Here’s a fun party game. Can you name the five most common Latin words that have no English equivalent? Admittedly, you need to choose your party carefully, and by party I probably mean department meeting, but it’s an interesting question and one that could, quite fruitfully, set the cat among the pigeons.
Oh, and I don’t have the answers. But Sarah Scullin, who writes for the online journal Eidolon, proposes five Latin and five Greek that will help you bluff the game if you need it.
Teaching classical texts, we and our classes often have to negotiate the meaning-space between Latin, Greek and English words and I’m sure you can quickly think of some obviously freighted words in each ancient language that need a ‘handle with care’ warning.
For Tom Holland translating Herodotus, it was barbaros.
For Emily Wilson translating The Odyssey it was kunopis, used by Helen in self-reproach. Wilson positions her translation close to the etymological root of the word: They made my face the cause that hounded them. I heard Wilson at a book festival a couple of years ago and this was the line she chose to show how she differed from her predecessors Robert Fagles, who translated the line as ‘shameless whore that I was’ and Stephen Mitchell who used ‘bitch that I was’. Quite a departure, and all three are highly significant.
It’s a great example to illustrate the value of reading a text in the original. Homer’s epics use a vocabulary of around 8,500 words. The full Oxford English Dictionary contains entries for 171,476 words in current use, not to mention the 47,156 considered obsolete.
The ‘vocabulary gap’ is important, then. And not just for us as classicists scratching our heads trying to translate pietas. The linguist Roman Jakobson said ‘languages differ essentially in what they must convey, not what they may convey’ and this idea underpins Four Words for Friend, a book which has sat on my bedside table for the last couple of weeks.
Published this year by the British science writer Marek Kohn, Four Words is a sort of manifesto for ‘plurilingualism’. It emerged from Kohn’s own experience of almost losing his mother tongue Polish, after emigrating to England.
His status as both a neurobiologist and a ‘heritage speaker’ gives him a unique insight into languages: what they do for us, how we learn them, and how language interacts with knowledge and experience.
The title refers to the four different words for ‘friend’ in Russian, which each convey varying degrees of familiarity and affection between people. It’s a precise system of categories which English – even using ‘pal’, ‘buddy’, ‘bestie’, etc. – can’t quite approximate. Generally, we need a modifying adjective: ‘good friend’, ‘close friend’, ‘old friend’. For translators of Russian, then, it’s a situation twice as tricky as Latinists distinguishing ille from iste or femina from mulier.
At this point, you might ask: ‘Surely there’s no meaning that can’t travel between languages, even if more/fewer words are required?’ Yes, but as Kohn shows, the tools available within a particular language do condition the sorts of things we are likely to express, and more broadly how we view the world.
One clear example of this in Classics would be the concept of mood. The Romans have the indicative, imperative and subjunctive. The Greeks also have the optative (which the Romans had too in Early Latin). The availability of mood, especially the indicative vs. subjunctive choice, enables – and even encourages – Latin speakers to clarify exactly whether actions and ideas belong to the realm of actualisation (indicative) or instead were conceived of in the fallible mind of some person (subjunctive). If we spoke Latin fluently, would this make us more likely to scrutinise the realised-ness or realisability of actions?
A professional linguist would actually call this concept evidentiality, and in languages where it is strongly accounted for, speakers have proven better at discriminating between first-hand information and information from other sources. The grammar of their language has installed a mechanism to assign priority to different types of information.
Turkish verbs, for instance, require suffixes like -di and-mis which specify whether info is first-hand or not. Turkish speakers using English have been found to over-use English equivalents like ‘apparently’ or ‘it seems’ or ‘as far as I know’ because they feel uncomfortable not accounting for the evidentiality of an action. Interesting.
And what about the question of aspect? Here is another concept, beloved of Greek students, which exerts an influence on how speakers think. Unlike English which lacks aspect, German has an ‘endpoint preference’ built into its verbs. If you showed them footage of a cyclist riding along a country lane, a German speaker is more likely to start inferring the destination, and perhaps the cyclist’s motivation, and other observations concerned with outcomes. An English speaker assessing a similar scene of motion is more likely to offer a running commentary on what’s going on – the pedalling, the weather, the route as it proceeds.
Our default is to treat present time action as ‘imperfective’ and this surely has some bearing on the way we think: a case of language having an effect on language, if that makes sense.
Imperfective is a word which I use when teaching Latin sequence of tenses. In each sequence, primary or historic, there are two types of action available: imperfective (present, imperfect) and perfective (perfect, pluperfect).
The word ‘tense’ is an unhelpful and confusing element in explaining that it is the quality of the action rather than the time value that is significant.
It’s also a tricky lesson to teach, conceptually, because aspect is alien to us as English speakers (and Dutch speakers too). In England, for example, football commentators offer non-stop chatter. In Germany, or Sweden, or Norway, the commentary is much more spare: the periodic observation of significant moments as opposed to a running commentary. In the Sesotho-speaking countries of southern Africa, where fifteen aspectual forms are available, the commentary must be almost non-existent!
As a teacher of Latin and Greek, then, reading Four Words has turned out some very interesting questions:
a) What constraints does the Latin language put on the user’s ability to express themselves?
b) How far is the grammar and syntax of Latin creating, as opposed to merely carrying, the content of texts?
c) How can we get our pupils to appreciate how Latin language affected Roman thought?
I will finish with two points of contrast between English and Latin idiom, which could support the idea that what is thought is partially determined by what can be said.
Example 1: Latin prefers ‘people doing things’
If we are taking ‘Latin’ crudely to mean the Classical Latin of Cicero and Caesar, then the tendency is for speakers to express the agent of verbs. Impersonal verbs exist, of course, but they are used more sparingly than in English: Latin likes a concrete subject governing a finite verb. Similarly, where English would use an abstract noun, Latin would use a workaround which allowed for a finite verb with that all-important personal ending. So responsibility for actions is more likely to be expressed. Did that entail more blaming, I wonder?
Passive and impersonal forms are pervasive in Spanish. Unlike Latin, these take the focus off agency and instead spotlight the action. Does this encourage ambiguity? Is a Spaniard more prone to imprecise or rhetorical expression today than 2000 years ago?
Example 2: English loves the infinitive
How often in translation does the humble English infinitive mask a nasty bit of Latin syntax! Purpose clauses, indirect commands, fear clauses, prevention clauses… Any others I’ve missed?
Put the question for your pupils: what is lost by using the blunt instrument of an infinitive (a noun), as opposed to a clause?
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this post, especially if you’re a sceptic!
It would also be great to have other suggestions for how the idiosyncrasies of Latin and Greek could engender particular habits of thought. Here are some contenders to get you thinking:
- word order
- correlatives
- transitivity
- particles
Thanks for reading!
