Latin, the uppity language

Illegitimi non carborundum

According to my Latin/English dictionary, good grief is meher-cules! And I agree. What utter nonsense!

"Often people in power are using the words because they want to feel self important..."

Hmmm. She's not only a nitwit, but a clairvoyant one at that. Oops! I'll bet she doesn't know what that word means either.

It is unfortunate that Ms. Claire is one of those people in power.

I don't doubt the national literacy level is "l2 years old" if children aren't encouraged to use a dictionary or simply ask if they don't understand a word.

Of what value is the "diversity" of which she speaks if language has to be dumbed down to the point people cannot communicate? How much respect can people have for each other when they feel they have to dumb it down for each other.

That's not a war on Latin, that's a war on English. Those phrases have enough English pedigree that they're no longer "foreign."

My parents told me that studying Latin was a waste of time because it was a "dead" language. I still regret not taking the Latin classes that my high school offered. It is a beautiful language.

Ironically enough, Cicero would have approved. Cato the elder would have been ecstatic. 'Course, I'm not terribly fond of either gentleman.

And "O me miserum!" would serve the turn of "good grief!" quite nicely.

Dreher,

You have officially lost your freakin' mind. How did you happen to tie Palin into this? If anything, it is the ideological multiculturalism of Barack Obama that will officially do away with what is left of humanities departments in the U.S., and therefore do away with Latin.

If you were a rational, non-emotivist thinker, you would have been more inclined in making a snarky point to have tied this pogrom against the Latin language to Obama and his supporters. After all, it is they who think of the Latin language as a vestige of western imperialism and rightly to be done away with. And, by the way, Obama, a lawyer, is not an intellectual. He is a technician. His educational policies will continue the hyper-technicization of education and mix in with it an even more pernicious brand of ideological brainwashing than is currently mandatory.

There is a big difference between having undertaken an immersion in the history of the best that has been thought and said and mere technical training. The closest that Obama has come to an education in the humanities is the ideological indoctrination that he has received from his long list of radical peers.

Honestly, how can anyone take "paleocons" seriously after this election? There is no intellectual force to their shared positions. Goldberg's work is more intellectually weighty than Deneen's or Larison's. How sad.

I forgot to add, in reference to the above link, which is about the resurgence of Latin in Minnesota schools--it's so obviously the influence of the Harry Potter books (but the article doesn't even mention it.)

Perhaps these adults are a bit clueless, but as the mother of a 9 year-old-boy who has read six of the HP novels aloud, in their entirety,(and who is about to embark upon the 7th) I am all too well aware of the new lure of Latin.

If the sprinkling of Latin and pseudo-Latin in the novels weren't enough, there's even an all-Latin translation of the first book in the series. (See link above.) How cool is that?

Rod,

This news from England is pretty nutty.

But, Rod, why did you have to begin your post with the gratuitous slap-down of Sarah Palin and her admirers? As my Jewish neighbor here in NYC constantly reminds her grandchildren: "Be nice."

The anonymous poster at 12:08 made a valid comment, I think, about what an Obama/Pelosi/Reid axis will mean for the future of education in this country ... although I tire of the whole "paleo-con vs. neo-con" slugfest reflected in comments by "anonymous." Yes, it is useful intelletually to understand and clarify the polarities expressed in the differences between "paleocon" and "neocon" but as a practical, political matter it makes sense to find areas of agreement.

I'm with Reaganite on this one. The use of Latinate phrases in English is generally a sign of wishing to show off one's education, pomposity, or simply lack of connection with what the words actually mean. If I were to sit on some sort of English version of the Academie Francaise I would try to re-Anglicise English. Most regional dialects are less Latinate than standard English, which is really the creole of the Norman elite. I don't think it's true anymore but, as late as the 19th century, people on parts of the east coast could communicate with Friesians.

Having said that, I doubt that Bournemouth council's motives are along those lines. Bournemouth is a seaside town on the south coast, that I think of, perhaps wrongly, as populated entirely by retired, middle-class people - I don't think of it as the cutting edge of either linguistic ideology (tonguewise thoughtcraft? - LOL) or social engineering (folkish wrightwork?). I just think that local government officials enjoy making petty rules.

This is one of the more ridiculous bits of petty, penny-ante rule-making I've seen in recent months. (And, as a lawyer, I deal with agencies that specialize in the art on a daily basis.)

There is a bit more to this than rules-making pomposity, however. Whether one likes Latin or not, the language--and the worthy Roman culture that produced it--is an essential part of the Western heritage. Ridiculous rules like this not only play to the power fantasies of small-time bureaucrats, but they encourage the alienation of the ordinary person from important and real sources of knowledge and wisdom.

There were reasons, after all, why children of high-school (and younger) ages had to study Latin a century and more ago. The US Constitution is partially based on the institutions of the Roman Republic. Many parts of American and Western legal traditions derive from Roman and Byzantine thought. The Christian faith itself was developed and nurtured, in part, by Roman thinkers (e.g. St. Augustine). What are we supposed to put in their place ? The Sacred Thought of The Holy Obama ? The oratory and rhetoric of 50 Cent ? The wit and wisdom of Spongebob Squarepants ?

If anything, I'd rather see more Latin and Greek in our public life, not less. Being reminded once in a while of our roots--and, equally as important, that we HAVE roots---might make us a little less susceptible to the demagoguery and snake-oil salesmanship of the modern Politician and his partner-in-crime, the Advertiser.

Your servant,

Lord Karth

You call this bin of chatterboxes, parasites and dabblers an 'elite'? We're better off without.

After tomorrow's debacle, we could do worse than start laying deeper foundations for conservative than than the God-given right to buy things. Among the things that involves is the force-feeding of Latin (and Greek to the bright ones) to the kids. Horatius, Mucius Scaevola, Cato the elder, now those are worthy examples to learn and to emulate, don't you think? They inoculate against nonsense.

This is a tempest (oops, I meant a raging storm with a lot of thunder and lightning) in a teapot.

Of course, it should be pointed out that were it not for Guillaume le Conquérant and 1066 et tout ça, there would be little Latin in English. English was elegantly Gallicised before it was luxuriously Latinised.

Just wait a few years and the issue will be moot. There are no Latin words in Urdu. And no Roman law in sharia.

Hey, lighten up. The Sarah reference was just some tongue in cheek sacrasm. Does anyone really think Rod thinks that Sarah wants to do away with Latin?

A modicum of common sense, sans knee jerk reactions, would go a long way here.

Does this mean that everyone who opposes the common use of Latin will foresake using our nation's legal scrip? "E Pluribus Union" is prominent on it and apparently is an affront to anyone who does not make the time to appreciate some of our roots and history.

But if we are picking on languages that cloy and annoy - I object to the pretentious use of French. Little phrases like "raison d'etre" and "fait accompli" simply aggravate me. Why not simply say, "Reason for being" and "accomplished fate (or fact)" and not try to sound so danged Euor? How would it be if people started dropping little bits of Swahili or Mandarin in our conversations - would others feel excluded and ostracized?

I won't worry too much because "una hirunda non facit ver". We'll continue to use Latin despite opposition, id est, per aspera ad astra :-)

And this has what to do with "political correctness", exactly?

You know, there's an entire generation of people here (I'm writing from the UK) who don't even seem to know the difference between "political correctness" and "health and safety legislation". "PC" seems to stand for anything they used to do in the past which other people now want to restrict for any reason at all.

If you agree that using vile racial epithets is totally unacceptable, as I trust you do, Rod, you should really avoid lumping that stance together with inane prohibitions like this one. The designation only serves to weaken the social stigma against hate speech - an effect which is, of course, just fine by the average Daily Telegraph reader.

The example my "history of the English language" prof liked to use of how Germanic and Latinate words work in unity and/or counterpoint to make stronger writing than either could alone was Lady Macbeth's line: "No, it will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red."

I just *love* that this tirade against Latin ends with the word "ego."

It's fairly typical that any rant against "bad" English will itself use the very linguistic features that it claims to abhor.

The US government already discourages the use of Latin terms. See plainlanguage.gov.

For what it's worth, I majored in Greek and Latin in college, and I agree with the substance of these recommendations. People who don't know Latin frequently create ambiguities by misusing "ad hoc," "per se," and "quid pro quo," and by mixing up "i.e." and "e.g." The New Yorker staff will correct your prose if you make those mistakes, but if you're writing for the government, you should stay out of that minefield altogether.

(@trp: I suspect that students of classical languages are all over the map on this election. In particular, I myself am aware of at least two books currently being written that enlist the Greek historian Thucydides on oppositie sides of the current administration's Middle East policy.)

Am I the only CURRENT scholar of Greek here? It's Koine', not classical, but still, I voted for Obama.

Note that I wrote "Americans proficient in Latin", a much broader category than that of Classics professors. The latter are as prone to the follies of academia as any other group of scholars. The former category includes a good number of very conservative Catholics; they may be even more numerous than Latin-proficient university professors. The parish at which I attend the Extraordinary form of the Roman Rite is heavily McCain/Palin; I doubt that any of them would vote Obama/Biden, because of the abortion issue. These conservative Catholics may not be scholars, but it cannot be said that they don't value the Latin language and the Western Christian cultural tradition.

Marian,

Well, I taught elementary Greek as recently as last spring, and will teach it again when the dept. asks me to, so I suppose that makes me current. It's classical, though since I'm at Baylor, we also read some NT with the students. And I voted for Obama.

DJW,

It's not a SSPX parish but a regular Catholic parish that has Sunday Masses in the EF, so the people there tend to be less radically right than many SSPXers. I also occasionally attend an Ordinary Form Mass in Latin (ad orientem, chants from the Graduale, etc.) and people there are mostly leaning McCain/Palin as well. While it's probably true that a majority of the parishioners at both parishes don't have a lot of Latin beyond that of the Ordinary and Graduale of the Mass, nevertheless they would certainly not advocate eliminating Latin from public life, which is what is happening in England. Therefore support for Palin does not = hostility to latin, In fact, I'd wager that the sorts of people who would support purging our public space of its relics of "eurocentrism" would be more likely to vote Obama. I studied Latin and Greek in the course of my BA and Phd in Philosophy; and, though I did considerably more work on the languages than is usual, even for work in Classical Philosophy, I can't say that I'm a Classics scholar in any serious sense of the word. All the same, like many "traditionalist" catholics, I value it and want to teach as much of the language as I'm capable to my daughter.

By the way, the "Minimus" books, published by Cambridge University Press, are a lot of fun for younger kids.

David J. White: Another Esperantist reading the blog!

In factu, me preferi latino sine flexione, una lingua constructa ab Giuseppe Peano, et quale es multo plus simplice quam latino classico aut etiam quam latino vulgare. Es possibile que uno disce illa in modo rapido et que illa es comprehensa paene statim sine studio in schola. Et quia illa es fundata in latino, es plus pulcro quam esperanto, quale, oporte confitere, es una lingua aliquid bastardo.

Coul some please ask that cultural snob Marie Clair what "ego" means? We Latin-deprived peasants are deeply offended by the use of such elitist foreign words.