the key to its
preservation—lies in the glory of its literature, and in the eagerness
of devotees to bring others to it. Father Foster plays his part
magnificently in that. But alas, for all the colour and comic-strip fun
of modern Latin textbooks, there is no way to the literature that does
not go via14 the horrible wild places where ablatives and gerunds live.

1 soldiers; 2 boots; 3 a world language; 4 in the context of eternity;
5 AJ, who has held the post of prime minister since April, submitted
her resignation to President TH, which he accepted; 6 “How the Grinch
Stole Christmas”; 7 rightly, “a rare bird”; 8 I came, I saw, I
conquered; 9 light from the Vatican; 10 a little roll stuffed with
sausage; 11 under the trees; 12 I love; 13 farm; 14 by way of