This question comes courtesy of Loafing Cactus of Cactus Juice, who wonders what I would say if I were given the opportunity to boost the Latin language in a book such as Harry Mount's Carpe Diem.
Carpe Diem purports to "teach" the Latin language with a few chapters of desultory instruction and a lot of padding with boring anecdotes. It is by a journalist who once tutored Latin at Oxford, and it is a best-seller in England.
I wish Mr. Mount were a real Latin teacher. He may have done a better job.
And what about me? What do I like about Latin? Well, here are my 500 words.
First: I don't particular like the people who spoke Latin: the ancient Romans. If you've seen the HBO cable TV series Rome you might know what I mean. The Romans were, on the whole, sadistic glory hounds who hated Greeks and never felt they could live up to them culturally. Romans lack the charm and harmlessness of modern Italians; they are more like mafiosi. To give you a snapshot: they invented crucifixion.
I have a much greater affinity for the Greeks, but I would venture to say that ancient Greek is an order of magnitude more difficult to learn than is Latin. So, there are exponentially fewer jobs teaching Greek than Latin.
The Romans have many redeeming features, however, chief among them their language, which I adore. It is not how beautiful it sounds (it's ugly, as languages go) nor how noble the sentiments one finds written in Latin that I adore-- though the poetry can be pretty fantastic.
I adore the precision.
I am a sloppy person, overall. I never follow recipes. I forget appointments. I am messy. You should see my office.
But in Latin, I can be a stickler. Because once you have learned even a little Latin, you begin to see the exactness of the meaning that an author wishes to express.
This is excellent discipline for adolescents, by the way. A small minority of them are compulsive about exactness, and these are the ones who constantly ask the question whether the following two sentences mean the same thing:
Tomorrow, we are going to the store to buy bread and milk.
We are going to the store tomorrow to buy bread and milk.
(Answer: yes)
The majority of adolescents are whirling about in a cyclone of chaos, their bodies and minds betraying them daily and sometimes hourly with new, unexpected reactions caused by hormones and other environmental factors, including parents.
Adolescents purport to want freedom from restraints such as Latin Grammar. "Why can't we translate it this way?" they wail. But in fact, Latin provides an anchor of stability in a storm of raging gland secretions.
No matter how bad a day you've had, how many of your friends have tweaked you, how many teachers have told you you have failed life, the following sentence will always mean the same thing:
Puer puellam amat.
Boys loves girl.
In fact, it will mean the same thing if you say
Puellam amat puer.
And if you say
Amat puellam puer.
And if you say
Puer amat puellam.
That is because meaning in Latin comes not primarily from the word order, but from the little endings on the words.
The -er on puer always means the boy is doing the doing.
The -am on puellam always means the girl is getting done to.
The -t on amat always means that a he, a she, or an it is doing the doing.
This is bedrock. You can't change it.
Of course, there are exceptions, piles and piles of them. Which leads to the second thing I adore about Latin, which is judgment.
Sometimes one is given a sentence where the meaning in English is not apparent right away. The endings, which give so much comfort in simpler sentences, can seem to deceive, because sometimes endings have two or more possible meanings.
Translation, in other words, is not always cut and dried.
You have to think <he said, tapping his temple>.
As in this example:
Reges puellae rosas dant.
Here, the word puellae can have three meanings: "of girl," "to/for girl," and "girls doing the doing." The -ae ending was attractive to the Romans and they liked using it as much as possible.
How to make the choice?
Look at the other words in the sentence.
Reges means "kings doing the doing," or "kings getting done to."
Rosas means "roses getting done to."
Dant means "they give."
Clearly, "they give roses" is the core of the sentence. But who is giving them to whom?
Either the girls or the kings could be giving the roses. But if the girls give the roses, we are left with nonsense. "The girls give roses kings." And I don't know what roses kings are
But if we say it is the kings giving the roses, then we can choose another meaning for puellae, and one which makes good sense: "Kings give roses to girl." Sure. If you're giving roses, you should give them to someone. And as indicated above, -ae can mean "to/for" something.
There are a thousand levels of rising complexity in Latin. And it is great mental discipline to try to solve the puzzle. I think they should have, in addition to sudoku, a Latin translation puzzle on the comics page every day. I think life would be much better because of it.
Latin is one of the only subjects in school where you're really using your head to solve a problem that has a right answer. Mathematics is the most famous of those few subjects, and someday I would like to write a book on the similarity-- and differences-- of Latin and Math.
But as Math is restricted to right answers, while Latin can also express poetry, which has thousands of right answers, I judge Latin superior to Math.
Just think-- a way of being exactly right and being poetically right, in the same package. Fascinating.
PS There is a new book popularizing Latin called Latein ist tot, es lebe Latein (Latin is dead, Long live Latin!) which, has been very favorably reviewed but is unfortunately written in German. Now's the time I need my German translation friend to go in with me on a project!