Necessary Roughness

I picked up Learn Latin: A Lively Introduction to Reading the Language by Peter Jones because I’ve sung the music to two Latin Requiems (Cherubini and Faure), and I own CDs of the same plus another Requiem by Mozart. I also wanted a little more background on some Latin phrases we throw around, e.g., QED, ex post facto, non sequitur, et cetera.

I had always wondered why there was no Latin-English babelfish or translator, and it seems to me the reason is because the words change so much in meaning depending on what prefixes and suffixes are built into the words. In Latin, word order is for the most part irrelevant, so the word forms are used to determine subject, object, and so forth. In this way it is like Sanskrit (thanks Arabinda), which has no dependence on word order at all. No wonder those Romans were able to write so much poetry with it.

Learn Latin is divided 20 chapters, meant to be taken weekly. I was able to go about five chapters into it before being completely lost in the exercises. The exercises consist of written practice to better familiarize oneself with vocabulary and usage. There are brief Latin-English and English-Latin sections and a helpful grammatical summary at the end.

The author keeps the reader interested by writing in a jovial tone and using Latin works notable in their own right such as Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana and St. Jerome’s Vulgate. We get to read how Romans profess their love in some chapters and how they convict and crucify the Messiah in others. There are also some history lessons, such as the Norman conquest of Britain in 1066 and the assassination of Julius Caeser. Shakespeare gets it wrong here, the author writes. Instead of the Latin “Et tu, Brute,” Caeser exclaimed in Greek, “kai su teknon”– essentially, same to you, boy! That’s telling them.

This book lives up to its billing as being enjoyable to read. Now that I’ve done so, I should go back and take the lessons one week at a time. The book has one failing: while there are indices for grammar rules and basic Latin-English constructs, there is no index for some of the more significant constructs such as e.g. (exempli gratia, for the sake of an example) and QED (quod erat demonstradum, that which/what was to be proved).

I recommend this book to anyone with even a trivial interest in where words come from. Some of our English words come straight from Latin (alumnus, circus, video, audio) while others come through Old and Middle French (journal, treason). Purchased for $7 from Barnes and Noble, this was a good buy.