Lingua Latina, Part I: the Versatility of Inflection and Tense

Due primarily to the posts of David, I have decided to expand the scope of this blog a little to some other interests of mine, including writing and classical languages, specifically Latin. I will still post, of course, on theological, philosophical, and historical subjects (though David will probably be able to supply the history part much more ably) but I think that this is also the best public forum under my control for a more serious treatment of these subjects that greatly interest me.

I have been, as many of you know, in a class this school year called AP Latin IV: Vergil. This class is designed to prepare one to take the Advanced Placement exam on Vergil's Aeneid, and we are now almost through the approximately 1850 lines that the AP exam tests on. My understanding of the Latin language has grown enormously since studying this amazing poet, and I wanted to share some of the peculiarities and attributes of his language, which has many resources of power and description that English can only look at longingly (and, I confess, some areas in which English is probably superior).

The first and probably most obvious attribute of Latin, the one that most textbooks will hammer into students' brains from day one, is that it is an inflected language. The listener or reader can tell the purpose of a word in a sentence based on its ending letters, not necessarily by its position, as in English. A language based on this system, besides forcing students of it to learn multiple declensions and conjugations, has the ability to juggle words within a phrase or clause almost at will, depending on the purposes of the author. This provides the Latin author with the enviable ability to emphasize nearly any word he wants at any point in the sentence, a feat impossible, at least on such a scale, in English. I will take as a case a point a section early on in the epic where Juno, queen of the gods, is lamenting the fact that she, with all her power, has been unable to destroy the Trojan fleet, while Minerva, technically a lesser goddess, has been able to exact revenge on an enemy of hers, namely Ajax son of Oileus. Narrating what Minerva did to the unfortunate man, Juno says the following:

illum exspirantem transfixo pectore flammas/ turbine corripuit scopuloque infixit acuto...

A typical English translation of this passage might be "she seized with a whirlpool the man, breathing flames from his transfixed chest, and stuck him on a sharp rock." If one followed the actual word order of the Latin, however, it would read something like "the man breathing from his transfixed chest flames with a whirlpool she snatched and on a rock stuck sharp." The reaction of an English reader to such a hash of words would be to scratch his head. In Latin poetry, however, this is par for the course. With the position of his words, Vergil can, for instance, emphasize the man's "transfixed chest" by positioning it between exspirantem and flammas. Latin is capable of producing very physical effects with the positioning of words. Another example, perhaps even more startling, comes from book 4. Dido, queen of Carthage, has fallen in love with Aeneas, but after spending a whole winter with her he is abruptly commanded by the gods to leave. After wildly denouncing him as a traitor and calling down curses on his head, Dido runs inside. Vergil recounts her frenzied flight with these words:

His medium dictis sermonem abrumpit et auras/ aegra fugit...

"She breaks off (in) the middle of her conversation with these words and, wretched, flees the air."

But notice how Vergil has interposed the word "medium," middle, in the very middle of his dictis, these words. This kind of graphic interposition doesn't really work in English. We can't get away with "these in the middle of words her conversation she breaks off." Of course, good English poets can work around these limitations, but it is still a definite advantage of Latin.

Another advantage of Latin is a much more powerful use of tenses, in my experience particularly the perfect and pluperfect, although there may be many others I am not aware of. Two examples of that. The first, of the powerful use of the pluperfect, is not from the Aeneid, and comes (I think) from Cicero talking about the execution of the famous Roman traitor Catiline, or some of his followers. Cicero said to the Senate one word: vixerat. In English that would literally translate "they had lived," but the basic sense is they are dead, i.e., they did live up to a certain time in the past, but do no longer.

The other one, from the Aeneid itself, shows out the juxtaposition of the present and perfect tenses can make an interesting effect. I do not remember the precise section, but Vergil is describing Mercury flying to Carthage with a message for Aeneas. The present tense, I believe, is used to the describe Mercury's flight, and the perfect tense to describe his landing in Carthage--the implication being that the god is outside time, since he landed at the place, at least grammatically, before he even started flying!

Time constrains me from going on, so I shall leave this discussion for now, and hope that I have made this subject at least somewhat interesting to others, and would not be better off addressing the empty air. :-)