Stripe Latin Delights

Do you recognize these bright stars that are looming into our evening sky?

See the end note about enlarging illustrations.

Of course you do.  Alpha Canis Minoris is Procyon, Alpha and Beta Geminorum are Castor and Pollux, Alpha and Beta Orionis are Betelgeuse and Rigel, Alpha Aurigae is Capella, Alpha Tauri is Aldebaran.

To deal with the stars’ official designations you need to know a little about a couple of languages.  About Greek, very little, the letters of the alphabet.  About Latin rather more: how to form the genitive case – the “of” case – of the constellation names.

Some of those names, such as Orion, came from Greek, but more are pure Latin, such as Auriga, Gemini, Corvus, Pavo, and they all are treated as Latin words.  Their genitive forms are Latin.  Alpha Orionis, the A star of Orion: if it were Greek it would be Alpha Oriontos.

Some of the Latin genitive forms are fairly easy: masculine, feminine, and neuter names ending in -us, -a, -um have genitives in -i, -ae, -i (Taurus, Tauri; Ara, Arae; Triangulum, Trianguli).

But many are of other “declensions”: Aries, Arietis; Cancer, Cancri; Hercules, Herculis; Lepus, Leporis; Serpens, Serpentis; Virgo, Virginis; Apus, Apodis; Crux, Crucis; Lynx, Lyncis; Monoceros, Monocerotis; Pyxis, Pyxidis; Dorado, Doradus.  Some are plural: Gemini, Geminorum; Pisces, Piscium.  Or two-word, so that their endings have to “agree”: Ursa Major, Ursae Majoris; Canes Venatici Cànum Venaticòrum.

Higher up than the top of our picture is the Roman god Mars (genitive Martis) and farther around to the west are Luna, Neptunus, and Mercurius, but Saturnus, Jupiter (genitive Jovis) and Venus (Veneris) are at this time below the horizon, as is Sol Invictus.

So do you have to steep yourself in Latin grammar if you are to enjoy the constellations?  No.  But knowing a bit enhances the flavor.

Other sciences retain traces of the earlier centuries when Latin was the medium of all European education.  Medical people have to know  which muscles are extensors or flexors, that quadriceps femoris is the four-headed muscle of the thigh, the anatomical directions – anterior or posterior, superior or inferior, ventral or dorsal, lateral or medial.  The Linnaean names by which we classify all living things (also cloud types) are Latin, a noun for the genus and an adjective, or sometimes a noun in the genitive, for the species: Homo sapiens, Xenos vesparum (a parasite “of wasps”), Stormbergia dangershoeki (a dinosaur discovered at a place called Dangers Hoek).

Stripe Latin

I’ve had to re-publish my little book Stripe Latin: a Grammar Game, which shows how to learn some rules of Latin by fitting colored cards together.

I made it as long ago as 1994, and the printer sent me not the 500 I had ordered but 612 – printers were allowed a percentage of overs or unders.  I hardly expected anyone to buy this little thing, though I had enthusiastic feedback from one person (with an Italian surname).  Some days ago I was surprised to learn that the stock was down to two copies.  So I thought I’d keep it on as a print-on-demand book.  But it was under the 24-page minimum for that.  Then I realized the solution was to print the pictures of the cards on pages with their other sides blank, so that you can cut out the shapes to make your cards.  Next obstacle was that the first edition was made in the days of paste-up and printers’ negatives, so I had no electronic files, except a program I had written to draw the cards.  Getting this program to work again took a surprising number of days.

The little book is pretty, and you can indeed learn something by just reading it, but can you actually use it to make and play a card game?

It would work that way, definitely, if someone manufactured a number of cards of the “puella, regina, aquila” type and a number of the “amant, celant, vident” type. and so on, and sold them in boxed sets.

So, although the back of the titlepage says “Rights resrved,” et cetera, I would be happy for anyone to do that, and I would provide the program for the cards’ shapes and colors.

Latinitas

The language the Romans spoke was Lingua Latina because Rome was at first just one of the cities of Latium, the region that was latus, “broad and flat,” west-central Italy.  The expanding Roman power absorbed the other Latians, and then their cousins the Oscans, Umbrians, and others, who form the Italic branch of the Indo-European language family.

Going in the other time-direction, the languages descended from Latin (Italian, Romanian, French, Spanish, Portuguese) are called “Romance”; and their speakers in the Americas are “Latinos.”

Latin delights

In early stages of learning Latin, I disliked it. I couldn’t imagine live people talking such words as factum, monebam, monebantur, regibus, hic, hanc, harum, horum.  It seemed a product of grammarians themselves, working like chemists to turn formulae into syllables.

But it was unfair to accuse the Roman of mathematical thought-process because, thumping his chest, he said “Sum.”  The seeming intellectuality, or nerdishness, of Latin is due to our having borrowed words from it for intellectual fields, centuries later than the borrowing through French of more worn-down forms.

There were some Latin words I couldn’t help loving.  Priscus “ancient.”  Apud, “according to.”  Robur, “oak.”  And constructions such as ut celerrime, so neat compared with English as quickly as possible.  Later, reading the medieval poetry of The Wandering Scholars, and later, translating bits of sources that bore on astronomy or that I could use as “fillers,” I appreciated increasingly that this is indeed “the ancient and marmoreal tongue,” into which ideas mould themselves more firmly and memorably than into our ragged vernaculars.  And having a better dictionary I kept coming across Latin delights:

Paulisper “for a little while,” invesperascit “it grows to be twilight,” ornatulus “rather ornate,” tantulus “so small,” solamen “consolation,” seges “cornfield,” stelliger “starry,” reglutino “unglue,” mollicellus “dainty,” côs (genitive côtis) “whetstone,” laniena “butcher’s shop,” later “brick,” lateramen “pottery,” veru “a spit” or “javelin,” antegredior “I go before,” perungo “I oil thoroughly,” satur “full, sated,” Equirria and Tubilustrium “the rites of the horses” and “of the trumpets,” cincticulus “little girdle” (a tickly one?), glubere “to peel,” lanx “dish” (Greek lankla), glis (gliris) “dormouse,” ebur “ivory,” prex “entreaty,” adgnoscit “he discerns,” idoneitas “fitness.”

Clever exploitations of words’ inflections: peraudiendus, “worthy to be heard all through”; huius persuasu, “by persuasion of him”; ridetur, “there is laughter.”  The ending -im, is it like our -wise? – passim “pace-wise, everywhere”; statim, “stand-wise, immediately”; olim, “that-wise, once upon a time”; datatim, “by giving alternately.”  Funditque has ore loquellas, “And he pours from his mouth these vocables.”

Because most Latin substantives end with inflections, those that have cut them off seem to have a special neatness: lac, sal, sol, mel, animal, vectigal (“revenue”), minutal (“mincemeat”).

And Latin phrases packing sacks of meaning into forms so curtly efficient that they are kept at hand like little tools by the users of later languages: ad hoc; non sequitur, ex se.  And the phrase that is elevated to an essential word: inter est.  The compactness of an inflecting language: Oderint dum metuant, “Let them hate so long as they fear.”  Mutatis mutandis: we have to tack this mundane, lawyerly little caveat onto a generalization because our own substitutes, such as “all else being equal,” or a translation, “given that those things have been changed that need to be changed,” cannot get near its brief precision.  Mollia tempora fandi, “smooth moments for speaking.”  Ex ungue leonem, “By noticing a claw you know that a lion is around the corner” – that is, “There is a great mind behind this.”  Obit anus, abit onus, “The hag died, the burden vanished” (said Schopenhauer when the woman who had been blackmailing him died).

Our verse goes by stress rather than by quantity – the time-units of vowels and consonants – but we clean it, help it run, if we adjust it toward Latin-like quantitativeness, avoiding complex syllables in weak places and consonant-clusters where syllables meet.

As against English fluffiness: the enviable solidity, the granite, of Latin syllables.

MUL  TAS  PER  GEN  TES  ET  MUL  ta  per  AE  quo  ra  VEC  TUS

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ILLUSTRATIONS in these posts are made with precision but have to be inserted in another format.  You may be able to enlarge them on your monitor.  One way: right-click, and choose “View image”, then enlarge.  Or choose “Copy image”, then put it on your desktop, then open it.  On an iPad or phone, use the finger gesture that enlarges (spreading with two fingers, or tapping and dragging with three fingers).  Other methods have been suggested, such as dragging the image to the desktop and opening it in other ways.

Sometimes I make improvements or corrections to a post after piblishing  it.  If you click on the title, rather than on ‘Read more’, I think you are sure to see the latest version.

This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.