It lives! - The Latin language

So I had a little difficulty scheduling an interview for this week's post... I did, however, come up with a (slightly alternate) solution. Since the main reason for getting an interview was so that we would learn whatever we used for this post orally, I am using a different oral learning source for information for my post: mon professeur francais, Professeur Flood. In this post, I will focus on combining the elements of language preservation and acquisition and Latin by going into more detail about the ways that the Latin language has influenced the English that we speak today, especially through the French language (because really, how much cooler is it to talk about three or four languages instead of two?!).

In my last post, I had two maps that I really liked which showed the expansion of Latin-derived languages and the Latin alphabet across the globe. These maps really showed the extent to which Latin has spread. But how has it spread for us English speakers specifically?


English is primarily a Germanic language. I took one semester of Latin in high school, and the teacher (who was also the Foreign language department chair) repeatedly told us that taking German helps students on the English section of the SAT more than any other "modern" (not-dead a.k.a. not-Latin) language. How then is Latin such a big influence on English?

One way is through another Language which is Latin-based: French (which my Latin teacher repeatedly said was the second-most-helpful language for English). And let me preface this discussion by saying that French is the foreign language I study, so I'm a bit biased in its favor. When the Normans invaded Britain in the aptly named "Norman Invasion" of 1066, the French language was brought to Britain. In case you're going "wait, who are the Normans again? I thought they were the British," remember that in your history classes you talked about how on D-Day the Allied forces landed in northern France, in Normandy? The Normans were the French who lived to the north (kind of close to another place in northern France called Brittany; we're already seeing some major influences!) Basically, in 1066 in the Battle of Hastings of the Norman Invasion, the French Normans overran the people of modern-day England and the Normans themselves became the ancestors of the modern English. (This led to a very close connection between France and Britain that eventually ended disastrously in the Hundred Years' War when the British king claimed the French throne when Charles VII should have inherited it and the British subsequently invaded France with the help of the Duke of Burgundy... ok, focusing back on language now and getting off on my little history tangent.) There is therefore a great deal of similarity between the two languages.

Take, for example, the following words that are actually French words:

1. Nature
2. Respect
3. Religion
4. Alliance
5. Relation
   

There are also words which are very similar in the two languages, such as "Mariage" in French. However, there are additionally words that are the same in spelling but not in meaning: for example, the French word "sensible" means sensitive, not sensible. There is also an abundance of words which are not directly translated but have words formed from their roots. An example of this would be the French word "coeur," which means "heart," in regards to the English word "cardiovascular"; similarly, the French word "mal" ("evil" or "bad" as a noun) is related to words in English such as "malpractice" and "malice." English and French have remained such close languages that when new things are invented, they often take the same word: for example, "a pizza" in English is "une pizza" in French, and "a garage" is "un garage." While this has become the case for a lot of languages recently (it's been mentioned several times in class how people everywhere call an ipod an "ipod"), it has been going on much longer between English and French. It should be made clear, however, that English and French are not essentially becoming the same language because of this: the name of another invention that came along with the garage is the car, in French "la voiture," from the verb meaning "to fly."

So if English is so much like Latin, how does learning German- a non Latinate language- supposedly help your English more than learning French? Well, for one thing, Latin is not too similar grammatically to English. A couple of classes ago, Professor Burton wrote the Latin sentence "Peur vide puellam" (The boy sees the girl) on the board. He then wrote "peur puellam vide" and "puellam vide peur" on the board. In Latin, all of these things sentences mean the same thing. They all mean that some boy saw some girl. In English, however, if we took "The boy sees the girl" and switched the subject and object around to "The girl sees the boy," the sentence meaning is completely different. This is because in Latin, the "m" at the end of "puella" makes the noun ablative (if I remember correctly; it may be a different case) and therein identifies it as the object and not the subject, allowing you to write the sentence a number of ways. In English, we typically follow a subject-verb-object order ("I am it"), unless asking a question, in which case we usually switch it to a verb-subject-object order ("Are you it?")

Like the similarities between French and English words, many Latin-derived roots are commonly used in modern English. Though there are far too many to list, here are a few with their meanings and an example:

• ad- "to" (addition)
• amor- "love" (amorous)
• ambi- "both" (ambiguous)
• aqu- "water" (Aquarius)
• bi- "two" (biped)
• cent- "hundred" (century)
• chloro- "green" (chlorine)
• chrom- "color" (chromium)
• chron- "time" (chronological)
• contra- "against" (contrary)
• cre- "make" (creation)
• cred- "believe" (credible)
• dem- "people" (demographic)
• di- "two" (dissect)
• dia- "apart" (diagonal)
• dict- "say/speak" (diction)
• dom- "house" (domestic)
• dorm- "sleep" (dormitory)
• dur- "hard" (durable)
• dys- "badly" (dystopia)

Think that was more than just a few? Well, I only got through the very highlights and only through the letter D. So, I think this list is sufficient to show that A LOT of our language comes from Latin. We therefore have each acquired several pieces of the Latin language as we learned English itself AND as we learn Romance languages (it is worth reminding here that the two most commonly studied foreign languages in American are Spanish and French, both of which are Romance languages). And as we acquire the Latin language, even if only in bits and pieces, part of the language lives on and is preserved even if it is not fully used. It is therefore not monks of the past who copied manuscripts or the Catholic clergy who are the defenders of the Latin language against the erosion of time: we are the defenders of this ancient tongue. Pretty cool, huh?