Parva leves capiunt animas. (Small things occupy small
minds)
-- Ovid
E pluribus unum, sine qua non. (Out of many, one, without
which nothing.)
-- Andrew Jackson
-- Jean Shepherd
I attended high school on the campus of Manhattan College in New York. In those days, Manhattan College was a school for males only and my little part of it, Manhattan College Academic Department, was restricted in enrollment to about 220 young lads. No lasses. Manhattan College was run by the Catholic Church and provided a thorough, if conservative, education. Every day in my freshman year the school day started off with a recitation of three decades of the rosary. The group-rosary oratio gravis required a student to lead off with the first half of the Ave Maria (Hail Mary), followed by the rest of the class joining in for the second half. Once the first decade was exhausted, the lead student (whom we lads dubbed “it”) would recite the first half of the Pater Noster (Our Father), the class would finish it for him, and the student who sat immediately behind him thereupon became “it” and took up the next decade. Three students per day had to take the lead, up and down the aisles. This meant that I, personally, started off each school day saying no less than thirty-three organized school prayers.
Amazing it is that I grew up to be an agnostic bordering on out-and-out pagan. So much for the notion, entertained by so many of our conservative friends, that organized prayer in public schools would somehow lead to a rebirth of Christian piety in our benighted, sinful land. On the other hand, although I consider myself as benighted and sinful as the next man, I did not grow up to be a criminal, a whoremonger, or a pornographer, so perhaps all those Hail Mary’s had indeed a benign effect. Who’s to say?
In those long-off days, the Catholic Mass was still conducted in Latin. In fact, Latin permeated the Catholic Liturgy. They didn’t call it the Roman Catholic Church for nothing, amice mei (my friend). The Mass started with the priest intoning the words Introibo ad altare Dei, and ended with Ite missa est. There were hymns in Latin such as the Tantum ergo and O Salutaris hostia, prayers such as the Credo, and at Christmas we would sing Adeste Fidelis instead of O Come All Ye Faithful. I still know the Latin words to many of these devotional recitations. I find myself of two minds about the Church’s ultimate abandonment of Latin, which took place in the mid-nineteen sixties. The words of the Latin prayers and hymns were never translated for the lowly lay communicants. At services, cards were handed out to the parishioners containing the arcane lyrics carefully spelled out with hyphens between the syllables, the stressed syllables in capital letters. To us, they were simply holy words we mouthed aloud when so ordered, so we could get into Heaven when we died. It was an exercise in parrotry, hardly uplifting and certainly not instructional. During devotional services the crowd chanting the Tantum ergo had as much comprehension of what they were doing as a bunch of Chinese guys singing Jeepers Creepers phonetically.
Yet, the Latin liturgy lent an air of mysticism to Roman Catholicism which was sadly lacking in the Protestant sects with which I was then faintly acquainted. I had the experience of attending a service in a Protestant Church at one point during my high school years. I recall being struck by the silly emotionalism of the preacher and the atonal hymn singing of the musically talentless rank-and-filers as they belted out songs with English language lyrics, full of poor meter and forced rhymes. The Catholic Mass was, by comparison, deep and mysterious, full of ritual and rites. Candles were lit, bells were rung, incense burnt, even the color of the priest’s vestments had arcane meaning. The Mass even had its own special language. In my world, which was not a Greek world, that language was Latin.
Naturally, the conservative prep school I attended decided that an education in Latin was sine qua non for a young Catholic man. Our introduction to Latin began in freshman year. The instructor was one of the monks of the school. His name was Brother Lawrence, but we called him The Crow. Almost every teacher, lay or monk, in the school had a nickname. The lack of a nickname was the mark of a truly dull teacher. Besides the Crow, we had teachers named the Owl, who taught mathematics and physics; Bozo, who taught English; Percy Dovetonsils , English and French; Solomon, English lit; The Duke, who theoretically taught Social Studies but in reality taught nothing. The Duke was such a jumble of neuroses that he deserves an essay all to himself, but I’ll leave that to another day.
The Crow was so named for his awful, cawing voice, although his appearance also fit the bill. He was a thin man, black-rim bespactacled, with hallow eyes and a hooked nose. His black hair, combed directly back from a forepeak over his pate, was rapidly thinning and streaking gray. His lips were thin and always pursed, making him appear as though he had just tasted something unpleasant. However, I recall him from his place in the past more through auditory imagery than visual. His squawking voice was loud, very loud. It echoed off the bare, plastered ceilings of the antique classrooms, ricocheted off the blackboards, rebounded about the room, and screeched into one’s ears, knocking loose the wax contained therein. His voice crawled all over you, like lice. I felt as though I were wearing a rough wool shirt on my bare, sunburnt skin as I sat in freshman Latin class. Listening to the Crow ramble on endlessly about the subjunctive forms of the imperfect tense or of supine participles and their usage reminded me of feedback from a badly configured hi-fi set; of the neighbor kid practicing his first trumpet lesson at 10:00 o’clock at night; of a bad train wreck, complete with passengers screaming inarticulately in their death agonies as the engine and cars braked in futility. Some kids got toothaches just from sitting in the class, as his voice easily penetrated soft tissue to set off resonating more solid organs of the body, like bones, teeth, nails, and kidney stones. His voice sounded like a scratchy recording on which someone had turned up the volume to full in an attempt to make the garbled speech stand out against the background noise. I can still hear him after all these decades as if I were still in the freshman Latin homeroom at my seat back by the door. He is braying and squalling about ablative singulars and genitive plurals as if that were all that mattered in this world. To the Crow, Latin grammar was all that mattered.
On the very first day of class, the Crow wrote two Latin phrases on the board: Salve frater and Salvete pueri. He explained that upon his entering the room, we were to rise and recite the first phrase, whereupon he would pronounce the second – our signal to retake our seats. Salve frater means “Greetings, Brother”, Salvete pueri is “Greetings, boys”. That was as close to conversational Latin as we got in his class. Everything else, and I do mean everything else, was a stupefying analysis of Latin grammar. We parsed every Latin noun and adjective, verb and preposition, participle, supine and gerundive until we all went stark, raving mad. An exaggeration, you say? Who else but madmen would translate foreign literature into English and come up with so-called sentences such as, “Over the hills, into the city, through the streets, amid the people, came the soldiers, shouting and calling, carrying swords”. What kind of insane babble is that?
The Crow never got far enough away from a Latin word, no less sentence, to understand what it might actually mean. It never occurred to the Crow that when Caesar wrote the word Germaniae or Romae, he was trying to say something about Rome or Germany, rather than serving up an example of the locative case for us to admire. In fairness, I should state that every Latin teacher I had or ever knew was exactly the same in this regard. So were the two Latin majors I encountered in College. As for the sing-song blather that we arrived at for English translations of Latin literature, it was a natural result of the hypnotic focus on grammar that characterizes Latin scholars the world over. What is it about Latin that leads to this state of affairs?
Well, Latin has got grammar in spades. “Grammar” is actually a layman’s term. In linguistics we generally talk of structure and syntax. I will refrain from going into a precise definition of these terms, but suffice it to say that structure refers to the changes that occur to words and syntax refers to the way words are used in a language. As an example, look at the English sentence below:
The boy loves the girl.
In the above example, the –s added to the verb love is structure. It is an ending to the verb that makes it third person singular in the present tense. The positions occupied by the words constitute syntax. If one reverses the positions occupied by “boy” and “girl”, the meaning of the sentence is altered. And as we know in this less then perfect world, to say, “The boy loves the girl” is not to say that “The girl loves the boy”. More problematic are the positions of the definite articles relative to their nouns ( in some languages, “the” follows its noun). Is that syntax or structure? I would argue structure on the grounds that an alteration of that arrangement does not change the meaning but produces gibberish. Now, in Latin, this same sentence has rather more structure than syntax:
Puer puellam amat.
Here the verb amare is inflected to amat and puellam is puella (girl) in the accusative case, showing that it is the object of the verb, while puer (boy) is in the nominative case as subject of the sentence. The structure here is important, but the word order is not. One could say Amat puer puellam, puellam amat puer, puer amat puellam, and so forth. The reason for this is that the structure shows the use of the word in the sentence and therefore the syntax can be loose. A change in the structure again produces junk. Were we to say Puer puella amat, the sentence becomes meaningless as one cannot tell whether “boy” or “girl” is the subject. Latin had seven cases into which nouns and their modifiers could fall, although only the first five are really important. Here are puer and puella and two other nouns listed out in their principal cases, singular and plural:
|
Case |
Boy |
Girl |
War |
Soldier |
|
Nominative |
Puer |
puella |
bellum |
miles |
|
Genitive |
Pueri |
puellae |
belli |
militis |
|
Dative |
Puero |
puellae |
bello |
militi |
|
Accusative |
Puerum |
puellam |
bellum |
militem |
|
Ablative |
Puero |
puella |
bello |
milite |
Plural
|
Case |
Boys |
Girls |
Wars |
Soldiers |
|
0Nominative |
pueri |
puellae |
bella |
milites |
|
Genitive |
puerorum |
puellarum |
bellorum |
militium |
|
Dative |
pueris |
puellis |
bellis |
militibus |
|
Accusative |
pueros |
puellas |
bella |
milites |
|
Ablative |
pueris |
puellis |
bellis |
militibus |
Adjectives are declined much like nouns. Nouns can fall into five types or declensions. Adjectives have three declensions. There are also three genders. Gender in Latin is a purely structural concept that indicates the manner in which the noun is inflected and the behavior of its modifiers rather than the sex of the object described. The set of case endings a noun has depends upon the declension, number and gender. Adjectives must agree with nouns in number, gender and case. In many instances, this means that the endings of the noun and the adjective will be the same: puero magno ( to the big boy), puellarum iratarum (of the angry girls). In other uses, where the nouns and adjectives are of differing declensions or where the noun is declined in a way normally associated with a different gender, the adjective may have endings quite different than the noun: nautae magno (to the big sailor), bellis atrocibus (with or by the fierce wars). Keeping all this straight in your noggin is a chore, I can tell you.
Notice the noun ‘Soldier’ in the above chart. It is a third declension noun because of the set of endings it takes, but it is of a class that interposes an extra syllable between its stem and its ending. In this case it is added to mil and the declensional endings are added to the result. There are other nouns of this class but they may interpose different letter combinations. Custos (guard), for example interposes the letter ‘d’; caput (head), changes the ‘u’ to an ‘i’ and drops the normal –em ending in the accusative where it also reverts to the ‘u’; dux (leader), changes the ‘x’ to ‘c’ so does cornix (crow); rex (king), changes the ‘x’ to ‘g’; nox (night), changes the ‘x’ to ‘ct’; and so awful, ad infinitum. There is a class called i-stem nouns that take a slightly different set of third declension endings. There are also irregular nouns – of course! Nix (snow), for example, is irregular in inflecting to nivis in the genitive and retaining this irregular ‘v’ through a declension resembling the i-stem nouns.
Now that you have mastered nouns and adjectives, let us consider the cases themselves. These cases have various uses. Nominative normally indicates the subject of the sentence or clause, genitive shows possession, dative is the indirect object (something to or for something), accusative the direct object (that which is acted upon). The ablative case generally shows agency – which can be difficult to define. In addition, certain prepositions govern certain cases. Ad (to – in the sense of motion toward) governs the accusative; cum (with), the ablative; and so on. Placing a noun into the wrong case is a pitfall for the budding Latin scholar.
The verb morphology of Latin is relatively simple compared to the noun and adjective structure. Latin has present, imperfect, perfect, pluperfect, future, and future perfect tenses. The imperfect is the tense of past, continuing actions while the perfect indicates a single past action:
Dedico templam Iovi – I dedicate a temple to Jupiter. (Present)
Dedicabant templam Iovi – They were dedicating a temple to Jupiter. (imperfect)
Dedicavisti templam Iovi – You [have] dedicated a temple to Jupiter (perfect)
Dedicaveramus templam Iovi – We had dedicated a temple to Jupiter. (pluperfect).
Dedicabis templam Iovi – You (singular) shall dedicate a temple to Jupiter. (future)
Dedicaverit templam Iovi – He shall have dedicated a temple to Jupiter (future perfect)
That is the first conjugation. There are others, of course. In addition there is passive voice (Templa Iovi dedicatur – a temple is dedicated to Jupiter), and subjunctive forms (Dedicarem templam Iovi – I might dedicate a temple to Jupiter). Unlike English, there are no compound tenses formed from two words (have dedicated), these are handled in Latin by the perfect, pluperfect or future perfect. Only in the passive voice are there some compounds formed with the verb to be. Nor are there any emphatic (I do dedicate) or progressive (I am dedicating) forms in Latin. Notwithstanding, it is difficult to handle four conjugations in all their endings, the corresponding passive forms, subjunctives and imperatives along with a large number of irregular verbs.
The Crow absolutely loved all this crap, but most of us in his class found it taxing. Latin was the first foreign language to which I was introduced – before Spanish, German, French and Dutch. It was also the most ‘foreign’. The complexities of its structure made of it a sort of puzzle to be solved. Look at this stuff:
Proca, rex Albanorum, Numitorem et Amulium filios habuit. Numitori, qui natu maior erat, regnum reliquit; sed Amulius pulso fratre regnavit et, ut eum sobole privaret, Rheam Silviam, eius filiam, Vestae sacerdotem fecit, quae tamen Romulum et Remum geminos edidit.
English:
Proca, the king of the Albani had as sons Numitor and Amulius. To Numitor, who was born the elder, he left the kingdom; but Amulius drove off his brother and, in order to deprive his offspring also, made his daughter Rhea Silvia a priestess of the Vestae. She notwithstanding gave birth to the twins Romulus and Remus.
My translation is put into decent English, but it would have driven the Crow crazy. The “Amulius drove off his brother” part would not be allowed to stand. Pulso means a blow or a shove, while regnavit is the ‘perfect tense of completed action’ of regnare which means to rule, or hold sway. Pulso appears to be the ‘ablative of means’ of pulsus, fratre is the dative of frater, brother. Thus, according to the Crow, the phrase should be translated: “but Amulius held sway with a blow to the brother”. That is terrible English, but that would not matter to the Crow. It would not matter to my second year Latin instructor, either. His translations, of Ovid or Caesar, were even worse. When I translated:
As
The whole of Gaul is divided into
three parts…
My second year Latin instructor flipped out. In his weird
mind ‘The whole of Gaul’ would require that Gallia be inflected to Galliae
to put it into the genitive case. The power and majesty of the Roman language
was lost on my instructors, I fear. They saw it purely as a puzzle to be
solved, and there was only one correct solution. Parva leves capiunt animas.
Yet the power and majesty of Latin was not lost on the Catholic Church when it incorporated Latin into its ritual. The Salve Regina (Hail Holy Queen) was but one of the prayers offered after a low mass and ranks with the finest Latin poetry:
Salve, Regina, Mater misericordiae, vita, dulcedo, et spes nostra salve.
Ad te clamamus exsulses filii
Hevae.
Ad te suspiramus, gementes et
flentes in hac lacrymarum valle.
Eia ergo, advocata nostra, ilos
tuos misericordes oculos ad nos converte.
Et Iesum benedictum fructum
ventris tui, nobis post hoc exsilium ostende.
Hail Holy Queen, Mother of mercy, our life, our sweetness and our hope.
To thee cry we, the banished children of Eve.
To thee we pine, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.
Be then our advocate and turn thine eyes of mercy towards us,
And after this exile, present unto us the Blesséd Fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
O clement, O pius, O sweet Virgin Mary!
It sounds good in English, much better in Latin. Latin lent such an air of mysticism to the Catholic Liturgy that as a kid, I was certain that Latin was spoken in Heaven – evil grammar and all. Latin tied together all the churches in all countries with a common liturgical language ( e pluribus unum). Yet the hierarchy of the Catholic Church decided in the 1960’s to dump Latin in favor of the vernacular, and promptly emptied the churches (sine qua non).
Oh, well. In the 1950’s and for that matter, in the 1850’s
when Catholics at Mass rose their voices toward heaven and recited the Salve
Regina, I doubt anyone up there was listening. Quite possibly nobody was,
but at least they said well what they said. Well said. Benedictum.
FIN
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March 2001