With Good Reason

Living in Toronto , it seems, brings us in contact with dozens of different languages. We may hear them on the street or in the subway, see them in print on newsstands, or come across them while flipping through the channels of the TV. And if we are really determined, we can learn them either in a classroom setting or on our own through books and tapes. One language that we have the opportunity to study but rarely if ever hear in spoken form, however, is Latin. Though Latin is considered a “dead” language, it permeates our daily lives far more than most of us realize. We use Latin expressions, such as “status quo;” employ words of Latin origin in our everyday vocabulary; and may even have names ultimately derived from Latin (my own name, Emilia, comes from the Latin word “aemulus,” meaning “rival,” also the root of “emulate”). Latin has played an important role throughout the Western - and to a certain extent non-Western - world in religion, medicine, and politics. Therefore I have thought it appropriate to dedicate an essay to the subject of Latin.

Latin, like English, Greek, Russian, and Hindi among others, is part of the Indo-European family of languages. More specifically, it belongs to a branch of Indo-European called Italic. As their name implies, the Italic languages originated on the Italian peninsula. The term Latin takes its name from “ Latium ” (present-day Lazio), the region in which Rome is located. At first Latin was only one of several related Italic languages spoken in what is now Italy . Others included the now-extinct Faliscan, Oscan, and Umbrian. With the rise of the Roman Empire , though, Latin eventually eradicated and supplanted these rival tongues, which died without issue, so to speak. All Italic languages alive today (the Romance languages) descend directly from Latin.

As the Romans expanded their empire even further, they brought their language beyond Italy ’s borders. Of course not every land that fell under Roman rule became Latin-speaking. In Gaul (modern-day France ), Latin did eventually replace the pre-existing Celtic tongues there. On the other hand, the Romans never managed to impose their speech on Britain – although traces of it remain in the names of places ending in “caster,” “cester,” or “ chester ” (from “castrum,” camp) as in “ Lancaster ” and “ Gloucester .”

Latin nevertheless had an influence even in those Roman territories where it never gained a footing as a spoken language. In Palestine it never became a native tongue or even a lingua franca (a role already occupied by Greek), but it was used for official purposes. When Jesus was crucified, the words “This is the king of the Jews” were written above the cross in Hebrew, Greek and Latin (Luke 23:38). The impact of Latin on the Jews of the New Testament was evident as well in the fact that a number of them had Latin first names. One of Saint Paul’s female disciples and co-missionaries was called Priscilla, from the Latin word “prisca,” meaning “old” or “ancient,” related to our own “pristine.” The name “Paulus” itself signifies “small” in Latin, which leads some scholars to suggest that Saint Paul may have been a dwarf.

Latin was the medium for a number of literary masterpieces, such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Virgil’s Aeneid, and the plays of Terence. To write these and other manuscripts, the Romans devised their own alphabet, which was in turn derived from the Greek alphabet. The Romans borrowed or adapted many of the Greek letters, but they invented others, like the “g” (as distinct from the Greek “gamma”). The Roman, or Latin, alphabet is used by all Western European languages as well as several Eastern European and non-Western ones.

Works like the Aeneid and Metamorphoses were written in what is known as Classical Latin, the official version used for administrative and literary purposes. However, another type of Latin was developing alongside it, Vulgar Latin, the form spoken by people in their day-to-day lives, just as the Greeks employed a vernacular called koine (“common”). With time, in several of Rome ’s former colonies Vulgar Latin evolved into separate languages. These include five national languages (French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Rumanian) in addition to a number of more localized tongues, like Rhaeto-Romansch in Switzerland , Provencal in Southern France, and Catalan in Northeastern Spain . All of these are known as the Romance, or neo-Latin, languages.

For the most part, the vocabulary, syntax and grammar of these languages derive from Latin. Some changes nonetheless occurred during the transition from Latin to neo-Latin. The barbarian invasions from the North into the Roman Empire led to an influx of Germanic lexicon into the Romance languages. For instance, a Germanic term for war, “werra,” became “guerre” in French and “guerra” in Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, supplanting the Latin “bellum,” as in Julius Caesar’s memoir “De Bello Gallico” (Gallic Wars) or in the English “bellicose” and “belligerent.” Some Latin words furthermore took on different meanings as they passed into Romance. For example, “mulier” for “woman” kept its original designation in the Spanish “mujer” and Portuguese “mulher.” Italian on the other hand adopted “donna” from “domina,” or “lady,” to signify woman but retained “mulier” in “moglie,” wife.

While Latin ceased to be an everyday form of speech by the period between 600 and 800 A.D., it remained as a scholarly language throughout Western Europe in areas such as religion, law and science. The Magna Carta (“Great Charter”) was written in Latin in the thirteenth century. Among the more educated classes Latin became a sort of lingua franca - like English is in India today, for example - for literary and academic purposes. People with different mother tongues could thereby read each others’ medical, legal and other treatises.

Latin was also the language of the Roman Catholic Church. As early as about 400 A.D., Saint Jerome translated the Bible into Latin in a version called the Vulgate. In fact, the Catholic Mass was said in Latin until the 1960s, when the Vatican authorized the use of local languages. Latin lost some of its religious influence with the Protestant Reformation, whose leaders stressed the importance of the vernacular as a means of allowing each individual to read and understand the Bible directly as opposed to through intermediaries like priests. Nevertheless, the impact of Latin did not disappear completely. After all, Martin Luther wrote his 95 Theses in that language rather than in his native German. Likewise, many Protestant denominations, such as the Lutherans, retained the Latin names of parts of their service. The “Te Deum” after the offertory comes from “Te Deum laudamus,” which translates literally as “You God we praise,” “laudamus” hailing from the Latin verb “laudare,” the root of our “laudatory.”

A large number of Latin derivatives entered English during the Renaissance, a period in which Latin was emphasized as a language of learning and science. Many of these terms have a certain formal quality to them in comparison to their Anglo-Saxon equivalents. “Excavate,” for instance, sounds much more scholarly than “dig.” Such words frequently refer to items or concepts relating to medicine (such as “larynx”), science (“temperature”) and law (“juridical”). In addition, a non-negligible portion of our vocabulary consists of words of ultimately Latin origin which entered English through the former’s daughter languages French, Italian and Spanish. “Opera,” for example, comes from an Italian term for “work,” which in turn hails from the Latin “oper-,” the root of “operate” and “operant.”

One might conclude by asking what is the status of the Latin language today. It is perhaps not as influential as before, when it was deemed, along with Greek and Hebrew, a necessary component of a gentleman’s education. However, it lives on in many ways. Latin is a required subject in the high school curriculum (another Latin borrowing!) of many jurisdictions, and even when not mandatory, it is offered as an optional course at a fair number of secondary schools and colleges. I am a bit embarrassed to say that I am the only member of my immediate family not to have studied the language: both my parents, my siblings, and several of my aunts, uncles and cousins took Latin in school. Latin is also used in medical records in several European nations, which makes transferring such documents from one country to the other much easier because everyone can understand what is being said. Finally, Latin survives in a sense in the modern-day Romance tongues, which spread outside Europe with the overseas explorations of Portugal , Spain and France . In fact, the Americas are on the whole more “Latin” than Anglo-Saxon: in total the speakers of Portuguese in Brazil , Spanish in the rest of Latin America and French in Quebec and several Caribbean islands outnumber the Anglophones of the United States , Canada and the Caribbean . So the glorious heritage of Latin continues to this very day.