Living with a Dead Language

by Ann Patty

  By semester’s end, we’d memorized the first three declensions of nouns, which comprised thirty-eight possible inflections, and all four conjugations of verbs, in six possible tenses, both active and passive, which comprised two hundred eighty-eight possible inflections. There was so much to memorize, and so much ambiguity everywhere. In the first declension, half the cases have the same ending. In the second declension, the same is true, and on and on. One can only wonder if the Latin of the Roman streets (vulgar Latin, from vulgus, vulgi, meaning the public, the masses, the commoners) hewed to the inflections, especially since the meaning of the sentence might become clear only at the end, when the verb, usually the last word of the sentence, revealed the syntax of all that preceded it.

  The sentences in the workbook were becoming more difficult, but they were nothing compared to the “short readings” that ended each chapter. These were actual Latin texts, from Caesar, Cicero, Catullus, et al., and though the text even gave us word definitions below the sentences quoted, I often had to spend half an hour just deciphering one line. Cicero, in particular, liked to go on and on without a subject until the last line of a five-line disquisition, and pile up clause after clause before revealing the verb. Curtis had a new refrain: “Ambiguity is everywhere.”

  I had learned enough Latin words that I began seeing their traces everywhere: Gladiolus, the sword-shaped flower in my garden, was named after gladius, gladii (sword), and furtive (as were my glances at Camilla’s homework pages) is derived from fur, furis, meaning thief. Words became more loaded now that I knew Latin: Repugnant, from repugno, repungare (to resist, fight against), gave the English word new force. Dilettante, I now knew, came from the verb delecto, delectare (to delight, charm, interest). Insulate, from insula, insulae (island), explained in a delightful way that the high R-value insulation required for the geothermal system I installed when I rebuilt my house made an island of its interior. Even automobiles took on new meaning. Volvo (two of which George owns—every country man has more than one vehicle) means “I roll.” When we learned the fourth conjugation verb audio, audire, Curtis told the story of the German inventor of the Audi, named Horch, which is German for “Hark.” The designers were not allowed to name models after themselves, but Horch used his knowledge of Latin to skirt the rules: Audi is the imperative for listen, or “Hark!” Latin could be subversive. And it seems to be particularly favored by carmakers: in addition to Audi and Volvo are Stratus, Nova, Maxima, Fiat, Prius, Ultima, Optima, Taurus, Focus, and other models. Perhaps the marketing departments of the auto industry thought Latin names would lend their automobiles a dignified and, dare I say, classic feel.

  As an editor, I often used the symbol known as a caret to add a word to a sentence or a letter to a word. I’d always thought of it as a carrot, since the symbol looked like an upside-down carrot, and something about it seemed Elmer Fuddish; but no indeed. It was from the Latin verb careo, carere, meaning to lack, be without, be free from. The word “stet,” editorial shorthand for “I crossed this out but now think it should be kept in” and written above or below a marked deletion, I learned, means “It should remain as it is,” and comes from the verb sto, stare, to stand.

  And then there were my legal favorites that came to us intact from the Latin: alibi (elsewhere), a contraction of alius, meaning other, and ibi, meaning there; and alias, meaning, simply, other. How succinct Latin!

  Even the idea of reading took on new meaning. Lego, legere, principally means to gather but also to read. And interlego, interlegere means to understand: literally to read or gather between the lines. Sometimes the Latin behind English words would spin around in my mind like a whirlpool (gurges, gurgitus, from which gurgle), threatening to make every word so dense with meaning and allusion I’d soon be dumbstruck.

  Before the semester final, I met with the siren Ella to go over the workbook sentences I’d translated that we hadn’t gone over in class. She was bright, competent, and kind, though I had scrambled at least a third of the sentences. I often felt a sort of panic because I was working so hard yet making so many errors. I had to remind myself that I wasn’t being graded and no one but me had a stake in my endeavor. What did I have to prove? Only that old habits die hard, and I had never been a mediocre student, which, at best, I now was. I was competing with my younger self, and guess who was winning? Perhaps it was a blessing that it was much too late to share my disappointing progress with my mother.

  I was the second in the class to finish the semester exam. I had always been a fast test taker; at least I still had that going for me. Insouciant Inez had been the first to leave the room, after only thirty minutes.

  I imagine she got an A on the test, though she didn’t win the prize. That went to Roberto, one of the Three Graces. Curtis turned the potentially mournful day he returned the final into a sort of celebration, presenting high-scoring Roberto with a bust of Cicero, who, it turned out, had been assassinated on this very day: December 7, 43 B.C. His decapitated head had been displayed in the Forum.

  I got 85 out of 100 on the final, which seemed to me reason for my own celebration. Camilla got 92. Stella refused to reveal her score.

  We had a six-week break after the term’s end. I invited Curtis to lunch. For a Christmas present, I’d bought him the DVD of a filmed production of Carmen, which starred Placido Domingo and Julia Migenes-Johnson (who was the opposite of neuter). It was shot in situ in the countryside and cities of Spain, and the sexiest opera I’d ever seen.

  Curtis and I met at a chic Italian restaurant in Rhinebeck. I asked him about my fellow students, most of whom were entirely opaque to me. Though he didn’t name them, Curtis told me that often students choose Latin because they have some sort of learning or social disability. “It allows them to fulfill the language requirement without having to talk much,” he told me. “Asperger’s syndrome people do particularly well in Latin because they usually have practically photographic memories,” he said. “This is, of course, confidential, but you might have noticed how Tim always remembers every exception to every general rule.”

  After Christmas, I went to Belize for two weeks, as I’d done for the past five winters. My friend, the writer Patrick McGrath, owned a beautiful house on the beach in Placencia, a small, funky, former pirate town in southern Belize, which we rented at a great bargain. My two beloved friends, Judy and Stephanie, were with me. I did not bring along my texts, only my flash cards, which I looked at only once. Latin and the tropics just weren’t concordia. We spent our days lolling on the beach, drinking rum, reading, and dancing.

  It was the first time I had traveled on vacation without an extra suitcase stuffed with fifteen pounds of books: a next-in-line book, a backup book, a backup to the backup book, et cetera. I did bring my Kindle, however, on which I had downloaded a manuscript I was reading freelance to help defray the cost of the trip. The fledgling writer used the word chiasmus on page 10 of the manuscript. I’d learned the word only a few weeks before, so it seemed a lovely synchronicity—except she had misused the word. She’d conflated it with chasm.

  Chiasmus (from the Greek chi, which is shaped like an x) is a rhetorical term that refers to an x-like linguistic structure, where the second half of a sentence or text balances the first but with the parts of speech in opposite order: noun, adjective/adjective, noun; or noun, verb/verb, noun. The structure lends itself well to proverbs and was a favorite of Roman writers:

  Multa audi; dic pauca.

  Listen to many things; say few.

  Cum vinum intrat, exit sapientia.

  When wine comes in, wisdom goes out.

  I loved such fifty-dollar words as chiasmus, but nothing was more irksome than someone misusing them, which is nothing but pretentious by any reckoning. I’m all for jumping on the chance to use an obscure, newly acquired word. But if you don’t have a firm grasp of the meaning and nuance of a fancy word, you have no business employing it. Often people make such mistake
s because they use a thesaurus (Latin for horde, treasury, storehouse) and fail to subsequently look up the word in a dictionary to check its subtle shadings. How often have I, over the years, looked up specious and spurious, so as not to confuse the two? Twenty times? Forty? Now I am helped by knowing that specious comes from the Latin species, which means appearance. Thus specious is the one that means something fallacious that has the appearance of truth. Spurious, from the Latin spurius (illegitimate), is the one that means, in the vernacular, bullshit. How many times have I looked up fungible, a word I long to use but have managed to on only one occasion? It’s such a slippery word, slippery like fungus, although there’s no relation between the two words. Fungible derives from the Latin verb fungor, fungi, functus (to satisfy or employ oneself, to discharge, perform), and has nothing to do with the Latin word for mushroom (fungus, fungi), even though they look the same. Vah! (Wow!)

  With fungus, fungi you may notice how often English retains the first-person plural form of Latin nouns: persona, personae (first declension); cactus, cacti (second declension); axis, axes (third declension). But in case you think translating just got easier, the first-person singular and first-person plural nouns in the fourth and fifth declensions (except for the few neuter fourth-declension nouns) are identical.

  As I was dilating on the above, my friends rolled their eyes. Stephanie said, “You know, Ann, not everybody cares about these things,” and went on to suggest that my raps about Latin were private and perhaps shouldn’t be shared. She didn’t understand that I was not showing off, though it seemed so to her. I was testing the strength of my lifeline. Old insecurities never die. The void still yawned before me, and words were still my tether and safe harbor. Only now some were in Latin.

  CHAPTER 4

  That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory:

  A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,

  Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle

  With words and meanings.

  —T. S. Eliot, “East Coker”

  Second semester began in late January. Winter had settled in, though few of the students seemed to pay much attention to the weather. Dylan of the soul patch often showed up for class in flip-flops, even though it was well below freezing. Once he showed up in what looked like pajama bottoms and slippers. I had overheard he was from Los Angeles (of course, he was probably a surfer, too). He was sexy and aloof, and were I younger, I would have placed myself next to him and tried to get something going. Alas, however, I was the anus (anus, anus), a rare feminine fourth-declension noun meaning old woman, not to be confused with anus, ani, a neuter second-declension noun meaning anus or ring—a rather alarming homonymic Latinism that I decided not to dwell upon.

  One fellow had dropped the class (thus losing credit for the first semester), but if memory serves, he was probably failing anyway. A new young woman, a self-confident brunette, joined us just in time for our introduction to the subjunctive (from the Latin verb subiungere, to subordinate or bring under). The subjunctive has its own special mood: one that expresses uncertainty or doubt, or anything nonfactual. This case has come down to English, though it is often neglected. Once, a copyeditor tried to remove the subjunctive from the manuscript of one of my authors, because she thought it sounded stilted. The author, who had used it correctly, changed it back. There followed a long e-mail train between the two. Finally the copyeditor wrote, quoting from the copyediting manual Words into Type: “However, many clauses introduced by if do not express a condition contrary to fact, but merely a condition or contingency. In such cases, the subjunctive is incorrect and betrays the kind of grammatical insecurity demonstrated by ‘between you and I.’”

  The author was outraged. Equating the use of the subjunctive with confusing the nominative and objective cases? Eho! (Whoa!)

  The copyeditor and her manual were both dead wrong. As my favorite language expert, Patricia T. O’Conner, says in Woe Is I, “If what’s being said is contrary to fact or expresses a wish, the verb is in the subjunctive mood.”

  I believe whether one favors the use of the subjunctive in English is often the result of one’s education. And if, as the copyeditor maintained, the usage sounds pretentious to the American ear, that only demonstrates the extent to which our educational system has failed to instill proper usage in students.

  There are also independent uses for the subjunctive, such as optative (If only I were young!), potential (This endeavor might make me feel young again!), and hortatory (Persevere!).

  I used the subjunctive to e-mail birthday greetings to my friend Patrick in Latin. His three years of Latin in high school were still available in his memory. Because he knew I was learning Latin, he often threw a Latin phrase into his e-mails to me.

  Gaudeamus diem natalis tua! Let us celebrate (hortatory subjunctive) your birthday! I usually mess up when I translate from English to Latin, even worse than the other way around, and indeed I had. I should have written Gaudeamus diem natalem tuam, because in Latin adjectives must be the same as the nouns they modify in case, number, and gender. However, I discovered that locution was never used in Latin. An Internet search came up with Felix natalis tibi (Happy your birth) or Felix dies natalis tibi sit (May your day of birth be happy). Ad multos annos (To many years) is still used at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome to say happy birthday to the pope, just like the ending to our contemporary happy birthday song, “and many more.” The longest, most effusive expression I found is from Pliny, Ep 6.30.1: Debemus mehercule natales tuos perinde ac nostros celebrare (We ought, by Hercules, to celebrate your birthday just like mine).

  There were other categories of subjunctives with resonant names that I’d never encountered in English or French, concepts that themselves suggested life stories. These were not independent but conditional uses of the subjunctive, and promised even more potential drama:

  Past contrary to fact (If I had learned Latin in high school, I would have studied Greek now.)

  Present contrary to fact (If I were an A student in Latin, I would be proud.)

  Future less vivid (If I keep studying Latin, I may one day comprehend this language.)

  Future more vivid, which has certainty rather than uncertainty and takes the simple future tense (If I study long enough, I will comprehend this language.)

  I loved the concept of the future being more or less vivid (from vivo, vivere, to live), which has to mean more or less alive in one’s imagination. Who named these concepts? Does Latin imply determination might make it so, as it so often did for the Roman vision of conquest?

  Bleak winter soon held us firmly in its grip. Was it my imagination, or had the oatmeal on offer at the Retreat gotten thinner, and didn’t they use to offer granola as a condiment? Even Dylan now dressed in boots and down.

  Along with bad weather came ever more difficult grammatical concepts. Hard on the heels of the subjunctive, the ablative absolute arrived like a deep freeze. Two of my Latinist friends had warned about the ablative absolute: “Just wait till you get to that,” they told me. “It will drive you crazy.”

  The ablative absolute was introduced, along with participles, in Chapter X, to which we turned just after our two-week spring [sic] break in March. A participle is an adjective made from a verb, such as hearing (audiens, audientis), seeing (videns, videntis), or believing (credens, credentis). With the addition of participles, parsing the sentences in the workbook became infinitely harder. The syntax of a word could no longer be determined only from its ending: with participles, one had to look in the middle of the words for the ns or nt that identified a participle.

  The ablative absolute is most commonly a participle and a noun both in the ablative case. The syntax is called absolute because the ablative pair is complete unto itself (ab-solutus, having been freed from, loosened away), thus unrelated syntactically to the rest of the sentence. For example, Bibi vinum te dormiente. (When you were sleeping,
I drank the wine.) The participle is called circumstantial because it defines the circumstances that surround the verb (with, when, because, although). Circumstance derives from the Latin verb circumsto, circumstare, literally translated as “to stand around.” Many of these concise, handy ablative absolutes have come down to us intact in Latin, as in his dictis (with these things having been said), ceteris paribus (with all things being equal), and Caesare duce (when Caesar was leading). Though the ablative absolute can pop up anywhere in a sentence or verse, the two ablatives that form it are steadies and are usually, but not always, seen side by side. For me, it did not live up to its reputation for being impossibly difficult to grasp.

  In fact, I liked the ablative absolute, the way it could wrap up entire epochs in two words, then move on: It felt like a no-fault divorce from the main sentence, rather like mine from my second husband, whom I now refer to as my own Ablative Absolute.

  Though he had looked perfect on paper—a well-educated and well-traveled journalist, with a deep knowledge of Latin from his years of ecclesiastic studies—he was not perfect in the flesh. He was ten years older than I, had a slumped posture that conveyed a lack of vitality, and an aura of greyness. He had studied to become a priest from age thirteen till twenty-four, making it all the way to the Gregorian University in Rome before he left the Church, along with much of his cohort, during the Second Vatican Council. I often wondered whether the priests had chosen him for the calling because he had a low vitality, or if they had driven the vitality out of him: Chicken or egg? He was wonderfully articulate; Latinate to be sure as he’d had eleven years of Church Latin in one form or another.

  Over dinner one night, as we were discussing what I considered the Church’s hatred of sex, I asked him, “So, when you were a young priest in training, did you masturbate a lot and feel guilty?”