QUID EGO FACEO?: A Case for Latin

If you read my previous post, you can tell I've been thinking a lot about languages lately. 

You have no idea. 

About three years ago I began studying Spanish, or rather picked it up again after decades. Then almost exactly one year ago, I decided on top of that, to take up Italian. And just recently I added a third language to the mix, Latin.

There is a method to my madness, the three languages I'm learning are closely related, the siblings Spanish and Italian both being the children of the mother tongue, Latin. My previous knowledge of Spanish made learning Italian easier, especially the grammar, and taking wobbly beginner's steps in Italian made me a little more confident with my Spanish, While I do from time to time confuse the two, I'd say it's worked out pretty well. 

But why Latin? Who after all would want to learn a dead language?* There's a question that's been pondered about, especially in academic circles for at least a couple generations. 

Here are the standard answers you get from Latinophiles:

• Latin is the mother tongue of the Romance languages so gaining a knowledge of it, makes learning French, Portuguese, the two languages mentioned above, and a host of other languages much easier.
• Almost sixty percent of the words in English have Latin origins so leaning Latin helps improve one's English vocabulary. 
• Learning Latin's complex case structure helps in learning other languages as well such as German and the Slavic languages. 
• Many terms used in science, medicine and law come directly from Latin so a prior knowledge of the language gives people a heads up when entering those fields.  
• Much of the collected wisdom of Western Civilization put down in writing from the time of Julius Caesar to the nineteenth century was written in Latin, so knowing the language enables one to come in direct contact with those works as they were written, rather than through the lens of a third party interpreter. 
• Learning Latin makes you smarter.  

These are all good reasons to learn Latin and there are a host of others. But as many folks point out, quite reasonably I might add, all of these, except the second to the last, are fringe benefits of learning the language, and can all be achieved in other ways without going to the trouble of learning Latin. 

For example:

• If you're interested in learning Spanish, Italian, German, Czech (as I am), or any other language, just learn those. The truth is, learning a foreign language is a skill and learning ANY foreign language greatly improves your ability to learn others. 
• If you're looking to improve your vocabulary through Latin, you can simply study the Latin root words relevant to your language, again without learning Latin. I did just that in my high school etymology class which improved my English vocabulary as well as gave me an interest in learning other languages. Yes it took forty years to address that but hey, better late than never.
• You don't need to take Latin to learn terms used in the profession of your choice, just learn the terms. 
• And finally studying lots of things can make you smarter, it doesn't have to be Latin. 

But here's the thing, only by learning Latin can you accomplish ALL of those things, and much much more!

OK I know, it's a hard sell, especially in this day and age.

There are a few things going against Latin. For starters, our contemporary values, at least from those who call themselves "progressive" (not sure why that's become such a pejorative term), place an emphasis on learning from a vast array of cultures, not just the culture of Europe and the colonial expansion that culture inspired. 

I get that and champion it. After all let's face it, our culture has been inundated with education focused on Eurocentric themes at the exclusion of all others. It's time for a change. Latin, the paradigm of the "dead white man's language", represents all that. 

On the other hand, I don't believe in throwing the baby out with the bath water. Over two thousand years of history and wisdom that has greatly influenced our culture and the way we think, both for the better and the worse, should not be discounted. 

Then there's the notion that we should concentrate on teaching our children practical things that will help them get jobs and get through the daily routine of life. If I had a quarter for every time I've been subjected to a meme that said something like "Wouldn't it be better to teach our children how to balance their check book rather than teaching them how factor a quadratic equation?" I'd be, well a lot richer than I am today. 

My ideas on the subject jibe perfectly with those of advocates of liberal education, best expressed by the president of the college my son is currently attending. He said essentially this: "We don't know what the jobs of the next decade or so will be, so instead of teaching your children how to do a job that already exists, we each them how they can learn to do a job that doesn't exist yet, but certainly will."

Learn of course is the key word there, hence the emphasis. I'm a strong believer that schools, especially at the elementary and secondary levels, exist not just to teach our kids stuff, but much more important, to teach and inspire them to learn things on their own, kind of like the biblical passage that says give a man a fish and feed him for a day, but teach a man to fish and feed him for life.  

So I believe there's a good reason to think that the experience we gain from the mental exercises of learning something like Latin  can be applied to a whole range of other things we do in our lives. And it makes us more rounded individuals to boot.

Take speaking our own language. As I recall, my high school etymology class consisted of receiving a new list of root words at the start of every week, the first half of the class, Greek, the second, Latin. We memorized the roots and their English counterparts, then learned the English words that were formed by putting those roots together. Fascinating stuff but here's the deal, one of the least inspiring ways to learn a language, including your own, is to memorize random lists of words. And in this case, it wasn't even words, but parts of words.

For most language learners, it's much better to learn words in context, preferably through sentences, articles and stories geared to the students' level. Not only is it a vastly more interesting process, but it's a way more effective teaching device. 

Consider this passage from the Roman poet of the 1st Century BCE, Horace. I found it in one of the classic Latin textbooks, Wheelock's Latin and it has been edited and adapted into prose for the sake of clarity for newbies such as myself:

Agricola et vitam et fortunam nautae saepe laudat; nauta magnum fortunam et vitam poetae saepe laudat; et poeta vitam et agros agricolae laudat. Sine philosophia avari viri de pecunia semper cogitant: multum pecuniam habent, sed nihil virum avarum satiat. 

Like all the passages in the Wheelock book, it's up to the reader to translate it so I'll do my best:

The farmer often praises both the life and fortune of the sailor; the sailor often praises both the great fortune and life of the poet, and the poet praises the life and the land of the farmer. Without philosophy, greedy men always think of money, they have a lot of money, but no greedy man is satisfied.   

I know this translation leaves a little to be desired (in fact they all do as we'll see in a moment), however it's the best I can do after only about a month. But the moral of the story, which is as old as the ages, is as Dr. Wheelock points out: "The Grass is Always Greener." 

That passage not only transmits wisdom across the millennia, it's also a great lesson in etymology:

• For starters, the word Philosophia was "borrowed" from the Greeks and is composed of two roots, phil (love) and sophia (wisdom). 
• Agricola and agros come from the same stem, agr (land). Lots of English words come from that stem, the most obvious being agriculture. 
• From vitam, and its stem vit (life) we get vital, vitality, vitamin, etc. 
• From nautam, naut (sailor) we get nautical, etc.
• From cogitant, cog (think) we get cogent, cognizant, etc. 
• From pecunia, pecun (money) we get pecuniary, pecunious, etc. 
• From viri, vir (men) we get virile, virtue, etc. 
• Fortunam, poeta, laudat and a few others should be self-explanitory. 
• Oh yes and from et cetera (and the rest), we get etc.        

Maybe it's just me but I think it's vastly more interesting learning these stems in the context of actual words in action, rather than simply as a random list of stems. 

As I mentioned, the one unequivocal reason to learn Latin is to be able to read over two thousand year's worth of thought and expression in its original form. 

Here is another piece by Horace, this time in its unedited form in verse. If you're not already familiar with it, you may recognize a couple of words in the last line: 

Tu ne quaesieris (scire nefas) quem mihi, quem tibi

finem di dederint, Leuconoe, nec Babylonios

temptaris numeros. Ut melius quicquid erit pati!

Seu pluris hiemes seu tribuit Iuppiter ultimam,

quae nunc oppositis debilitat pumicibus mare              

Tyrrhenum, sapias, vina liques et spatio brevi

spem longam reseces. Dum loquimur, fugerit invida

aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.

My Latin isn't nearly good enough to translate all of that but here's a link to a page with four, count 'em four different translations.

But did you catch it? "Carpe diem" and the philosophy that inspired those words, have become a pop culture phenomenon since the movie Dead Poets' Society was released in 1989. Here's a link to the scene where an English professor named John Keating, encourages his students to "seize the day." 

In addition to making me realize how much I miss Robin Williams, it is truly a wonderful, dare I say inspiring scene with no stop going un-pulled in the emotive department. 

Like the message of the earlier quote from Horace, I believe the message of this stanza is very clear, life is short, so make the most of every day. 

But according to the Australian philosopher Roman Krznaric, carpe dium has been "hijacked" by a society which has turned it into little more than a marketing gimmick. Krznaric sites the Nike slogan "Just Do It" which in itself is more or less in the spirit of the ancient mantra. However according to Krznaric:

the spirit of "Seize the day" has been surreptitiously hijacked by consumer culture, which has recast it as Black Friday shopping sprees and one-click buying: Just Do It has come to mean Just Buy It.

Writing in JSTOR Daily, Chi Luu takes Krznaric's observations one step further:

Even life experiences have become commodities, in a world where people can no longer afford to buy a place to live. We’re encouraged instead to buy into precarious economic lifestyles celebrated by ad campaigns like freelance startup Fiverr’s “You eat a coffee for lunch… Sleep deprivation is your drug of choice. You might be a doer.” This is the “carpe diem” aesthetic of a modern world of aggressive action, not all that different from the “work till you drop” mentality of industrialism.

My guess is that "working until you drop" isn't exactly what Horace had in mind when he wrote his poem.

Part of the problem, according to Kznaric and Luu lies in the translation. Luu puts it bluntly when she says that "carpe dium" is a mistranslation because "carpe" does not mean "seize" but rather "pluck", as you might pluck a flower. Obviously according to her, the two English words convey a quite different meaning. 

It's true that had Horace wanted to use an explicitly more forceful metaphor, he could have chosen the very similar word "cape", from which our word "capture" comes. 

But he didn't.

Luu suggests that using the metaphor "seize" rather than "pluck" is... 

...an example of one of the more telling ways that we mistranslate metaphors from one language to another, revealing in the process our hidden assumptions about what we really value. Metaphors may map to similar meanings across languages, but their subtle differences can have a profound effect on our understanding of the world.

As Luu suggests, we are a society who values action over passivity, and our metaphors reflect that. So it's only natural that we would choose the aggressive metaphor "seize", over the more passive "pluck".

But wait a minute. Ancient Rome wasn't exactly "pink tea for mollycoddles" either. They meant serious business as we all know, look at what they did to Jesus. So it seems a little silly to assume that an ancient Roman would be any more averse to using a forceful metaphor than we would.

It has to be remembered that except for most nouns, there is rarely a perfect one to one correspondence between words in different languages. An adage I've heard over and over again in my adventures in language learning is that words don't mean words, words evoke ideas. And different languages have different ways to express those ideas. From its appearances in a great variety of texts that survive, it turns out the word carpere (the infinite form of the verb from which the imperative carpe comes) is very flexible, that is, in different contexts it can mean a great deal of things. Indeed, many English words including "pluck", "harvest", "seize", and dozens more can be appropriately used to stand in for it. English has many similar words. 

Take the word "take":

• We can take a nap.
  
• We can take no prisoners.
• We can take the bus.
• We can take the car to the garage.
• We can tell someone to take a hike.
• We can take off our clothes.
• We can take off in an airplane.
• We can take some time off.
  
• We can take on a project.
  
• We can take the spaghetti.
• We can take credit cards.
• We can take something that doesn't belong to us. 
• We can "take it easy but take it." (Woody Guthrie)
  
• We can even take the day.

In each of those examples, the verb "take" performs a different action, and each sentence conveys a different feeling, some mundane, some passive, some defiant, and some aggressive. But even though we're using the same verb, there is no ambiguity in any of those sentences for someone who is fluent in the English language, because it's all about the context. But if we were to translate those sentences into another language, we'd most likely have to use a different verb for each one.  

Of course, Horace didn't write seize the day or pluck the day, he wrote carpe dium. And just the same as those examples of take, anyone with a good knowledge of Latin can understand what Horace meant.

Could it be though, that Horace was being intentionally a little ambiguous in his choice of carpe over cape? 

Much like ourselves, people in Ancient Rome would have had their own interpretation of what it meant for themselves to carpe dium. For some it may have meant stop and smell the roses, for others it may have meant to screw it and spend their life savings on that snazzy new chariot. After all, vita brevis est. 

Given that, it's possible that a long lost ancient Roman version of Roman Kznaric, or maybe even Horace himself might have bemoaned the fact that carpe dium was being hijacked 2,000 years ago, just as it is today.

Because as we learned from the first writing of Horace I mentioned, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

For what it's worth, as a translation I prefer "seize the day" by a mile. 

Pluck in my opinion is a terrible word. For starters it rhymes with a common English four-letter word. Imagine someone listening to that passage from Horace being read in English and mishearing the phrase as "fuck the day." Furthermore, every old comic will tell you that words with the letter "K" in them are inherently funny. Had Robin Williams used the line "pluck the day boys" in the movie, people would have thought he was making a joke. 

Most of all, when I think of pluck, I don't think of flowers, I pick those. No, I think "pluck the banjo" or "pluck the chicken".   

Shall I pluck the day like I would pluck a chicken? I don't think so.

Long story short, no matter how good the translation, it's always better in the original.

Of course as Horace reminds us, life is short and most of us mere mortals don't have the time to study the language of every piece of writing that interests us. I'll probably never get around to reading the Old Testament in its original Ancient Hebrew, the Quran in Arabic, or the Bhagavad Gita in Sanskrit, not to mention the classic works of Chinese literature in their original Ancient Chinese, or modern Chinese for that matter. I started to read the Gospel of St. John in Latin, (In principio erat Verbum...) but had to remind myself that it too is a translation from the original Greek. 

All of these ancient languages are well worth learning, especially if you have an interest in the particular culture they are associated with. But since life is short, I'm not going to get too carried away with my bucket list. 

On the other hand:

Τα ελληνικά μπορεί να μην είναι και τόσο κακή ιδέα.

* A "dead" language is defined by linguists as a language that currently has no native speakers. That distinguishes it from an "extinct" language which is lost. Currently, Latin, a dead language by that definition, is still widely studied around the world, but it's difficult to get a reliable number of how many people actually know it, tougher still to get an accurate number of people who speak it fluently. That number ranges from about 200 (ridiculously low I think) to the tens of thousands. That's understandable as most folks study the language purely as an academic exercise, not as one to communicate verbally with other people.  

Here's a guy who definitely speaks Latin fluently. His name is Luke Ranieri and he's a strong advocate not only of learning Latin, oh yes and Ancient Greek as well, but speaking them, truly bringing those ancient languages to life. In the video below, he goes to the Vatican, where the official language is still technically Latin, and tries to find people who actually speak it. He found only a handful and as you can tell, the three priests who agreed to go on camera, speak it quite hesitantly.  

But I have a sneaking suspicion that there will be a resurgence of Latin, Ancient Greek and other ancient languages in the future, thanks to of all things, the internet, and guys like Ranieri.

By the way I kind of cringe whenever I hear Latin described as being a dead language. I think eternal is more like it.

Valete!