Living with a Dead Language

by Ann Patty

  Whenever I told a friend or acquaintance that I was learning Latin, those who had taken a bit of high school Latin would happily recite the conjugation of amo, amare (to love) like a little poem. My English friend Caroline even had a mnemonic rhyme that her mother had taught her, though it scrambled the order of the inflections and didn’t truly rhyme:

  Amo, amas

  I love a lass

  Amatis, amamus

  In my pajamas

  Amo, amare, amavi, amatus was the first verb introduced in week three. In Latin, four forms of verbs are cited: the first-person singular present tense amo (I love), the present infinitive amare (to love), the first-person singular perfect amavi (I loved), and the perfect passive infinitive amatus (to be loved). These allow the student to identify which of the four conjugations governs the verb. As there are five declensions, or noun patterns, so too are there four conjugations, or verb patterns, in Latin.

  Curtis said, “Of course you all probably know this verb: probably your parents have recited this conjugation when you signed up for Latin to show you they remember it. However, your parents often learned the wrong pronunciation. Amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant is not pronounced with the stress on the last syllable. Stress in Latin is on the penultimate or the antepenultimate syllable.”

  So Latin, dead lo these many years, has changed for students over two generations. I once attended a yoga retreat with Kofi Busia, a master Iyengar practitioner who is also a scholar and a wise man. As we held postures, he walked among us, philosophizing, his oft-repeated theme “You cannot change your future, you can only change your past.” I’d spent the week, while suffering through extended shoulder stands and downward dogs, trying to get my mind around that until it finally hit me that what he was saying was that how you carry and interpret your past affects everything you do, thus, your future. If a setback made you feel a hopeless failure, you carry that; if you took it as an opportunity to learn and improve, you carry that. Inevitably, in the course of your existence, you will transform the meaning of past experience. And if a new insight arises, a new feeling or a new bit of information, everything might change.

  In Latin, the discovery of a poem that uses a word in some way heretofore unused by the known literature can change the dictionary in the future. Everything that moves backwards changes motion forward. I was changing my past even now, by taking Latin. I was excavating a new basement below the linguistic home I’d inhabited since college, pushing the void ever deeper underground.

  CHAPTER 3

  Language is the only homeland.

  —Czeslaw Milosz

  When I totaled up commute, class work, homework, and memorization, my Latin adventure was taking up about twenty hours a week. I loved being a student again. I no longer felt as though I were merely killing time in worthless pursuits and cul-de-sac mental meanderings.

  As we progressed through the year, the workbook became my sport and pastime. Following each new grammatical concept introduced in the text, the workbook offered drills, rote memorization, and fill-in-the-blank exercises. I loved the workbook. Of the aural, visual, and kinesthetic modes of learning, I seemed to be in the latter camp; writing more firmly planted things in my mind than simply repeating and staring. And I loved filling in the blanks. At the end of each chapter, there were simple sentences to translate, then more and more complex sentences, which used the cumulative vocabulary and parts of speech we had learned. Since our vocabulary was limited to first- and second-declension nouns, most of the sentences were about war (bellum, belli), pretty girls (puellae pulchrae), goddesses (deae), and queens and their islands (reginae et insulae). So we began to learn the priorities of the Romans.

  Every day when I returned home from class, I spent an hour or so doing the practice sentences in the workbook, even those we hadn’t been assigned. I knew I had to work harder than my classmates to memorize; my memory had been altered and addled by so many more years of substances, illnesses, life. Besides, I liked translating the sentences: Cultivating words was as fun as gardening, and it could be done even on cold, rainy days.

  While I memorized declensions, George memorized declivities (from the Latin declivis, sloping down) in mountains, seeking the best routes for climbing the Catskill peaks. When it was warm, I’d return from class to find him sitting on the porch with his topographical maps.

  “Why do you spend so much time staring at maps,” I had asked him during the early days of our relationship.

  “I’m not staring at maps,” he’d corrected me, “I’m studying them.”

  He also studied weather and wind, which were his only overlords at work and leisure. He planned his days, both work and play, around the weather. George is an arborist, and, in his early sixties, still climbs trees. I’ve seen him as high as fifty feet, carefully roped in with safety lines, working a three-foot chain saw. In his work, he specializes in finding an expansive view and cutting trees to reveal it. His eyesight is better than 20/20, and he can identify a bird before most people can distinguish it even as a random spot in the sky.

  When he is not in trees, George is often hiking in the mountains, and he’s happy to drive an hour, or two, or more, to get to them. He is a member of both the Catskill 3500 Club, made up of those who have climbed every Catskill peak over 3,500 feet, as well as the Adirondack 46ers, which welcomes those who have scaled the forty-six peaks over 4,000 feet in the Adirondacks. George likes to be high up, where there is a panoramic vista.

  The day after a snowfall, he’ll be off with skis and snowshoes, never mind that the temperature in the mountains is barely above zero, taking advantage of what is, for him, a perfect day: alone on the mountain trails he has memorized from his maps. While I explore the crowded past of language, George communes with the wilderness of nature. He is almost my opposite, a man of few words and of calm temperament; a man more conversant with nature than culture.

  Most days, as I waited for class to begin, I enjoyed watching the young people come in, observing their interactions with one another, their workbooks and cell phones. Two, Alissa and David, always arrived together, always in the middle of some conversation. Sometimes a student would come in, sit down, and furiously do the homework in the ten minutes left before class began. I always rearranged the desks for my threesome: me, Camilla, and Stella, always choosing the one wooden desk for myself—the prerogative of age, as I justified it. Stella always sat next to Camilla, the three of us like three big birds perched in the southeast corner, a counterpoint to the Three Graces, as I called the boys, who always sat together in the northeast corner. Camilla had wanted to take Latin since she was in the ninth grade. She was a reader, and her public school didn’t offer Latin, but she knew enough to equate the language with love of reading. Stella, quiet, and seemingly rather depressed, had taken three years of high school Latin at her Catholic school in Los Angeles, but they had stopped offering it when she was a senior. She was a comparative religion major, “but I know that knowledge of the classics is an essential part of a liberal education,” she told me.

  Besides Camilla and Stella, I’d had a conversation with only one other student, Jerry, one of the Three Graces, who was among the best students in class. Jerry was a drama major who thought the memorization required in Latin would strengthen the skill he needed for learning dramatic roles. No one else ever spoke to me, although one day, three months in, Tim of the magenta stripe, who always sat two desks in front of me, turned around and asked, “What made you take Latin at this age?”

  “Just trying to say alive,” I told him. He never asked me another question.

  Curtis warned us that the practice sentences in our workbook in no way reflected the reality of Rome. “The prudent queen (regina callida) sends soldiers off to war (bellum), and to neighboring provinces (provincias). And the goddesses are everywhere in the practice sentences. Do you think the matriarchy will persist when we get to the third declension and learn t
he word for king (rex)?” he asked.

  At the beginning of class each day, we translated the workbook sentences assigned the day before. We all began to make jokes about the progress of the queen and the powers of the goddesses in our practice sentences, and progress there was. In Chapter V, the first sentences critical of the queen appeared. “Unless the queen can control herself, she won’t be able to rule her people” (Nisi se regere regina poterit, non populum regere poterit) one sentence declared, and another, “If she fails, I will take up arms and rule” (Si fallet, arma capiam et regam).

  “They’re preparing us,” Curtis said, “for the next chapter, when we learn the word for king. The preeminence of the queen will end abruptly.”

  When I was in college in the early seventies, before there was such a thing as academic feminist analysis, the male-centric Roman view was never identified as such. The feminist revolution, although nascent, had made few inroads into academia. I was in a feminist consciousness-raising group in 1971, but most of our discussions centered on mothers, men, housework, infidelity, and appearance. My biggest concern was distancing my future from the bondage my mother had endured: She had ceded all her power to my father and seemed little more than the slave of our house, a thankless job. Every night my father, planted before the TV, would call to her, “Fran, bring me thirteen potato chips and a glass of ice water”; or “a raw potato, and thirty peanuts”; or “another martini.” And bring them she would, stopping whatever she was doing to fill his order, which, if not placed before him exactly as requested, would result in a complaint.

  Feminism came just in time to rescue me. I defined myself as “not Mother,” which of course was very painful to her, and I disdained her advice about hairstyles, clothing, even language. “I do wish you’d take Latin,” she’d say every year during high school, and again during college. “I loved Latin, it was always my favorite subject in school.” I think she hoped it might give us something in common, something that would mitigate the growing distance between us. But I didn’t consider Latin. I continued my French studies. French was the language Terry studied, so to me French was the language of culture and sophistication, and those were what I was in pursuit of, things Terry represented.

  In the one classics class I took in college, a survey course that began with the Greeks and ended with the Romans, the sad plight of women in Rome was not discussed, even when we learned that Roman women had only a single name derived from the male line (gens). Thus all Gaius Claudius’ daughters were named Claudia, distinguished from one another only by a numerical adjective: Claudia, Claudia Secunda, Claudia Tertia, et cetera, an outrage to any right-thinking feminist. Against my mother’s wishes, I never took my husband’s last name, but always kept my own. It staked my claim as an independent entity, as any man’s equal.

  Just after my wedding ceremony, as my new husband and I were preparing to leave on our honeymoon, my mother once again lamented, “I do so wish you would change your last name.”

  Why did she wish that? I was too angry to ask. “Please stop nagging me about this,” I said. “It was hard enough having two first names as a child, with all the grief I took from people who didn’t believe I knew my own last name. At this point I’ve earned my name, and it’s my name. My identity. Why do you care so much?”

  “Well then, just call me Shit,” she retorted. “I’ve been Frances and I’ve been Fritzie, and I’ve been Fran and I’ve been Nicholds and O’Conner and Crowder and Patty, so just call me Shit!”

  I was shocked at her outburst. Why did taking a husband’s name matter to her so much?

  Over the years, I’ve come to understand. Like a good Roman woman, Mother took on the identity a father, or husband, conferred on her. Her father had decamped when she was a child, and she was adopted by her stepfather; her first husband was killed in the early days of World War II, so that surname didn’t endure long. She did what was right for a woman of her station and generation, subsumed herself to the next male, his name and his needs. And too often those male needs left her feeling like shit.

  Now in the twenty-first century, whenever women were treated like shit in the literature, it was remarked upon. Almost daily, Curtis pointed out the sexist aspects of Roman culture. When we finally got to the third declension, along with the king came vis (power, force, violence, physical strength) as well as timor (fear). Timor was masculine, vis feminine. What did that say about the Roman concept of masculine and feminine?

  There was also carmen, which meant “a song or poem,” a neuter noun. Always fond of giving us cognates, Curtis said, “You can remember it’s a woman’s name, but that doesn’t help with the neuter, and isn’t there a piece of music named after it?”

  I blurted out, “Carmen, don’t you know it? It’s one of the most famous operas!”

  He looked abashed. How could such an educated man not know Carmen? I thought, until I remembered he was only thirty-one years old, grew up in Colorado, attended Dartmouth and UC Berkeley. Why would he know opera? I certainly hadn’t at that age. Such moments caught me up short, and reminded me I had forty years on the rest of the class, and thirty on the professor.

  The third declension is by far the hardest. First-declension nouns were almost always feminine, second masculine or neuter, fourth masculine, and fifth feminine. Not so the third declension, which hosts all three in abundance. Also the relation between the nominative and genitive in the third declension doesn’t always follow the same pattern as the other declensions, with merely a suffix added. The declension includes a number of nouns whose nominative case ends in s but changes to r in the genitive: flos, floris (flower), rus, ruris (countryside), ius, iuris (law). I would soon learn that s turning into an r is known as a rhotacism. When an s or z is surrounded by two vowels, it is replaced by an r for ease of pronunciation. The term is, like Latin, highly ambiguous, even self-contradictory, because in a medical context rhotacism refers to an inability to pronounce r’s. Indeed rhotic (r) sounds are the last to be mastered by most children and are the bane of most stutterers. Perhaps the latter should fancify their condition by referring to it as rhotacism.

  The third declension also comprised a subset of nouns known as i-stems. There were no hard-and-fast rules about which nouns were i-stems, though they had different endings in the ablative singular and genitive plural than the rest of the declension. Thus this declension required even more memorization than the others, and to make matters worse, it seemed there were more nouns in the third declension than in any of the four other, easier, declensions.

  Latin mnemonic rhymes, commonly used to teach the language to youngsters, are not taught to college students, though I began very much to regret that. Every person I know who took Latin in high school has one or more to offer.

  Benjamin Hall Kennedy, creator of the Public School Latin Primer in 1866, the revised version of which remains widely used in England, included many rhymes to help students learn gender—most of them for the third declension. My two favorites, which actually helped me, are:

  Abstract Nouns in io call

  Feminina, one and all;

  Masculine will only be

  Things that you may touch or see,

  (as curculio, vespertilio,

  Pugio, scipio, and papilio)

  with the Nouns that number show

  Such as ternio, senio.

  Many Neuters end in er,

  siler, acer, verber, ver,

  tuber, uber, and cadaver,

  piper, iter, and papaver.

  As difficult as the third declension were the endless q words we had learned by Chapter VII, halfway through the book. Like w words in English, the q’s are ubiquitous in Latin, comprising interrogatives, pronouns, adverbs, and subordinating conjunctions. My bêtes noires were the quam words, which proliferated like rabbits. Finally, I made my own quam mnemonic, which I recited to the rhythm of a nonsense camp cheer I’d learned in gram
mar school. My “Quam Song” is best accompanied by stamping feet. I ended it with an id, for old time’s sake:

  Umquam numquam quamquam postquam

  antequam priusquam quoniam quis

  quamvis quamlibet quia quid?

  quisquam nequiqua, nescioquid, id!

  Translated to English:

  Ever never although after

  before before because who

  however as you wish because what?

  any pointlessly I know not what it!

  The chant didn’t really help my confusion much, but as the year progressed, whenever a particularly difficult syntactical term was being discussed, I’d chant the quam cheer, sotto voce, to Camilla. Only once did Camilla begin the chant, and we both started cracking up. Curtis stopped the class:

  “Ladies, would you care to share your joke with the rest of us?” he asked pointedly. I could feel the flush move up my body. My face must have been beet red. I hadn’t experienced such a chastisement since junior high, in my French class, for which I repeatedly received the grade of A/D, D being a bad citizenship mark given for my constant joking to my best friend, who sat next to me. Was I still falling prey to such insecure antics? An aging cutup still feeling the need to prove she was way fun and getting her best friend in trouble?