Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati

May 9, 2008 9:57 PM

And that's very nearly the limit of my Latin, such as it is. Is Latin really a supremely clear and precise language?

BBC News is quoting Reginald Foster, an American Roman Catholic priest, as supporting the Vatican's use of Latin on part of its Web site. He told the BBC:

"You have to say something and move on. It's not like French and some of these philosophical languages where you can write a whole page and say nothing - in Latin you can't do that!''

I'm curious whether this is, in fact, true and if so in what sense or senses.

Back when I was in school (uphill both ways, you know) I was told that Latin, for all its contributions to English, was a dead language. I opted to study French and German instead. Are people such as myself missing out on something wonderful by not knowing Latin?

posted by bryon to writing & language (21 comments total)

I took Latin in high school. I remember translating the Aeneid senior year, and being incredibly impressed with the precision of the language. English is a language where meaning is derived from the placement of words in the sentence. For example, the cat sat on the mat is a completely different sentence than the mat sat on the cat. In Latin, all the context is within the word. So you'd know if the noun was a direct object or a subject from the word itself.

I never studied French or German, so I cannot compare them. But compared to English, Latin is a dense language.
posted by JustKeepSwimming at 10:10 PM on May 9

I studied Latin for 7 years; it's sort of sad how little of it I remember. I can't read it offhand, now; I have to grind through it the way I did in Latin II.

The great works everyone reads - the rhetoricians Cicero and Seneca, and the writings of Julius Caesar - are indeed clear and precise as anything you will ever read. Virgil, on the other hand, was flowery at best (in the Aeneid book IV), and at worst mawkish and laden down with interminable metaphors.

Catullus and Plautus were light and funny, Livy was quite frankly dull as a box of rocks, and any one who has ever taken a crack at De Rerum Natura will tell you that Lucretius gives the lie direct to any rumor that use of the Latin language warrants anything like clarity or precision.
posted by ikkyu2 at 10:18 PM on May 9

Scholarly Latin of the sort you might read in Cicero or Caesar is a very precise language. You can move words around quite a bit without losing meaning.

But it bears mentioning that the Latin that we learn (8 years here) was not street Latin, even during the height of the Roman Empire. In a way, the Latin we know is a bit more like hard-core scientific writing (in English, for example) where words often have very precise meanings that are not always the same as what we'd expect (take the popular misunderstanding of the word "theory" in "Theory of Evolution"). Street Latin, "Vulgar" Latin (a term ripe for misinterpretation) was the forerunner of Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian, etc., and was probably as casual and context-dependent as any other spoken language today (if not overwhelmed with the absurdly wonderful number of synonyms that English, again as an example, has taken on).

It's almost circular. Classical, formal Latin was precise in part because it was classical, formal Latin, elevated from the street talk that most Romans used.
posted by socratic at 10:52 PM on May 9

And, responding to ikkyu2's observation about Virgil, et al. (heh), my high school Latin teacher always said that Virgil's sometimes ham-fisted use of Latin resulted from an attempt to conform a relatively inflexible Classical Latin to styles and forms that didn't come naturally to the language.
posted by socratic at 10:54 PM on May 9

Classical Latin, as taught, is based on a literary form of Latin and isn't necessarily much like what the people spoke. I've learned (to varying extents) Spanish, Romanian, French and Italian (all descendants of Latin), but I've never studied Latin itself. So to save time and prevent potential errors from my ignorance, I'll just quote selectively from Wikipedia, which says what I would have had to express with many more words:

Classical Latin is the form of the Latin language used by the ancient Romans in what is usually regarded as "classical" Latin literature.
____

What is now called "Classical Latin" was, in fact, a highly stylized and polished written literary language selectively constructed from early Latin, of which far fewer works remain.
____

The spoken Latin of the common people of the Roman Empire, especially from the 2nd century onward, is generally called Vulgar Latin. Vulgar Latin differed from Classical Latin in its vocabulary and grammar, and as time passed, it came to differ in pronunciation as well.


So while, if you learn German or Spanish in school, you're learning something that's pretty much the same language that people actually do speak. When you study Latin, you're actually studying a fairly contrived (that's my word!) or specialized form of the language that people didn't really ever speak. I think of it as a cousin to the sort of English used in legal documents, as that's a convenient comparison for me - it's precise, concise, even elegant at times. But somewhat removed from many of the finer aspects of a "living" language.

I'm sure that Vulgar or Popular Latin would have allowed the speaker to ramble on for as long and as incoherently as any other language does today. The idea that Latin is close to a "perfect" or "logical" language has been around for centuries and this silly idea has (rather sadly, again in my opinion) caused many changes in English usage and in what's considered wrong in English. For instance, the double negative was an intrinsic and perfectly acceptable part of English until some folks decided that, due to Latin's supposed supremacy, English should follow the idea that two negatives cancel each other out - never mind the past, or the fact that double negatives are grammatically necessary in some languages, such as Hungarian.

There are more examples like that, but it's a little more alien to me than it will be for others, since I didn't grow up speaking English or a Romance language. I enjoy that language changes as it does, and while it's an historical novelty that English has seen big changes due to such an artificial and forced rationale, I'd have been more impressed had they occurred organically, rather than in an Orwellian sort of manner!

Latin doesn't have a monopoly on this rather distorted depiction - I know many people whose languages (like mine) are Slavic and who believe the same things about Old Church Slavonic that English and Romance language speakers often do about Latin. Perhaps the Swedes and Danes (et al) feel this about Old Norse and so on and so on, I can't say for sure.

Sure, you're missing out on something wonderful but not knowing Latin, and it's nice to feel that one of your language's ancestors was unique and special in some way (as we love the memory of our grandparents and feel them special and unique) - but objectively, this would be nearly as true for any language.
posted by Dee Xtrovert at 11:04 PM on May 9 [2 favorites]

Yes, you are missing out by not learning Latin.
posted by Locative at 11:42 PM on May 9

That priest is full of it.

"You have to say something and move on. It's not like French and some of these philosophical languages where you can write a whole page and say nothing - in Latin you can't do that!''

I'm not sure what he means by "philosophical languages", but for many, many centuries all scholarly treatises were written in Latin. In fact, people wrote in Latin for a much longer than they've been writing in French or Italian.

And you can certainly ramble on and on in Latin. Any language that forced you to conform would hardly be useful at all. I doubt it would be expressive enough to be useful for human communication.

However, Latin's vocabulary and structure do tend towards a more concise writing. IMHO, it's more dense. So you can still say a page full of nothing, but your page will be smaller or your nothing larger.

To find an example of flowery Latin, I don't think you have to look any further than the Catholic Church's dogmatic constitutions from Vatican II (Lumen Gentium and Gaudium et Spes being the most popular). Don't get me wrong, I think parts of these are beautifully written and very uplifting. But I wouldn't call them concise and to the point.

Some people pine for a language that never was. They should just learn Esperanto and get it over with.
posted by sbutler at 12:28 AM on May 10 [1 favorite]

Well, I have no idea whether you are missing out by not learning Latin. Probably. But it is most likely not true that Latin is any more or less precise/clear than any other language. Unfortunately, because of the vagueness of the claim itself (which, incidentally, can probably be translated into latin), it is very hard to prove or disprove. I think if you go through the exercise of trying to turn the claim into a falsifiable statement (which should be possible, in principle), you will start to see why such claims are ridiculous to make.

The real question is what it would even mean for a language to be more or less clear/precise than another. I suppose it must mean something like this: a native speaker of both languages, who wants to express something, could express it more clearly or precisely in one language than the other. But this is extremely difficult to disentangle from the culture that might surround the languages; for instance a native speaker of classical Latin and some dialect of vulgur latin would probably have had their education in classical latin, and therefore spent considerably more time expressing complex ideas in classical latin. Even if you manage to control for this, you run up against a problem of understanding what it means for a sentence to be precise or clear or unambiguous (not to mention more or less so than another). Understanding this has been a huge problem in linguistics and philosophy in the last 50 years or so and I'm not sure we are far enough along in the problem to decide questions like this, but two conclusion we have come to are (i) that any utterance of any natural language is massively vague and ambiguous, and (ii) people are excellent at handling this fact when processing natural language. The point is, that for communication in general, vagueness is everywhere, unavoidable, and largely unproblematic. In fact, it is probably even necessary, for the sake of efficiency.

Another way of approaching the question is to examine bodies of work that have been produced in each language (this is presumably what the Catholic priest you mention has in mind with the comment about French). But this is hopelessly entangled in culture and historical accident. I don't think it is because of the language that so many classics were written in Latin, but rather because of the culture. Similarly, it happens that certain schools of philosophy that aren't so concerned with saying anything very concrete have been practiced predominantly by French philosophers, but I don't think this is because they speak French. (I don't mean to say that this one is caused by French culture either, it seems a rather impossible project to even try to figure out the cause.) The point is that if you try to judge a language by the body of writing in that language, you are making an error about causation.

If you want to study languages that are precise, study formal logic. (Of course, there are formal logics that actually try to model vagueness.)
posted by advil at 1:01 AM on May 10

By the way, the dream of there being a superior or perfect language is quite old, and probably predates Latin -- you might be interested in this book by Umberto Eco. Here's a google books link.
posted by advil at 1:11 AM on May 10

Surely it's common knowledge that the perfected language is not Latin, but Sanskrit.
posted by flabdablet at 2:44 AM on May 10 [1 favorite]

any one who has ever taken a crack at De Rerum Natura will tell you that Lucretius gives the lie direct to any rumor that use of the Latin language warrants anything like clarity or precision.

A million amens to that.

That said, my favorite part of latin is not the precision but the ambiguity. Because word order is not important poets especially can really mess with the meaning of words. It's hard to explain but magical once you realize what's going on.
posted by miss tea at 4:45 AM on May 10

I (had to) study Latin from grades 6 years in school. It was a chore at the time. And one of the most useful things I've ever learned. While the methodical nature of Latin might not be what spoken Latin was about, understanding its inner workings provides you with an understanding how languages work - in general.

Even if I'm not able anymore to perfectly translate from Latin, much less into it from other languages, I can puzzle together the gist of most written sentences in languages like Spanish, French, and Italian. And once you do that and thean learn even a little of those, you start to get a feeling for how modern western languages are interconnected. The more you know about how grammar is constructed and vocabularies derive from each other, the easier it becomes to learn or at least basically understand new languages.

So go for it. If not for the language itself, then for the toolset it provides. Its like computer science students learning something like PROLOG. Nobody is going to use that later on, but it illustrates the basics for everything that follows.
posted by uncle harold at 4:49 AM on May 10

In brief:

in Latin you can't do that

Is this true? No.

Does Latin have this reputation? Yes, somewhat.

Is the reputation deserved? No, not really.

Although I'm told they've dug up some graffiti at Pompeii that's mightily to the point.
posted by gimonca at 5:52 AM on May 10

Also, what socratic and sbutler said.
posted by gimonca at 5:53 AM on May 10

seven years of latin in german gymnasium here and damn, it is precise. one letter in a verb can change everything. it would have been impossible to speak, had it been real.
posted by krautland at 6:21 AM on May 10

Dee Xtrovert, sbutler, and advil have it. Foster was just repeating a popular bit of superstition/propaganda. No natural language is inherently clearer than any other. (The French also have this self-flattering idea about their own language.) The fact that it's got inflected nouns and verbs ("one letter in a verb can change everything") is completely irrelevant. If you study Latin, it should be because you enjoy Roman literature and want to read it in the original. Otherwise, no, you haven't missed a thing.
posted by languagehat at 6:29 AM on May 10

Latin, like any other language, is as precise and clear as the writer makes it. A very good writer will write very clearly. A very poor writer will writer very poorly.
posted by oddman at 7:32 AM on May 10

Because word order is not important poets especially can really mess with the meaning of words.

Ovid is simply amazing at this; I finally began to enjoy Latin once I read Metamorphoses. One of these days I will have to go back to it.
posted by synaesthetichaze at 9:28 AM on May 10 [1 favorite]

Even if I'm not able anymore to perfectly translate from Latin, much less into it from other languages, I can puzzle together the gist of most written sentences in languages like Spanish, French, and Italian. And once you do that and thean learn even a little of those, you start to get a feeling for how modern western languages are interconnected.

Of course, while this is true (although I'd take exception to the generalization about "Western" languages, since we're only talking about Romance languages, plus English), the opposite's true as well. You'd be surprised at how much Latin can be understood together with some knowledge of Romanian and French, for instance.

And I must take this opportunity to tout the virtues of Romanian, the least studied of Latin's primary offspring. Aside from the fact that it's a living language, I've found it to be the most helpful of the Romance languages in understanding other Romance languages - Portuguese is almost readable now (!), plus it retains some of the "Latin" characteristics that the others have lost (such as the definite article being appended to the end of the noun) and some interesting sound shifts (such as "p" for the hard "c," so one gets "opt" for "oct" (eight.) In many ways, it's the closest to Vulgar Latin of the surviving languages. And it underwent a craze for the adoption of words from French a century or so ago, so there's a lot of immediate knowledge if one speaks French. Not to mention that it contains many Slavic / Latin word pairs, in the same way that English has many Germanic / Latin word pairs, and it has a stratum of Hungarian loan words - all of which make it a good gateway language for other languages from other families.

You'd be surprised how much Latin is comprehensible with some Romanian knowledge, so unless you're studying the Romans in some fashion, learn Romanian!
posted by Dee Xtrovert at 12:55 PM on May 10

"Knowing" Latin and studying or learning Latin are not the same thing. I took three years of Latin. That would be Latin I, three years in a row. I sucked at it, really badly.

However, I got a lot out of studying the language, even though I continually failed the class. The way words are constructed, the way sentences are constructed and all of the vocabulary that informs so many other languages was all very informative. I learned loads about English by studying Latin, even while completely failing to learn any Latin at all.

So yes, you are missing out by not studying Latin. At least a bit.
posted by DarlingBri at 2:24 PM on May 10

Background: studied Latin for 7 years. I have to disagree with the idea that Latin is either clear or precise. Elisions, for example: elisions are like contractions. If I were Virgil stuck on a line of iambic hexameter, and I've only got one syllable left, I can reach into my big culture-specific grab-bag of scilicets, spondees dactyls and the like, and simply drop a couple of inconvenient syllables... they're "inferred." kind-of like how Elizabethan poets might change "EVER" into "E'RE" to fit a rhyme.

Now, if it were just dropping a syllable here and there that would be one thing. But with Latin you can drop entire words because the phrase is part of the common cultural context--for example, if I said, "What came first: the chicken, or the egg?" you'd still understand me if I reduced it down to "Chicken? Egg?" But the only reason I can do that is because you and I have a shared cultural experience that has exposed both of us to that phrase enough times that you can infer the entire statement after hearing only its key elements. Or if I said, "...like Romeo and Juliet"--who's Romeo? Who's Juliet? If the both of us weren't forced to read Shakespeare in school, we wouldn't have the shared culture to recognize the allusion. The Romans had that, too, except now it's two thousand years later. We don't know all those common-culture references. They could come from expressions found in the popular plays of the time that are lost to the ages.

When you're first starting off and haven't been exposed to a lot of Latin poetry, translating can be a frustrating experience and actual readings nigh-impossible. Take the first part of the Aeneid:

Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris
Italiam, fato profugus, Laviniaque venit
litora, multum ille et terris iactatus et alto
vi superum saevae memorem Iunonis ob iram;

If you were actually reading this out loud, it would sound more like this:

Arma wee-room-kway kano, troy-aye qui primus ab or-eese
Eeetahliam fahto profoogus Lawinya-kway-way-nit
littora multi-let, tereese yactatus et alto
we superoom sigh-wigh, memorem lunonis oh-biram;

posted by Civil_Disobedient at 5:16 PM on May 10