You Already Know More Latin Than You Think:

Using English to Master Latin Vocabulary

The primary purpose of this section of the introduction is to demonstrate that the acquisition of vocabulary, always an immediate concern to beginners, is unusually easy with Latin. Non-IndoEuropean languages, such as Arabic or Swahili or Japanese, have extremely limited lexical affinities with English, and almost every word has to be learned in isolation from English; Latin, by contrast, is not only IndoEuropean, but the source of most of the words used in modern English.

In the first chapter of Alice through the Looking-Glass, Alice has to confess that she has only a vague understanding of the poem Jabberwocky:

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe etc.

She appreciates that the poem is structured like English, but since so many of the words are quite unlike real English words, she cannot know what they mean. She needs Humpty Dumpty to explain to her that “Toves are something like badgers – they’re something like lizards - and they’re something like corkscrews ... also they make their nests under sun-dials - also they live on cheese ... a rath is a sort of green pig” etc. By contrast, since the vocabulary of modern English is fundamentally indebted to Latin, we need no Humpty Dumpty to help us deduce the meaning of the majority of Latin words.

It will also be reassuring to note that Latin has a very small vocabulary. A Roman grammarian of the classical period estimated that Latin has about 1,000 basic words, verba primigenia (literally “first-born words”), from which all other words and word-forms are derived by compounding and inflection. For example, the noun horror has eight cognate adjectives, horrendus, horrens, horribilis, horridulus, horridus, horrifer, horrificabilis, horrificus.

This estimation is rather too low; it is projected that, when complete, the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, the most comprehensive dictionary ever compiled for any major language, will contain entries for some 50,000 words. Compound forms, of course, appear under separate lemmata, and the chronological range extends to c. AD 600, by when large numbers of words, mostly nouns, had been absorbed from other languages, especially Greek. (Since, for example, Christianity was introduced from the east by speakers of Greek, much of the vocabulary of the church is Greek, words such as baptisma, ecclesia, evangelium, martyr, presbyter.) Nevertheless, there is a great contrast with English (which admittedly has a exceptionally large vocabulary, much larger than that of any of the Romance languages); the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, completed in 1928, defined 414,825 words, the second, completed in 1989, 615,100.

The number of Latin words surviving from the classical period is probably not much above 25,000. Since it is estimated that a reasonably well-educated native speaker of English is able to recognize about 50,000 words, this total will not seem daunting. (In speaking, however, such a person uses only between 3,000 and 4,000 words. John Milton’s works contain c. 8,000 words, Shakespeare’s over 15,000, an astounding achievement at a time when English vocabulary was so much smaller than it is nowadays.)

The Thesaurus Linguae Latinae published its first fascicle in 1900, has now reached the letter p (but with the massive and challenging n so far omitted), and is scheduled for completion around 2050. It is by far the single most valuable tool for the modern study of the Latin language. Also indispensable is the Oxford Latin Dictionary (1968-1982), which is generally limited to texts from before AD 200 and is much less full in its citations. There are no comparable lexical resources for medieval Latin; such an undertaking would be very difficult, given that the vocabulary has expanded so vastly. Since so much of this huge influx is found only in particular parts of Europe, being borrowed from localized vernaculars, it is all but inevitable that the various projects now under way to produce dictionaries of medieval Latin should be geographically limited.

Unfortunately, only c. 2,500 words, i.e. about 10%, are found more than 100 times in the whole corpus of classical Latin, whereas by far the greatest number occur fewer than ten times. To take a particular case: the Amores of Ovid contain a total of 15,981 words, drawing on 2,932 different words; only 14 very basic words (meaning e.g. “I”, “you”, “and”, “not”, “if”, “in”), occur more than 100 times each; rather more than 2,000 occur fewer than ten times each; most significantly, however, 1,314 words, not far short of half of the total of Ovid’s lexical choice for the whole collection, appear in the Amores only once.

This illustrates an important difficulty: reinforcing familiarity with vocabulary through frequent exposure in reading, the method which has proved most effective in learning modern languages, is possible with Latin only to a limited extent. No Latinist, however experienced, can dispense with the aid of a dictionary. The difficulty should not, however, be exaggerated. A vocabulary of some 800 of the commonest Latin words will become familiar through the exercises in this course; additional lists of c. 500 common words not used in the course are given in Appendix 3; a further large number of words appear, with an accompanying translation, in the sections Verba Romanorum and Publilii Syri Sententiae. The maxims in these sections have been selected primarily because they illustrate the grammatical point introduced in that particular chapter, but they also provide a first exposure to much new vocabulary and, in the case of the poetic texts, to some of the forms of expression peculiar to verse. When students first progress to reading complete texts, editors provide vocabularies to obviate the chore of dictionary work.

Most importantly, however, as explained above, even when a word has not been met before, the preponderant influence of Latin on English ensures that there is a good chance that its meaning can easily be inferred. To put the apparently ominous infrequency with which Latin words occur into a proper perspective: those found only once in the Amores include very many such easily translated words as sacrilegus, Saturnus, senilis, septem, serpens, sex, sinuosus, socialis, spectaclum, speculator, spiritus, splendidus, squalidus, statio, sterilis, stomachus, stratum, studiosus, subscribo, suspendo, suspicio.

If limited vocabulary is the criterion by which to judge the suitability of a text, Caesar’s Gallic Wars, with scarcely more than 1,300 different words, stands out among the great works of classical Latin as by far the most suitable text for beginners. They also have an elegant but simple style. These factors, along with their military content, combined to ensure that they were the first Latin texts read by generations of schoolboys being groomed for the officer class in Europe’s armies.

Latin came in handy for the British army in 19th century India. After capturing the province of Sindh (in modern Pakistan) in 1843, General Sir Charles Napier reportedly announced his success with a one-word telegram to the Governor General of India, Lord Dalhousie: peccavi “I have sinned” [pecco 1]. The message will seem particularly apt if one bears in mind that he was exceeding orders in attacking Sindh. Dalhousie himself is said to have reported his occupation of Oudh [which rhymes with “loud”, now Awahd in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh] in 1856,with the even briefer telegram: vovi “I vowed” [voveo, vovere, vovi, votum 2 “vow”].

The apparent simplicity of Caesar’s style, however, is a ploy, intended to portray him as a straightforward plain-speaking soldier, far removed from the devious sophistry of political life. He needed all the devious sophistry he could muster:

It is perhaps unfortunate for Caesar’s reputation that his only works to survive are the commentaries on the Gallic and civil wars. He was one of the most respected intellectuals of his time, and these works are unlikely to be representative of his writings. When the emperor Marcus Aurelius complained that he could scarcely find time for reading, his tutor reminded him that Julius Caesar wrote a two-book study of Latin grammar during the conquest of Gaul, “discussing the declension of nouns while missiles flew around” (Fronto, Letters p. 224 van den Hout). He also composed poetry while on military campaigns (Suetonius, Life of Julius Caesar 56.5).

Well over 60% of the vocabulary of non-technical modern English is Latinate. This percentage would increase very substantially if scientific terminology were included, but not even the OED can keep pace with the deluge of new words constantly being created in the wake of new discoveries in chemistry, medicine, biology etc. To facilitate universal comprehension, almost all such words are compounds of Latin or Greek, or a combination of both. Many of these countless terms are known only to a small number of experts, and most of them have little aesthetic appeal. To cite just one example from the basis of all cellular forms of life, deoxyribonucleic (coined in 1931, with the spelling desoxy-) is a farrago of unhappily linked linguistic units: de is Latin, oxy is Greek, ribo is an arbitrarily rearranged abbreviation of arabinose [Greek or Latin with a Latin suffix], nucle is Latin, ic is Greek. Isidore of Seville (the patron saint of the Internet) might have taken against this term: “Words that are partly Greek, partly Latin are called ‘intermediate’. They are also called ‘bastard’, because they corrupt the final syllable while leaving the earlier ones intact” (Etymologies 1.7.13).

The majority of words in English are Latinate, but that is not, of course, to say that either spoken or written modern English pullulates with Latin. Perhaps only four words derived from Latin, just, number, people and very, find a place at the lower end of the list of the 100 most frequently used words in English, the others all being Germanic (the first 25 of them accounting for about one-third of all written English). There is no consensus on such statistics; to include four Latinate words is perhaps overgenerous. It is noticeable that three of the four Latinate candidates for inclusion are not monosyllabic; the only Germanic word normally reckoned in the top 100 which is not monosyllabic is water. (Perhaps surprisingly, however, a list of the 100 most frequent words in modern German has only 31 monosyllabic words.)

Of the 268 words in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, only 57 are of Latin origin (21%; 43 different words), as are only 44 of the 263 words of Hamlet’s great soliloquy (17%; all different). The Hon. Edward Everett was the main speaker at Gettysburg. Since he was a former professor of Greek at Harvard and the ceremony had been postponed for two months to give him time to prepare his two-hour address, he might reasonably be expected to adopt a more expansive style than did Lincoln: of his first 268 words, 78 are of Latin origin (29%; 71 different words).

Learning Latin is often said to be the best way to extend one’s English vocabulary, but it may be as well to bear in mind that “a mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details” (George Orwell, Politics & the English Language). Edward Gibbon was thinking more positively along the same lines when he noted that in his Memoirs “all licentious passages are left in the obscurity of a learned language”.

English vocabulary has been influenced in many fascinating ways by its three most important sources, Germanic, Latin and (Norman-)French. Some words have come to English in two or more forms, both more or less directly from Germanic or Latin as well as through French (e.g. from Germanic and French, ward and guard, warranty and guarantee, from Latin and French, catch and chase, dais, desk, disc [disk], discus and dish, fragile and frail, rotund and round, secure and sure, straight, strait and strict).

“Grammar” and “glamor” deserve special mention: both come through Latin from the Greek γράμματα (grammata), “writing”, for spells to exert a glamorous charm required knowledge of gramarye, thought of as “occult learning”.

Sometimes, a Latinate word was added but did not supplant its Germanic equivalent, thus providing English with synonymous terms (e.g. the Germanic wedding and the French marriage, the Germanic kingly and not only the Latin regal but also the French royal). Sometimes, a Latin/French word was adopted with a significant change in its meaning. The words calf, cow, sheep and swine are all Germanic (mod. Germ. Kalb, Kuh, Schaf and Schwein), and the modern French forms of their Latinate equivalents are veau, boeuf, mouton and porc; whereas, however, the Germanic terms refer to the living animals, which needed to be looked after by the Anglo-Saxon peasantry, English derives veal, beef, mutton and pork from the Latinate forms, for it was the Norman conquerors who ate the meat.

Similarly, “deer” is Germanic (mod. Germ. Tier, meaning “animal” in general), but venison is derived from the Latin for “hunting”, venatus, an aristocratic pursuit. On the other hand, however, “pullet” (mod. Fr. poulet) refers to the living bird, whereas “chicken” (mod. Germ. Küchlein) refers both to the living bird and to its flesh. Such double influence involves other languages also; e.g. “isolate” comes from isola, “insulate” from insula, respectively the Latin and Italian words for “island”.

An English translation of the passage given in German and Latin on p. xvii of the textbook is hardly needed:

Hippopotamuses are big, fat animals, which live in Africa, in the river Nile. Many African animals are frightening and very fierce - crocodiles, lions, leopards, rhinoceroses, hyenas, scorpions, vultures, snakes (e.g. pythons, asps, vipers). But hippopotamuses are not timid. They have big bodies, big teeth, big feet, but little ears and a short tail. Africa is a sweltering land. Therefore hippopotamuses stay for many hours in the water of the river and doze, but, when the moon shines in the sky at night, they emerge from the river and devour the abundant grasses.

Hippopotamuses: or “hippopotami”. Since the plural of “rhinoceros” is the improbable (Greek) “rhinocerotes” (not “rhinoceri”) or the odd-looking “rhinoceroses”, perhaps “rhinoceros” should be retained as a zero plural, as with “deer”, “sheep” or “fish”. Hippopotamuses (and crocodiles) were displayed in Rome for the first time in the games put on by Aemilius Scaurus in 58 BC. For the same games, Scaurus brought from Joppa in Judaea what may have been the bones of a dinosaur, but they were billed as those of the beast from which Andromeda was rescued by Perseus (Pliny Natural History 9.11).

One expects a language to show a heavy lexical dependence on older languages that share its own particular branch of the family tree. Thanks to the Battle of Hastings, however, English may be regarded as an honorary Romance language. The extent to which English has been receptive to the influence of Latin will seem the more astonishing if one contrasts the conservatism in the development of the Romance languages in their descent from Latin. Perhaps not surprisingly, Italian has a particularly strong affinity to Latin. Not only the vocabulary, but also the word-forms and grammatical structures of the following poem, a eulogy of Venice, written as a virtuoso exercise by Mattia Butturini (1752-1817), are equally correct in classical Latin and in Italian, albeit with a slightly old-fashioned ring to it:

“I salute you, nourishing goddess, noble goddess,/O our glory, O Venetian queen!/In the stormy and deadly whirlwind/You reigned serene; a thousand limbs/Fearlessly you laid low in the bitter battle;/Through you I was not wretched, through you I do not groan,/I live in peace through you. Reign, O blessed one!/Reign in prosperous destiny, in reverend pomp,/In everlasting splendor, in your golden seat!/Serene, calm, dutiful,/Kindly, save me, love me, protect me!” See M. Pei, The Story of Language, revised ed., Philadelphia & New York 1965, p. 337.

In 16th-17th century Spain, writing prose and poetry equally comprehensible in Spanish and Latin was a fashionable literary exercise. The Indian national hymn is composed in old-fashioned Bengali, but because Bengali and Hindi are both descended from Sanskrit, it is comprehensible in both of these rather different languages.

Sometimes, modern English words look rather different from their Latin origin. For example, carnival is derived from caro, carnis “meat” and levare “to take away”, signifying the abstinence from meat during Lent, after the festival on Shrove Tuesday – though the popular etymology caro, vale! “Goodbye, meat!” has a certain appeal. (The French Mardi Gras “Fat Tuesday” reflects the same origin.) Cologne (Germ. Köln) was founded by the Romans in 38 BC as Oppidum Ubiorum “The town of the Ubii [a Germanic tribe]”; in AD 50/51, the emperor Claudius renamed it Colonia Claudia Augusta Ara Agrippinensium in honor of his fourth wife, Agrippina the Younger, who was born there. Tracing the derivation from Latin of words that have undergone a radical metamorphosis can be fascinating: joy and gaudium mean the same but look quite different, whereas the sense of nice is quite different from that of its source, nescius “ignorant”. There are countless other such surprising, amusing, and informative etymologies that can only be understood through specialized linguistic knowledge, but such developments are, exceptional. It is important to appreciate that, when English has adopted Latin words, it has done so in a way that is generally systematic, and therefore predictable. The vast majority of our Latinate words follow a small number of distinct and obvious patterns of acquisition. The following small selection of word-groups will make this process clear, and the patterns are also illustrated in most chapters, in the section Thēsaurus Verbōrum:

Latin is still all around us, and help with deducing the meaning of Latin words can be derived from many and various sources. All twelve months of the year have Latin(ate) names, as do all twelve sun-signs in the zodiac. Six of the eight planets in the solar system are named for Roman deities. Earth is a long established English word, Uranus is named for a Greek god (as is Pluto; when William Herschel discovered Uranus in 1781, he had to be dissuaded from calling it George, after George III of England). Most moons are named for Greek mythological figures, but those of Uranus are mostly Shakespearian figures, and the recently discovered moons of Saturn are giants from disconcertingly miscellaneous mythologies.

Many Latin abbreviations appear in the Periodic Table, especially among the elements discovered before the 20th century ; e.g. Ag (argentum) silver, Au (aurum) gold, Fe (ferrum) iron, Pb (plumbum) lead. Non-Latinate elements that have been Latinized can seem rather odd; e.g. berkelium (97), lawrencium (103).

Latin has almost a monopoly in the naming of body parts. For example, the constituent parts of the mid-section of the brain (cerebrum) is entirely Latinate: the crustae, the tegumentum, the substantia nigra, the tubercula quadrigemina, the corpora geniculata, the “aqueduct of Sylvius” and the “subthalamic region”, this last being divided into three layers, the stratum dorsale, the zona incerta and the corpus subthalamicum (zona and thalamus were borrowed from Greek already in the classical period).

It may be surprising that body parts have Latin names, rather than Greek, given that most doctors were Greek; dissection, however, was little practised in antiquity and the pioneering medieval and Renaissance surgeons did not know Greek. Dissection of human corpses was permissible at some periods in Alexandria, but not elsewhere in the Greco-Roman world. Galen urges medical students unable to travel to Egypt to grasp any lucky chance to examine bone structure – a corpse washed out of its grave by a river in flood, or the skeleton of a highwayman killed by a traveler whom he had attempted to rob (On Anatomical Procedures 1.2).

It is obvious, but reassuring nonetheless, that many place-names have survived almost or entirely unchanged; e.g. Africa, Arabia, Armenia, Asia, Belgium, Corsica, Creta, Ethiopia, Europa, Germania, India, Italia, Libya, Macedonia, Mauritania, Palaestina, Roma, Sardinia, Syria. The names of many present-day countries are fashioned in this Latinate manner; e.g. Argentina is the land of silver (argentum), Australia the land of the South wind (auster), Liberia the land of the free (liber).

Africa and Asia denoted not only the continents, but also provinces of the empire, roughly equivalent to present-day Tunisia and Turkey respectively. Mauritania was a Roman province, considerably further north than the present-day country. The names of many American states are Latinate, though not classical: Carolina, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Virginia. Florida means “flowery”; the word would be the same in Latin but, like Colorado and Nevada, it is Spanish, perhaps given by Ponce de Leon to commemorate Pascua Florida (Easter). Montana (“mountainous”) is presumably Latin, rather than Spanish (montaña), having been devised by James M. Ashley, governor of the Territory of Montana in 1869-70. New Jersey is named after the British Channel Island; the claim that it is a corruption of Nova Caesarea (cf. Nova Scotia “New Scotland”) is improbable. California was coined as the name of an island inhabited by black Amazons in Garcia Ordóñez de Montalvo's Las Sergas de Esplandián (“The Exploits of Esplandián”), a romance popular at the time of the region's discovery; he seems to have been influenced by caliph, the title given in Muslim countries to the chief civil and religious ruler, as successor of Mohammad.