Latin people

“ How the armies of Rome mastered the nations of the world is known to every reader of history, but the story of the conquest by Latin of the languages of the world is vague in the minds of most of us. If we should ask ourselves how it came about, we should probably think of the world-wide supremacy of Latin as a natural result of the world-wide supremacy of the Roman legions or of Roman law. But in making this assumption we should be shutting our eyes to the history of our own times. A conquered people does not necessarily accept, perhaps it has not commonly accepted, the tongue of its master. ”

“ We can only judge the old Latin race, as especially embodied in the Roman, from its literature, its history and its institutions. From these we gather that it was a stock excellent for great ideals in the way of conquering and administering, a people of admirable commanders and engineers and jurists, a practical people, but a people not distinguished by brilliance of fancy, great delicacy of taste, notable depth of imagination or poignancy of feeling. Roman literature, left to itself, would, we may believe, have proved a very solid and rather heavy thing. ”

“ After all the researches that have been made, the true origin of the Latin people, and even of the Roman city, is involved in impenetrable obscurity; the legendary traditions collected by the historians are, however, the best guides that we can now follow ”

“ The French, Italians, and Spaniards have, in reality, no traces of Latin blood in their veins; but the institutions of the Romans were so strong, their organization was so perfect, their influence in civilization so great, that the countries occupied by them for centuries have remained Latin in language, institutions, and peculiar genius.
It is not, however, by reason of its strength that one people imposes its civilization upon another; very often the conquered people leads the conquerors in this line. ”

“ So long as the Empire held together the unifying influence of official Latin, and the constant intercommunication between the provinces, preserved the essential unity of Latin throughout the world, but when the bonds were broken, the naturally divergent tendencies which had existed from the beginning, but had been held in check, made themselves felt, and the speech of the several sections of the Old World developed into the languages which we find in them to-day. ”

“ The Latin dialects arose, no one knows how, among the tribes of central Italy, encompassed on all sides by people of the most various physical characters, who were gradually absorbed into the eternally widening maw of Rome, and there, by dint of using the same speech, became the first example of that wonderful ethnological hotch-potch miscalled the Latin race. ”

“ Had the Latin which the colonist, the merchant, and the soldier carried through Italy and into the provinces been allowed to develop in different localities without any external unifying influence, probably new dialects would have grown up all over the world, or, to put it in another way, probably the Romance languages would have come into existence several centuries before they actually appeared. That unifying influence was the Latin used by the officials sent out from Rome, which all classes eagerly strove to imitate. ”

“ But for our knowledge of the Latin of the common people we lack these two all-important sources of information. It occurred to only two Roman writers, Petronius and Apuleius, to amuse their countrymen by writing realistic stories, or stories with realistic features, and the Roman grammarian felt an even greater contempt for popular Latin or a greater indifference to it than we feel to-day. This feeling was shared, as we know, by the great humanists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when the revival of interest in the Greek and Latin languages and literatures begins. ”

“ One of the characteristics of these Latin fathers is their fondness for using the famous words of the old Roman religion, but in new senses. They inherit that Roman love for a strong technical word of pregnant meaning which has left us so many imperishable legacies in terminology. Municipium, colonia, imperium, collegium, rise in one's mind the moment the subject is mentioned; and a few minutes' thought will reveal another score of words which in various forms pervade all our modern European terminology. So, too, with the language of religion. ”

“ However, with three genders, five declensions for nouns, a fixed method of comparison for adjectives and adverbs, an elaborate system of pronouns, with active and deponent, regular and irregular verbs, four conjugations, and a complex synthetical method of forming the moods and tenses, the pitfalls for the unwary Roman were without number, as the present-day student of Latin can testify to his sorrow. That the man in the street, who had no newspaper to standardize his Latin, and little chance to learn it in school, did not make more mistakes is surprising. ”

“ It would naturally be a part of that policy to allow or to encourage the retention by the several communities of their own dialects. The common use of Latin would have enabled them to combine against her with greater ease. ”

“ As time went on the spoken language diverged farther and farther from the written. Latin is a troublesome speech on account of its complicated inflections and grammatical rules, which can be mastered only after a great deal of study. The people of the Roman provinces and the incoming barbarians naturally paid very little attention to the niceties of syntax and found easy ways of saying what they wished. ”

“ Latin peoples explored, conquered, and settled both Western continents, and gave a language which has become the permanent speech of two thirds of the Western world. To call the roll of artists, painters, sculptors, poets, dramatists, novelists, musicians, explorers, missionaries, and scientists for the past five centuries is to prove that a majority of the names mentioned in the world's illustrious hall of fame are from Latin races. ”

“ INTRODUCTORY AND ACCIDENCE.
§ 1. Language.—Language is one of the means by which human beings communicate their thoughts to each other. In language this is done by means of spoken sounds. Different nations do this in different ways, and hence arise different languages.
§ 2. The Latin Language.—Latin was the language spoken by the Latins, who lived in a district of ancient Italy called Latium. Of all the Latins the most important and powerful were the Romans, or inhabitants of Rome. The Romans were a great conquering people. ”

“ The population of this country is educationally divided by the letter h into three classes, which we may describe as the confident, the anxious, and the indifferent. The same division existed in imperial Rome, where educated people sounded the aspirate, which completely disappeared from the every-day language of the lower classes, the so-called Vulgar Latin, from which the Romance languages are descended, so far as their working vocabulary is concerned. ”

“ Yet the Latin language is still the necessary foundation of one half of human knowledge, and the forms created by Roman genius underlie the whole of our civilisation. So long as mankind look before and after, the name of Rome will be the greatest of those upon which their backward gaze can be turned. ”

“ After the division of the Roman empire, the western kingdom adopted for itself the name of the Latin kingdom; and its subdivisions were called the Latin kingdoms. The church connected with those kingdoms was also emphatically called the Latin church. Says Dr. More: “They Latinize everything. Mass, prayers, hymns, litanies, canons, decretals, bulls, are conceived in Latin. The Papal councils speak in Latin. Women pray in Latin. The Scriptures are read in no other language under the Papacy than Latin. In short, all things are Latin.” ”

“ How often have I experienced, that whenever it became necessary for a religious society or community, to write a Latin letter to Rome, or some other foreign kingdom, that there were very few men to be found among them, who were capable of doing it, unless it was in Latin stuffed full of Hispanisims? ”

“ Even yet it is more nearly than any other tongue the universal language of the learned. The life of to-day is much nearer the life of ancient Rome than the lapse of centuries would lead one to suppose. You and I are Romans still in many ways, and if Cæsar and Cicero should appear among us, we should not find them, except for dress and language, much unlike men of to-day.
Latin and English. Do you know that more than half of the words in the English dictionary are Latin, and that you are speaking more or less Latin every day? ”

“ In Belles Lettres, criticism and rhetoric, in history, physics and morals, the models of the moderns were all chosen from antiquity. In addition to this too, the progress of Roman arms, and afterwards the advance of Roman letters, had incorporated much of the Latin language and idiom in all of the polite modern languages except the German. The Italian and Spanish in particular have been well called "bastard Latin." How then can any student of modern literature only, hope to understand the genius of his own language, or even the spirit of that literature to which he has devoted himself? ”

“ And Latin,—the voice of Empire and of Law, of War and of the State,—the best language for the measured research of History, and the indignant declamation of moral satire; rigid in its constructions, parsimonious in its synonyms; yet majestic in its bareness, impressive in its conciseness; the true language of history, instinct with the spirit of nations, and not with the passions of individuals; breathing the maxims of the world, and not the tenets of the schools ”

“ The clever boys are, as a rule, well provided for; but, even for them, the methods of this book have been found to be the shortest road to accuracy and style in translation. Moreover by this means they have gained a firsthand acquaintance with Latin literature and the sources of Roman history.
It is impossible here to enter into ‘the question of the close and striking correspondence between the history, the literature, and the language of Rome. It was not until the history of Rome threw its mantle over her poetry that the dignity of the poet was recognised and acknowledged. ”

“ Of all modern writers he is foremost Latin, in knowledge, in instinct for beauty and form, in love of tradition. Even in his erotic and mystical passages this vein of purest gold may be seen, this understanding of the potential greatness of the tradition into which he was born. What wonder, then, that the first fundamental passion of the mature man's soul should be his desire to proclaim once more the cause of Latin civilization, should be the ardor of fighting in his own manner with his weapon of inspired words the world battle? ”

“ For English pupils learning Latin the reconciliation ought to present little difficulty; but nearly every great nation of Europe has its points of contact with Rome, and therefore its opportunities of constructing Latin Readers which are national in more senses than one. On the modern side they may be patriotic in tone, and inspired by that love of nature which appeals so directly to the youthful mind ”

“ Latin is no longer what it was in most of the countries of the so-called civilized world down to the beginning of the eighteenth century, and, in some of them, even to a much more recent period, the language of diplomacy, of jurisprudence, of philosophy, and of all science. Not even the ability to quote Horace in conversation is any longer required to give one the stamp of an educated man. ”

“ If ever there be a true Latin renascence, which is scarcely to be hoped for, it will come, not from a writer who is saturated with French, Russian, German, and English influences, but one who has the Latin genius, the Latin temper, unalloyed. ”

“ That, though false enough as theology, accurately represents the Italian mind. The nature goddess, the mother, the earth and its fulness, will console, recreate, and speak to the soul of the Latin on his native soil when religion has no language which reaches him. From the heart of that soil the Latin learnt his religion, and he has never parted with it. ”

“ In conclusion I should like to say that it has been my aim throughout to adhere to what is best in Roman literature, and to omit passages the choice of which can only be justified by regarding their literary form apart from their moral value. Latin literature contains so much that is at once excellent in style and noble in thought that it seems a grave mistake to exalt the one at the expense of the other. ”

“ How many and what foreign languages should be learned may be matter for wide difference of opinion. But so far-reaching is the prevalence of the Latin, as one of the principal sources of our own language, and of other modern tongues, that a knowledge of it is most important. ”

“ Thus the term Latin came to mean not so much a man of a certain stock as a man with a certain legal position, and so it continued for many centuries, while the new power rising to prominence in the world came to be known not as Latin, but as Roman. ”

“ Even those who can fully enter into the stateliness and imperishable beauty of the Latin tongue must surely feel it a grievous disadvantage, that devotions, which should carry the whole heart with them, are not presented through the medium of that mother tongue, the accents of which speak to every man's heart by the force of a thousand nameless associations, as those of no other tongue can. ”

“ The Empire included men of every kind of race; as a rule, Rome left them to continue their own civilizations with the use of their own languages. Undoubtedly now the Latin element enters Southern Italy, but only so far as that Roman governors were appointed and Latin was the language of the Government. ”