learned of Britain and began invading. The Latin-speakingnCelts fought back, and our stories of King Arthur have theirnorigin in those distant days. Eventually the Germans wonnand Britain became England, the land of the GermanspeakingnAngles and Saxons.nOur ancestors did not know much Latin, just the fewnwords likely to make an impression on beer-swilling,nvenison-munching barbarians. Of course, they noticed thenRoman roads, strata, and our word “street” is a linealndescendent of that impression. (Like many Latin words,nstrata was picked up by scientists in the 19th century and sonsurvives twice in English. A good parallel is the chivalrousnmedieval word “feat” and the hard 19th-century termn”fact,” both the descendants of the Latin factum.) Oi coursenthey noticed the great fortifications. “Wall” is the first halfnof Latin vallum. They also noticed that the Romans dranknwine and ate cheese, and those two English words comenstraight from Latin vinum and caseus. The latter word hasnsuffered from the changing pronunciation of English, butnthe w of our wine preserves, after all these centuries, thencorrect Latin pronunciation of vinum, long after the Romancendescendents of Latin turned to pronouncing it with anV. After the eventual conversion of the Germans, morenLatin words came into the language from Ghristianity,nincluding candle, altar, and church.nIn 1066 the Angles and Saxons themselves were conquerednby a new set of Norsemen, the Normans of France.n(Even in those days the French imposed their sense ofncultural superiority on lesser breeds without the law.) Thenconquerors brought in a whole slew of Latin words modifiednby a transition through Late Latin and French, These werenthe words of conquerors, and Latin became associated withnthe rulers and the upper class. So what a peasant worksnwith, “hand,” is a good Germanic word, but “stomach,”nwhat an aristocrat uses to enjoy the results of his work, is anLatin word. Similarly those filthy animals that the Saxonsnwatched for the rulers were “swine,” as still in German, butnthe delicious food that was made out of them was “pore,” angood Latin word. Latin still suffers from the feeling that it isnnaturally a language of an oppressive elite, even today,nalthough that was only one period of its life in English.nWith the 16th century came the Renaissance and thenReformation, new inventions, new continents, and newnideas. All this newness needed new words to describe it.nOne alternative was to invent totally new sounds to describenthis new world. Writers in English, however, made a verynimportant decision. Instead of trying to weld together newnsounds to embrace all the new discoveries of their world,nthey turned their back on the present and sought in thenunified and sophisticated world of Ancient Rome the wordsnto describe what was happening around them.nA few examples. How does one describe the feeling thatnthings are getting better? When the world is a unifiednwhole, where classes and doctrine change not, there is nonneed for such a concept. In the 16th century, people feltnthat there had been degeneration and emendment. So onenof them, William Shakespeare, picked up a Latin word forntravel and used it for things getting better, the wordn”progress.” In the Middle Ages this word had existed tondescribe, for instance, the passage of the king from onennoble house to another. Shakespeare used it to describenthings not just going, but going somewhere. It did not catchnon right away, but in the 19th century it came into its own.nAgain, how does one describe the feeling that one isngetting older but also better? Sir Thomas Elyot, T. S. Eliot’sndistant ancestor, wrote a book on education, The Scholemaster,nin which he felt this need. He considered using thenword “ripe” from the plant world, but some vague linguisticnsense told him that older people would not want to be calledn”ripe.” So he turned to the Latin word for “ripe,” maturus.nPeople who got better as they grew older were “mature,”nand the condition was “maturity.” We aging Baby Boomersncan now be grateful for the thoughtful Elyot and fornhundreds of others in the 16th and 17th centuries whoncoined thousands of words in English out of Latin andnGreek. All these words did not survive, but many did, tonenrich our speech and to allow the genius of our languagento mature, to progress, in an orderly fashion.nA similar situation existed in the 19th and 20th centuries,nalthough here we are dealing with scientific ideas andndiscoveries. Again the men of that age turned back tonancient Greece and Rome to describe the locomotive andnthe aeroplane, sociology and hermeneuties. Most of thenLatin and Greek in our dictionaries comes from these mennwho sought to describe a new world in the languages of annold one and so allow the rest of us to assimilate this newnessnwithout the trauma of future shock.nIt is still going on. We are all concerned with computersnnowadays, and the invention is a fairly new one, but thenword comes right out of Latin, computo, to reckon, and thenlittle flashing light that is signaling to me as I write this onnmy trusty Kay-Pro in an apartment in the old city of Rome,nItaly, is called a cursor, another good Latin word, forn”runner.”nOne reason why our society, unlike many others, hasnbeen able to assimilate change and newness without fallingnapart is that we decided, way back in the Renaissance, tonintroduce the world we had not yet seen, because we werenin the process of inventing it, by means of the sounds andnwords of an ancient society we knew only from books andnour imagination. This means that there is another reasonnfor an ambitious young person to learn Latin. Many believenthat the ability to think logically is improved by the exercisenof transferring thoughts from one linguistic system tonanother. One meets minds such as Vergil and Cicero, whonstill have a thing or two to say to our world. The vocabulariesnof law, medicine, and the sciences are full of Latinnwords that help a youngster understand those fields and risenin them.nThere is more, however. For there will be inventions andnideas coming out in the next generation that none of usnhave heard of yet, that no one has thought of If theirninventors continue the traditions of our ancestors, they willndescribe these inventions and discoveries with words takennfrom Latin. Latin is not only our link to a past rich withnadventure and mystery, it is also a ticket to understanding anfuture which is equally exciting and mysterious. No othernfield of study can make the same promise, that of rooting usnin our past while opening up the future. It is the one secretnthat no trade rival will ever be able to steal from us, becausenour creative future is rooted deep in the fertile soil of ournrichly productive past.nnnMARCH 1987 /11n