A beginner's guide to the Latin language, part 1 By IHCOYC in Culture Sat Dec 21, 2002 at 08:56:46 AM EST Tags: Culture (all tags)
	In a world that was better governed than the one in which we are forced to dwell, Latin was the foundation of the educational system, and the fountain of literacy: to know how to read and write was to know how to read and write Latin.  Knowing Latin, you could speak to anyone else who had been educated under the same régime.  Knowledge of the Latin language remains a matter worth pursuing. For speakers of English, Latin offers more than most others of the valuable intellectual exercise that comes from the study of foreign languages.  It opens a door to the classical, mediæval, and renaissance worlds.  The Latin language has a solemn beauty and cultural resonance that few others share.  It enhances your appreciation of the greatest music written in Europe.  In this article, which your interest or lack of same may turn into a series of several, we consider the grammatical structure of Latin and how it contrasts with English.

Latin: an Indo-European language Latin is an Indo-European language, the best attested member of the Italic family, a group that included a number of other languages formerly spoken on the Italian peninsula, including Oscan, Umbrian, Sicel, and Faliscan. English, also, is an Indo-European language, but contemporary English has lost many of the distinctively Indo-European features that Latin retains.  As a result, those who would understand Latin must learn to frame their thoughts in a rather different structure.  The Latin noun English retains the inherited structure of `case,' the inflection of nouns, most clearly in the pronouns.  In the conventional terms, I is a "nominative" form; me is an `oblique' form that serves as both "genitive" and "dative;" and my is a "genitive" form.  Common nouns in English do not use an oblique case; they only have a genitive, which in English is often called a "possessive" case. In Latin, all nouns have these cases, and several others.  The cases give Latin a flexibility and concision that English lacks. Here, for example, is the singular paradigm of equus, meaning "horse." equus, (the) horse (Nominative) equi, the horse's (Genitive) equo, to a horse (Dative) equum, the horse (Accusative) eque, Hello, horse! (Vocative) equo, by, at, from, with, or in a horse (Ablative) These cases allow Latin to do things English cannot.  In English, you can say I gave her an apple, where her is marked by its case form as being in the `dative' case, an indirect object.  A proper noun can go there: I gave Mary an apple; or a title like teacher. In Latin, these would be: malum ei dedi malum Mariæ dedi malum magistro dedi malum equo dedi Observe also that in Latin, since the functions of the words are defined by the case forms or `endings' they bear, you can reorder them freely to emphasise one over the other.  Malum equo dedi, equo malum dedi, malum dedi equo, equo dedi malum, and dedi malum equo share the same literal meaning, and differ in emphasis.  But when you change the case, you change the meaning: malum equus dedi can only mean "I'm a horse, and I gave an apple," or "While I was a horse, I gave an apple." It's not ungrammatical per se in Latin, but the unusual sentiment is hard to render in English.  The `ablative' case in Latin is especially distinctive.  It inherits the role of three Indo-European cases, the original ablative case, plus two others called `locative' and `instrumental.' You'd have to cope with all three of these if you were studying Russian or Lithuanian, whose nouns are even more conservatively Indo-European. The ablative case serves as the target of several very common prepositions.  It can also stand by itself, and takes the place of what in English becomes a whole prepositional phrase: equo iter feci, I made a journey on horseback (or, by my horse) The ablative is also used in a handy construction which grammar books call the "ablative absolute." It uses the ablative case to take the place of a whole subordinate clause in English: Bello consummato, miles domum rediit. After the war was won, the soldier returned home. The ablative has other uses, roughly similar to this one: whenever you want to specify the way something happened, how things are different, or why it happened so, you usually turn to the ablative case.  Grammarians give different names to each of these several uses, but once you have been through them all you start to see a theme developing. Latin resembles Japanese more than it does English in the way it handles nouns.  In Japanese, you have various particles, which serve as grammatical markers that define how a noun phrase relates to the rest of the sentence.  You have some liberty of changing the position of these noun phrases if their function is defined by the particle.  In Latin, the case endings serve the same goal, and allow the speaker even more freedom to move things around, for the sake of emphasis and euphony.  The Latin verb The English verb has lost even more of its original structure than the English noun has.  In Latin, the verb retains much of its original Indo-European structure: it has voice (active and middle/passive); tense, number, and mood. The Latin active verb is easy enough if you know Spanish, which of course descends directly from it.  As in Spanish, a pronoun subject can in most cases be omitted.  Spanish has retained most of the indicative tenses and many of the subjunctive ones.  The relationship is apparent enough from the following present tense active paradigm: amo I love; amas you (singular) love; amat he, she, or it loves; amamus we love; amatis you (plural) love; amant they love In addition to these active forms, however, the Latin verb also has a set of passive forms that reverse the relationship between the subject and the action.  Historically, the passive forms are often distinguished from the active by the presence of an /r/ infix: amor I am loved; amaris you (singular) are loved; amatur he, she, or it is loved; amamur we are loved; amamini you (plural) are loved; amantur they are loved The availability of these forms, unmatched by anything in a living Germanic language, again adds concision and expressiveness to Latin.  In English, the "passive voice" requires extra words to make the paraphrase.  The fact that it suppresses who is doing the deed makes it seem weaselly, and makes it suspect to style commentators.  No such opprobrium attaches to the passive voice in Latin, where these verb forms stand on an equal footing with the active voice. More importantly, the availability of many inflectional forms gives Latin the power to express more in a single word; English, to do the same job, would require several auxiliaries and adverbs.  The single Latin word amer! in idiomatic English would have to be rendered as "let me be loved!" or "I hope I will be loved!" Such is the power of a language with living subjunctive and passive inflections.  Language and Difficulty Latin is supposed to be more difficult for English speakers than, say, German or Spanish.  This difficulty is in fact an advantage. Looked at as a huge table to memorise, the Latin inflections may well seem daunting to the newcomer.  There are, of course, internal regularities in them as there are in the inflections of any language; the Spanish verb is only slightly less daunting than a Latin verb is.  The difficulty is only partially here. Rather, the difficulty in learning Latin consists in changing your habits of thought out of the synthetic and positional world of English syntax into the analytic and inflectional world that Latin supplies.  There is nothing necessarily simpler about having to memorise dozens of prepositions and idioms that Latin can dispense with, since it uses cases for many of the same tasks.  It is, simply, different.  Mastering that difference has value. To learn any foreign language is to learn how to draw distinctions that exist in that language, which may not map neatly into those drawn by your native tongue.  The Spanish distinction between ser and estar does not exist at all in English; those who would master that language must learn to think differently.  Latin, with its inflectional syntax, requires even more adjustments to your habits of thinking than Spanish does. Writing Latin properly is less a matter of finding the right Latin word, and more a problem of moving from thinking in an English based structure to the quite different structure of Latin.  For an example of how different it is, consider the opening of The Aeneid: Arma virumque cano, Troiæ qui primus ab oris Italiam, fato profugus, Laviniaque venit litora, multum ille et terris iactatus et alto vi superum sævæ memorem Iunonis ob iram; Word for word, in English, this would be rendered as: (The) arms (arma) man-and (virum-que) sing-I (can-o), of-Troy (Troiæ) who (qui) first (primus) from (ab) shores (oris) to-Italy (Italia-m), from-fate (fat-o) a fugitive (profugus), Lavinian-and (Lavinia-que) came-he (veni-t) banks (litora), much (multum) that-one (ille) and (et) on-lands (terr-is) tossed (iactatus) and (et) by-high (alt-o) power (vi) of-gods (super-um) of-bitter (sæv-æ) remembering (memorem) of-Juno (Iunon -is) for (ob) wrath (iram). In somewhat more natural English: I sing of arms and the man, destined to be a fugitive, who first came from the shoes of Troy to the Lavinian banks.  Only after he had endured much was he at last cast up on land by the high power of the gods; even so, he must always remember the wrath of bitter Juno.  Obviously, moving from Latin to English, or vice versa, requires major adjustments in your thinking habits.  Acquiring the ability to make those changes is a benefit of learning Latin that is at least as important as the ability to read the language itself. For further reference: Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar online. New? Has it changed? The Latin Library. A well organised collection of Latin texts. Latin course for the Virtual School of Languages. A beginning online course in Latin; rather elementary. Wheelock's Latin. Still probably the best introductory book on the language. An Amazon.com link.

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Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar online The Latin Library Latin course for the Virtual School of Languages Wheelock's Latin Amazon.com Also by IHCOYC