Living with a Dead Language Read online

  At this opening hour, there was only one other patron in the entire Retreat. I sat at a sunny table near the window and paged through Learn to Read Latin. It had fifteen chapters, all of which we would cover over the course of the next nine months. Each chapter began with a list of forty or so vocabulary words. And what should be the very first word of the very first vocabulary list of Chapter I but agricola—the only Latin word I remembered from that lone seventh-grade semester. Obviously, some things never change. Food, and those who provide it, always comes first.

  At 8:45 I headed to class. Again I was the first to arrive. I had to rearrange the scattered mess of desks to sit in the back row on the eastern side, as I had the day before. When she finally arrived, Camilla again sat next to me, and Stella next to her. Week in and week out almost all the students sat in the same place in relation to those around them, even though the desks needed organizing every morning. Only one student, a young woman whom I came to call Insouciant Inez, traveled around the western regions of the patria (a first-declension noun meaning homeland, included in the vocabulary list on page one of Chapter I). She would sit here or there with a careless slouch and an air of indulgent superiority, her feet usually resting on an empty desk she’d stationed in front of hers. I later learned she was a senior, well versed in Latin, who was taking this class for an easy A.

  A few students engaged with their smartphones while waiting for Curtis to arrive, but most paged through their textbooks.

  Curtis arrived at 9:00 on the dot, greeted us with Salvete, turned on the lights, and took up his position behind the desk. Every day the class sat in the penumbra awaiting his arrival, until finally, about a month into the semester, he said, “You know, I’ve noticed that the only class I teach in which no one turns on the lights is nine A.M. Latin. Why do you suppose that is?” After that, I turned on the lights if I was the first to arrive; others followed suit. The following year the college decided there would be no more 9:00 A.M. classes; the earliest class would begin at 9:30.

  That first week we were introduced, both in our textbooks and by Curtis, to “The Latin Noun and Its Properties: Gender, Number, Case.” Gender and number I had practiced with both English and French (though Latin added neuter to masculine and feminine), but not case. Case means inflection: Each word has a suffix that fixes its role in the sentence as subject, direct or indirect object, or adverbial object. In the Latin sentence, words can appear in any order the writer wishes, so the only way to “read” and thus comprehend the sentence is to “read” the suffixes and thus discern what part the word plays in the sentence. For example:

  Poeta puellam amat means “The poet loves the girl,” as does Puellam poeta amat; but Poetam puella amat and Puella poetam amat mean “The girl loves the poet.”

  Here I was again, with my beloved suffixes, beginning with endings. The -ids I’d begun collecting all those years ago could loosely be called an inflection that renders a noun an adjective in English—horror: horrid; torpor: torpid.

  Wikipedia provides a daunting summary of case and inflection:

  Latin, the mother tongue of the Romance languages, was highly inflected; nouns and adjectives had different forms according to seven grammatical cases (including five major ones) with five major patterns of declension, and three genders instead of the two found in most Romance tongues. There were four patterns of conjugation in six tenses, three moods (indicative, subjunctive, imperative, plus the infinitive, participle, gerund, gerundive, and supine) and two voices (passive and active), all overtly expressed by affixes (passive voice forms were periphrastic in three tenses).

  QED: The head spins. This is what I’d signed up for.

  On that second day, after his Salvete, Curtis called roll using the cards he’d collected the day before. I awaited my name to be called with some exhilaration: When had I last been in a roll call? I was a member of a class. On my card I’d written, “No previous Latin,” and “Passionate desire.” I hoped that pleased him. I was eager to please him.

  For the next week Curtis would use the cards to call on us during class and to learn our names. If no one answered to a card, he would toss it aside. You were allowed only five absences before your grade was affected. I decided I’d follow that rule and never miss a class out of laziness. I’d had quite enough laziness in the past two years; this was a necessary and welcome daily dose of discipline and engagement.

  That morning we were introduced to the first declension (nouns ending in a in the nominative case). A declension is a way of grouping nouns that follow a similar pattern of inflection. In Latin, inflection (from inflecto, inflectere, to bend or change) doesn’t have the many associations it has in English: It refers only to the suffix (inflection) added to the noun’s root to establish its syntax (which part of speech the noun plays in a sentence). Unlike English, in which the placement of the noun determines its role in the sentence, in Latin, it is the inflection, or ending, that determines the role a noun plays in the sentence. There are five different declensions (different patterns of endings) for nouns. Nouns are always cited in both their nominative and genitive cases (puella, puellae), because the genitive signals which of the five declensions govern the noun.

  The first declension is the first taught in nearly every Latin text. Most first declension nouns are feminine—queen (regina), woman (femina), goddess (dea), girl (puella). Only a few masculine nouns—poet (poeta), farmer (agricola), and sailor (nauta)—are included in this declension.

  A mnemonic from long ago tries to explain:

  All nouns in a make Feminine,

  If you like “Musa” them decline,

  Except they’re from a Graecian line,

  Or by their sense are Masculine.

  Does this help? What if you don’t know Greek? And why would the “masculine in sense” nouns such as agricola (farmer), nauta (sailor), poeta (poet) be included in a feminine declension? Though Curtis didn’t enter that thicket, I tried to penetrate the logic of the language. Was it perhaps because the “masculine in sense” nouns related somehow to taming nature (natura also feminine)? Most things having to do with the earth (terra, provincia) are first-declension feminine nouns, and certainly agricola and nauta are intimate with the earth. And life itself (vita) is feminine. But what does that say about the Roman view of the poet (poeta)? Does the first declension hark back to earlier, preverbal times, before the patriarchy, when the earth goddess ruled and all toil was at her pleasure? Accola (neighbor), advena (foreigner, stranger), conlega (colleague), and conviva (guest) are also first-declension masculine nouns. Perhaps because neighbors, strangers, colleagues, and guests, like women, were under the command of men? Scriba (secretary, scribe) is understandable as masculine, since few women in those days were literate. No surprise, however, that it’s in a feminine declension, since it’s a subordinate role. I myself had spent many years on that professional via (road, which is feminine), and I remember watching my mother take dictation from my father. She knew shorthand, a now obsolete skill that few, if any, men ever learned. And what about pecunia (property, wealth), which is also first-declension feminine? Is it because it is something to be conquered by the second-declension viri (men)? Ecastor! (By Castor!)

  The nominative is the easiest case; it names the subject of the sentence. It’s a case familiar to all English speakers. Nomen=name. “This is the most straightforward of the cases,” Curtis said. It is the nominative noun one tries to find first when translating a Latin sentence. It’s not necessarily the first word in a sentence, and it sometimes looks identical to the accusative case, but compared to the other cases, it’s not difficult to figure out its role in the sentence. I came to think of it as home base.

  The genitive is the possessive case, most often translated as “of.” Simple, yes? Patria puellae (the country of the girl or the girl’s country). Until you realize that it has other functions, increasingly more eccentric. The word genitive comes from genus
(family, breed, species, tribe, descendant), which links comfortably with English ideas and helps explain the genitive of characteristic and the genitive of description. But how does the genitive of indefinite value fit in there? I had no idea. Even odder, the genitive of the exciting cause. Curtis avoided these complexities in the first week, though they would be doled out, often two at a time, in subsequent weeks.

  The dative is the case of the indirect object (to or for). When you know that datum is a gift, and datus means “having been given,” the case becomes clearer. Though not for everyone: Some students, not adept at English grammar, had a lot of trouble with it. Curtis had to call on three students before one could identify the indirect object in the English sentence “I give you a lesson” (you is the dative). This case is a workhorse, with many roles in addition to the indirect object. Luckily, we would not be introduced to the more arcane uses of the dative till much later: the dative of advantage and disadvantage, the dative of the possessor, the dative of purpose, the dative of reference, and the capper, the dative of agent with the passive periphrastic. Ohe iam! (Enough already!)

  The accusative is the case of the direct object. The root comes from the same root as cause, so it is what is caused by the action of the verb. So in our simple sentence, Poeta puellam amat, puellam (girl) is the accusative. Even to this apparently logical case Latin adds complications, which would also be covered in subsequent chapters of our textbook: the accusative of duration of time, the accusative of exclamation, the accusative of place to which, and the accusative of respect.

  The latter, a favorite of Latin poets, seems almost purposefully awkward and obfuscating, though I would come to know it well two years later when I began studying the poets. Ovid especially seemed to favor the locution for describing hair. Viz., Ovid Amores I.i: “longas compta puella comas” (a girl well arranged in respect to her long hair) and Ovid Amores III.ix: “inornatas dilaniata comas” (mutilated in respect to her disheveled hair), which refers to the practice of mourning common in Rome—women tearing their hair out.

  I came of age in publishing in the seventies, the boom time of the paperback romances, whose authors, like Ovid, spent a lot of time describing the conditions of the heroine’s hair, although no romance novelist had ever presented hair with the accusative of respect. She was well arranged in respect to her hair? I think not. But likely the focus on the romance heroine’s hair had come all the way down from Ovid.

  The ablative is known as the adverbial case and expresses separation (from), association (with), instrument (by), or location (in, on, or at). An easy example: Poeta pecuniam de puella aufert. (The poet carries away money from the girl.) The girl (puella) is in the ablative case.

  The word ablative comes from the Latin ablatus, carried away. And indeed, the case is carried away with its own self: It is by far the largest and most consternating of the cases. Here are the various additional uses of the ablative that we would learn over the year: the ablative of cause, the ablative of comparison, the ablative of degree of difference, the ablative of description, the ablative of manner, the ablative of origin, the ablative of personal agent, the ablative of price, the ablative of respect, the ablative absolute, and the ablative of specification.

  Then there is the ablative of attendant circumstances, which even most textbooks leave out. It is what scholars call the use of an ablative in Roman literature that doesn’t fit comfortably into any of the other categories of ablative. Pro di immortales! (By the immortal gods!)

  Even Emily Dickinson, it seems, knew the ablative well, indeed accorded the capacious case estatehood:

  That It Will Never Come Again

  That it will never come again

  Is what makes life so sweet.

  Believing what we don’t believe

  Does not exhilarate.

  That if it be, it be at best

  An ablative estate—

  This instigates an appetite

  Precisely opposite.

  I wonder if she was referring to the ablative of separation. Or the fact that the estate is so large, and greedy: It appropriates any prepositional idea not safely stored in the double garages of the dative and the accusative.

  The easy, friendly vocative finished up the cases: It is the case of direct address and has no other agenda waiting in the wings. And, except for the second declension singular, its endings are identical to the nominatives!

  Here’s a sentence using them all:

  Professor, I will give you an egg on Easter. Pascha tibi, Magister, ovum donabo. In this sentence the nominative I is contained in the inflection (o) of the verb, donabo.

  Every day, as I drove to Poughkeepsie and back, I practiced the vocabulary given for the first chapter. I hadn’t attempted to memorize anything in close to thirty-five years. I had been a Zen student for more than ten years, but I still hadn’t committed the entire Heart Sutra to memory, even though I must have chanted it hundreds of times. In learning the vocabulary I was exercising a weak, atrophied muscle, and exercise I did. When I memorized, I could actually feel a spot of awareness and muscle fatigue about an inch above the outside of my left ear. Was that the memory center of my brain? Rather than sing while I drove, I chanted Latin nouns. When I was abed and sleep eluded me, I chased declensions rather than sheep.

  After the second week of class, we took our first Thursday quiz. Having spent so many hours memorizing the vocabulary and the first two declensions, I thought I’d aced the test. I’d always been a self-satisfied test taker, the fastest kid in the room. Not this time.

  I’d gotten only six out of ten, barely passing. I was not one of the smarties in the class; in fact, I seemed to be one of the dummies.

  “Oh, dear, I think this is very bad,” I said to Camilla. She continued to sit beside me every day, often in some unlikely outfit, a bit of homey dash and sass. That day she wore a skirt printed with large, bright purple and yellow flowers and a red-and-white-striped T-shirt. We were getting into the habit of chatting before class most days, usually comparing homework or asking advice on some syntax we didn’t understand. “How did you do?” I asked her.

  She showed me her quiz: eight out of ten. “Well, better than me,” I said as I slid mine over to her. “I don’t think I’ve ever done this badly on a test before in my life,” I lamented. I actually had that sinking feeling of failure in my stomach. She gave me a look, at once ironic and compassionate, and picked up the pile of cards on her desk. “You need to make flash cards,” she advised. “It’s the best way to memorize.”

  After class, I stopped at the bookstore and bought index cards. Which would be better: 3x5 or 2x3? I got two packages of the smaller, two of the larger; white for nouns, blue for verbs, the large ones for syntactical difficulties. Always being a thrifty sort, I did not make them, as Camilla did, one word per card, Latin on one side, English on the other, but rather squashed three words with translations on each card. I left the back blank, figuring I would need it later.

  I began taking the cards along on my daily walks with Augie, who was getting on in years but still lively and up for fun. The two hundred acres of hilly farmland across the street, now cultivated into a parklike private domain by my neighbor, were my memorizing fields. On those long walks, I’d let Augie run at will off the leash, as I repeated the words on one card after another. No one was around to hear me, and saying them aloud, again and again, seemed to plant them firmly in my brain. Farm fields nurtured words.

  In the third week, prepositions (of which there are fewer in Latin than one might expect—many prepositions are backed into the inflection) were introduced, accompanied by the only drawing in the entire text, a version of which is rendered below:

  This new word house delighted me. How concise Latin is! The language, like Roman architecture, is sturdy, carefully fitted together, built to withstand the incursions of time. Roman edifices and bridges have weathered millennia, one heavy
stone placed next to or atop another, their mortar the architectural equivalent of declensions and conjugations. Everything fits snugly, compactly. That’s what gives the language its ponderous feel and its grandeur. Still I loved the drawing of the house, and imagined the prepositions as vermin, climbing in and out of the walls of English and French nouns. They were not unlike the vermin that remained in my house, even after I’d spent a small fortune on its rebuilding.

  Learning a language is much like building a new home, or constructing a new addition. I’d studied French for twelve years; French words peppered my thoughts and speech (yes, it’s pretentious, but there’s nothing quite so specific as esprit or bouleversé in English). French for me was like an outbuilding, connected to the main house of English by a well-trod walkway. With my Latin studies I had begun excavating a new foundation; I was doing with language what I had done a few years earlier with my physical home.

  I’d saved the house’s 1840 structure and built on to it. It was not the smartest or thriftiest way to create a permanent, full-time domicile and friends advised simply tearing down the old house, which was of no architectural significance, and starting anew. It would be cheaper in the long run and I could have more and bigger closets, abundant light, and larger rooms. I could build my “dream house.” But that is not what I did. When someone would ask, “Why on earth are you restoring the old house rather than tearing it down?” I would become annoyed and repeat my mantra: “Because I’m not a teardown, McMansion girl. I respect the past and do not want to obliterate it.” So I excavated a new basement, updated the old house, and added a new wing, all using the architectural vernacular of the old. Language, like architecture, is an ever-evolving structure that we create and re-create throughout our lives. The new always incorporates what came before. No attempts at a made-up “universal” language (remember Esperanto?) have ever taken hold. Nor has classical proportion been replaced by “modern proportion.”