Latins

“ Latin, however, had not the plastic property of the Greek, the faculty of transforming itself into every variety of form and shape conceived by the fancy and imagination; it partook of the spirit of Roman nationality, of the conscious dignity of the Roman citizen, of the indomitable will that led that people to the conquest of the world. In its construction, instead of conforming to the thought, it bends the thought to its own genius. It is a fit language for expressing the thoughts of an active and practical, but not of an imaginative and speculative people. ”

“ Latin was the common language of scholars and remained so even down to the days of Shakespeare. 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. ”

“ Why study Latin? The foregoing paragraphs make it clear why Latin forms so important a part of modern education. We have seen that our civilization rests upon that of Greece and Rome, and that we must look to the past if we would understand the present. It is obvious, too, that the knowledge of Latin not only leads to a more exact and effective use of our own language, but that it is of vital importance and of great practical value to any one preparing for a literary or professional career. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As the literary language of the ancient Roman civilization died out, seemingly extinguished by the barbarism of the middle ages, all the forms of the old classical language being confounded in the most hopeless chaos, suddenly new, vigorous and beautiful tongues sprang forth, ruled by the most regular laws, related to, yet different from, Latin. ”

“ I have said nothing about the writing of Latin, because it is obvious at the present day that reading should be accompanied by writing from the first, and, what is even more important, that the sentences to be translated into Latin should be based on the subject matter and vocabulary of the Reader. Learning a language is largely an imitative process, and we must not expect our beginners to make bricks without straw, any more than we expect pupils at a more advanced age to compose in the style of Cicero or Livy without giving them plenty of models to work upon. ”

“ But the effect of the year’s study of Latin increases the youth’s power of apperception in very many directions by reason of the fact that so much of the English vocabulary used in technical vocabularies, like those of geography, grammar, history, and literature, is from a Latin source, and besides there are so many traces in the form and substance of human learning of the hundreds of years when Latin was the only tongue in which observation and reflection could be expressed. ”

“ Why should Latin give them a deeper insight into the philosophy of language, and introduce them to a literature and history which may raise them above the narrowness or the extravagance of their own age, and the language of the New Testament be forbidden, as too exhausting a labour, a toil fruitful only of imbecility or death? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Hence, while the simpler and commoner words of our mother tongue are Anglo-Saxon, and Anglo-Saxon forms the staple of our colloquial language, yet in the realms of literature, and especially in poetry, words of Latin derivation are very abundant. Also in the learned professions, as in law, medicine, and engineering, a knowledge of Latin is necessary for the successful interpretation of technical and scientific terms. ”

“ When I speak of knowing Greek and Roman antiquity as a help to knowing ourselves and the world, I mean more than a knowledge of so much vocabulary, so much grammar, so many portions of authors in the Greek and Latin languages. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If it be meant, that the Latin language is formed in more strict accordance with the general principles of grammar than the English, that is to say, that the relations which words bear to each other are more strictly analogous to the relations between the ideas which they represent in Latin than in English, we venture to doubt the fact. ”

“ Latin′ity, the Latin tongue, style, or idiom.—Latin Church, the Western Church as distinguished from the Greek or Oriental Church, so named as having employed Latin as its official language: the Roman Catholic Church; Latin Empire, that portion of the Byzantine Empire seized in 1204 by the Crusaders, and overthrown by the Greeks in 1261; Latin kingdom, the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem ruled by French or Latin kings, and lasting from 1099 to 1187.—Classical Latin, the Latin of the writers who flourished from about 75 B.C. to 200 A.D.; Dog Latin, barbarous Latin ”

“ Thus, ‘people’ is indeed ‘populus’, but it was ‘peuple’ first, while ‘popular’ is a direct transfer of a Latin vocable into our English glossary. So too ‘enemy’ is ‘inimicus’, but it was first softened in the French, and had its Latin physiognomy to a great degree obliterated, while ‘inimical’ is Latin throughout; ‘parish’ is ‘paroisse’, but ‘parochial’ is ‘parochialis’; ‘chapter’ is ‘chapitre’, but ‘capitular’ is ‘capitularis’.
Doublets
Sometimes you will find in English what I may call the double adoption of a Latin word; which now makes part of our vocabulary in two shapes ”

“ 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. ”

“ For exercising the intellectual faculties, and for awakening and developing a sense of the fundamental properties of a good style—namely, correctness, precision, and brevity of expression—there is no doubt that Latin with its limpid clearness, its rigorous precision, and its absolute definiteness of meaning, is a better object of study than Greek with its multitudinous forms and particles, the import of which is matter rather of skilled conjecture and artistic feeling than of logical analysis. ”

“ HOW TO READ LATIN 17. To read Latin well is not so difficult, if you begin right. Correct habits of reading should be formed now. Notice the quantities carefully, especially the quantity of the penult, to insure your getting the accent on the right syllable. (Cf. § 15.) Give every vowel its proper sound and every syllable its proper length. Then bear in mind that we should read Latin as we read English, in phrases rather than in separate words. Group together words that are closely connected in thought. No good reader halts at the end of each word. ”

“ 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 ”

“ That Latin was the common speech of the western world is attested not only by the fact that the languages of France, Spain, Roumania, and the other Romance countries descend from it, but it is also clearly shown by the thousands of Latin inscriptions composed by freeman and freedman, by carpenter, baker, and soldier, which we find all over the Roman world. ”

“ Their common development is mainly dealt with under Latin Language. The relation of the early vulgar Latin to the literary language, the spread of Latin following the spread of Roman rule, the prevalence of Latin over Oscan, Umbrian, Etruscan, and late Iberian and Gallic—all these matters concern rather the history of Latin than of the Romance languages. ”

“ We acknowledge that the Latin Language is a great Help to the Running of a Verse, and if the Reader insists upon that to be the only pre-eminence which Latin Verses have over English, he is very welcome to think as he likes best. ”

“ He who understands Latin will not only learn French, and English, and Spanish, and Italian, and Portuguese much more easily, but also much better. I can say of myself that I have in fact studied only the Latin grammar quite thoroughly, but that this knowledge has divested my grammatical studies in modern Latin and Germanic languages of all wearisome difficulty. ”

“ The frantic persons speaking of Latin, without that he ever learned the same in his health-time, shews the consonance which the Latin tongue holds with the reasonable soul; and (as we will prove hereafter,) there is to be found a particular wit applicable to the invention of languages, and Latin words; and the phrases of speech in that tongue are so fitting with the ear, that the reasonable soul, possessing the necessary temperature for the invention of some delicate language, suddenly encounters with this. ”

“ The pupil who has mastered this book ought to be able to read and write the easiest kind of Latin with some degree of fluency and without serious mistakes: in a word, Latin ought to have become in some degree a living language to him. ”

“ In another connection, a year or two ago, I had occasion to speak of the literary merit of some of these metrical epitaphs,52 of their interest for us as specimens of the literary compositions of the common people, and of their value in indicating the æsthetic taste of the average Roman. It may not be without interest here to speak of the literary form of some of them a little more at length than was possible in that connection. Latin has always been, and continues to be among modern peoples, a favored language for epitaphs and dedications. ”

“ Had the appreciative criticism of Latin been stronger and wider, had it left any tradition in its own last age, and so been able to throw that tradition as a bridge over the dark time to come, it would have been no advantage, but a loss and a mischief. Not only would it have been waste of time for the Middle Ages to appreciate Greek and Latin literature critically, if they could have done so, but it would have hampered them in the doing of their own great day’s, or rather night’s, work—their work of assimilation, of recuperation, and, not least, of dream. ”

“ But nobody has studied Latin without being or feeling himself surer of his control of a third of the words of his daily speech. I have never thought the etymological a particularly strong argument for studying Latin, but it has been given me by students of my own whom I didn't think I had succeeded in getting to learn Latin. That the close study of an English dictionary might do much the same thing for the boy, I freely admit; but the mass of mankind when they read are casual readers, and the casual reader does not use a dictionary. ”

“ Middle-age Latin words, i.e. those formed from a corrupt Latin by the monks of the middle ages. These last appear in French in a modified form, and come into English still further altered in their spelling and pronunciation.
I. In most cases English words of the first class are compounds or derivatives. We have not adopted the roots themselves, but use them only [24] in composition, with some particle or preposition. For example: the Latin root ‘clude’ is never found in English as an independent word, though we have ‘exclude,’ ‘include,’ ‘preclude,’ &c. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the third century before our era, a Roman could say audibo or audiam, contemplor or contemplo, senatus consultum or senati consultum. Thanks to the efforts of the scientific grammarian, and to the systematizing influence which Greek exerted upon literary Latin, most verbs were made deponent or active once for all, a given noun was permanently assigned to a particular declension, a verb to one conjugation, and the slight tendency which the language had to the analytical method of forming the moods and tenses was summarily checked. ”