Tag: Latin

There is a 1923 book titled “Church Latin for Beginners: An Elementary Course of Exercises in Ecclesiastical Latin” by Miss J. I. Lowe (online here) which contains two prefaces, as well as an appendix with a handy list of syntactical usages. At the time Catholic services were still held in Latin, so such a book had an obvious value.

The first preface, by a Canon William Barry, opens with the words:

I was very glad to see in print this little volume, which deals with our Church Latin; and I hope that it will be widely read and studied. The want of such a help has long been evident. Classical or heathen Latin is a beautiful creation of genius ; but as a language it is dead. The Latin of Catholic Christendom is a living literature; great portions of it are every day read and recited all over the world, by thousands on thousands of priests, seminarists, religious orders of men and women. But they have never been taught the grammar of it, seldom have learned by reflection how marvellous a transformation it is of a language singularly hard to refashion ; yet the miracle stands perfect in their sight.

Perfect I call it, and take my position close to such masters of style as Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, and J. A. Symonds, whose hearty recognition of what another has termed “baptized Latin” was enhanced by their Oxford training in the classics. Not a degenerate offspring of Roman speech in decay, but a most original and happy adaptation of the popular idiom to sacred uses, our literature of sanctuary, cloister, and the schools is a world in itself.

This is followed by a preface by Ronald Knox, which makes many interesting points, but begins with this:

There is a story told in one of our Catholic Colleges (and probably in all of them) which throws, it is to be feared, a sinister light upon the easy familiarity with which altar-boys, choirs, and even congregations patter out their ecclesiastical Latin. A boy in Latin class was exhibiting a mulish ignorance as to the meaning of the word tantus, and the class master, with that fatal tendency we all have to adopt the method of cross-examination, was trying to get the right meaning out of him. At last in despair he suggested: “Well, you have met the words Tantum ergo Sacramentum before; at least you know what that means.” At which a great light dawned upon the boy, and he said : “Oh, yes, sir, I know that : it means ‘Down in adoration falling.'” Most Catholic schoolmasters have had similar, if not quite so poignant, experiences .

No doubt it was ever so.  All the same, we are the poorer for the loss of this kind of Latin.

The first sentence of the “Life” of St Botolph reads as follows:

Omnipotentis Dei benignitas, compatiens errori humani generis, quod ab antiquo serpente caelitus concessa denudatum glo­ria, ignorantiae damnatur tenebris; divitias misericordiae suae in eius restauratione exhibere voluit, ut ad gloriam lucis de qua cae­cum aberraverat, rediret per lumen quod ei ineffabili gratia administravit.

I.e.

The benevolence of almighty God – compassionate towards the error of the human race, which, having been stripped by the ancient serpent of the glory granted to it by heaven, is condemned to the darkness of ignorance – wished to display the riches of His mercy in the restoration of it, so that (the human race) might return to the glory of the light from which it had blindly strayed, through the Light which He bestowed upon it, by His ineffable grace.

I’ve been staring at that, and wondering how to turn that into English without departing too far from the original.

Suggestions anyone?

When I was 11 years old, I was transferred to an old-fashioned northern grammar school.  This kept up the tradition of Latin and Greek, and Latin began at 11, and continued until 16.

The textbook used was Paterson and Macnaughton, The Approach to Latin.  This was actually the first volume of a three book series.  It continued in The Approach to Latin: Second Part, and there was also The Approach to Latin Writing.

I remember the Latin classes well.  It was a devil to learn, but useful to know, and I was fortunate to have an excellent teacher.

Schoolboys are hard on books.  At some time in my later years there, the school disposed of unwanted copies of the last two volumes, to anyone who would take them away. I picked up the latter two, and they lived in an old briefcase in my loft for many years until I brought them down a decade ago and shelved them with my Latin books.

There was no opportunity to collect a copy of the first volume – the only one I ever used.  But I was able to purchase a reprint in Cambridge in the late 1990s, from Heffers Bookshop, for £9.90.

These little books must have been printed in tens of thousands, but how many remain today?  Searching for copies online on Amazon and Abebooks, I was shocked to find that all these books are now sold for princely prices.  One copy was offered at over $1500 today, which is ridiculous.

I looked inside them last night, and took Second Part to bed with me, to read through the slender sections on Latin syntactical constructions.

The introduction states that they contain “a selected minimum of grammar”, and this is very true.  The vast bulk of the book consists of exercises.  Each bit of grammar, often half a page, is followed by two or three pages of exercises.  This is, of course, frustrating if you want hard information.

The actual grammatical content is very concise.  This morning I was reading a chunk of the Writing book, explaining something, and I wondered if there was a misprint!  I had to reread it two or three times before I could work out what they meant.  That the book was meant to be taught by a human teacher was evident.

I do not believe that my schoolboy self could have decrypted that sentence.  In this sense, it is not a good teaching book.  I know that my old teacher preferred Coles, Latin Grammar Simplified.

The exercises from The Approach to Latin I remember well.  They started easy and became harder and harder.  I loathed translating English into Latin.  But in fact, it is clear that the authors’ intention was to prepare boys to translate from English into Latin, doubtless for examination purposes.  This appears clearly from the grammatical material, now I look at it.

The limited syntactical material is not well presented.  But it caused me to think that I could extend the functionality of QuickLatin, my morphologiser, to flash up some possibilities whenever you see the word “ut” or “sicut”, or find a gerundive.  It wouldn’t be hard to do that.  At least, it shouldn’t be.

QuickLatin was originally written in 1999, during a long and pointless government contract.  It was written in Visual Basic 6, that much missed and easy to use tool that Microsoft sold at that time.  From time to time I have tried to rewrite it in something newer; but always I have had to stop, and go and earn a living.

Microsoft have never troubled to maintain their own tools, or to guarantee backward compatibility.  VB6 was phased out in favour of the incompatible VB.Net, almost twenty years ago.  VB.Net is now being phased out, with nothing to replace it.  I did attempt a rewrite in Microsoft Visual C/C++, and got so far.  When I came to pick up the project, a couple of years later, it wouldn’t even compile in the newer version of the tool.

Of course 1999 was aeons ago, by modern software practices.  Today everything is done with Test-Driven Development (although Microsoft never liked it, and their support for it in .NET was always rubbish).  Everything is divided into classes and objects.  VB6 stuff predates that.  It was always hard to work with.

Anyway, I’m stuck with VB6 code.  You can’t even convert it to VB.NET, incredibly.  Thus I’ve not put out a new version of QuickLatin in years.  But VB6 continued to work on Windows 7, as I recall.  I still have the disks for VB6.

It is apparently possible to install this on Windows 10.  But … for me at least … it has not worked.

This is why computers are frustrating.  You decide to do something and then, little by little, get led softly away from that into a Byzantine series of other tasks.

The task I want to do is translate some Latin.  To do this, I need to know more syntax.  To help with this, I’d like to modify QuickLatin.  To do that, I need to install VB6.  To do that… I need to find workarounds.  Maybe install a virtual XP machine.  Which means… yet more stuff to do.  All of which take time and prevent me doing what I actually wanted to do!

And so another day disappears.

In the last few days I have been looking at the Latin text of the passio of St Valentine of Interamna / Terni.  It’s a while since I did any Latin translating.  But the process always involves difficulty.

These days it is very easy to determine the tense, number, case, gender and meaning of individual words, with tools like QuickLatin or Whitaker’s Words, or other morphologisers.

Likewise the wide availability of dictionaries in PDF format makes it easier than ever to look up unusual words in specialised dictionaries.  The next step is for these to emerge in an indexed electronic form.  In fact a kind correspondent has sent me an interesting tool, in which you can search a wide range of dictionaries, where the start and end word of each page are stored electronically, and then you can display on-screen a bitmap of the page.  Many problems require a flash of genius; and this is an example of it.  I hope to write more about this in due course.

But none of this helps you with a phrase which simply won’t make sense, even when you know all the words.  This is because you don’t know much about Latin syntax.

A lot of people know some Latin.  A great number of people know enough Latin to do something with the tools above.

But most people do not know simply Latin constructions, like the accusative + infinitive phrase, even though there is even a Wikipedia page on it:

Iulia dicit, se bonam discipulam esse

Julia says, that she (se) is (esse) a good pupil (bonam discipulam)

Once you recognise the format, it’s not hard.  You translate the accusative “se” as “that she”,  and “she” becomes the subject of the new clause.  You find the infinitive (“esse”, to be), and treat it as an indicative (“est”, is).  After that, the rest of the clause is normal.  There may be other words along for the ride, which don’t matter, as here with “bonam discipulum”.

I have found by experience that few people understand this construction.

My own knowledge of Latin constructions is limited.  It wasn’t an important part of the Latin that I did at school.

Something that we all need to work upon some more.  I shall dig out a textbook and have a read!