So, You Want To Learn Latin?
By Lorna Lee
So, you want to learn Latin? Maybe you spotted your university motto and wondered what it means, maybe you’re just intrigued by ancient languages, or perhaps you recently saw *that* episode of Marvel’s Loki and want to know more? Of all the languages out there, Latin probably seems one of the most unapproachable; trapped two thousand years in the past it belongs to a world that, at first glance, couldn’t feel more distant from our own, and the idea of learning it can be pretty daunting. But in this article I’m going to try open things up, and as well as giving a brief introduction to the language of the ancient Romans, sharing a little bit of my experience and giving some tips on where to start; I will illustrate why Latin is not only an incredibly useful language to learn, but also how it is not actually as distant as you might think.
Ever since I started teaching myself Latin two years ago I have been captivated by the ancient world; but my experience with Latin (and my whole education journey) leading up to that point had been a little unexpected to say the least. I first encountered Latin at secondary school; I was lucky enough that my school decided to offer an optional GCSE in Latin, which I signed up for immediately (I had always been intrigued by ancient history and languages, but up to that point I’d never really had the opportunity to cultivate that interest). So there I was, learning Latin in a little group of four fellow language nerds and I was really enjoying it; had the circumstances been different I would probably have fallen in love with ancient languages right there, scrapped my plan to go to medical school and dove headfirst into classics. But at that time my health condition, which had been becoming progressively worse since I was 13, was making my life very difficult, and I struggled to keep up.
Eventually I became so poorly that I was no longer able to attend school and had to do my GCSEs from home. I was much too ill to do all my GCSEs, so, along with many other subjects that I enjoyed, I was forced to drop Latin; and it was 3 years before it entered my life again. I was in the middle of a Biology A Level (still bedbound with my chronic illness) and after years of wanting to study medicine I realised that, although elements of being a doctor would suit me, I just wasn’t enjoying the scientific aspect anymore. I had a very long think and the disappointment that I never got to finish my Latin GCSE had always been at the back of my mind, so for the first time in years I took out my copy of ‘So you Really Want To Learn Latin’ by N.R.R Oulton (it was still neatly packed in my Latin folder at the bottom of my schoolbag) and I haven’t looked back since.
The Language of Ancient Rome
'Linguists often use trees and branches as metaphors to explain the connections between different groups of languages' https://www.theguardian.com/education/gallery/2015/jan/23/a-language-family-tree-in-pictures
Latin is thought to have emerged at some time around 700BCE and was spoken by the various tribes occupying a small, west-central region of Italy known as Latium. One of these tribes, residing in a small settlement on the slopes of the Palatine Hill, were known as Romani (Romans). At this time, Latin was just one of many Italic language communities established across Italy; but from 500-280BCE the Romans came to control most of the Italian peninsula, taking Latin with them. By the first century BCE virtually all of Italy was speaking Latin and by the first century AD the language was referred to as sermo Italus ‘the Italian language’ (Jones, Peter. Quid Pro Quo page 5), at which time the Roman empire stretched from Britain to Syria and Linguae Latinae was fast becoming embedded in areas under the greatest Roman influence, e.g. Western Gaul and Spain. Latin is part of the Italic family of languages and is thought to be a descendant of ancient Proto-Indo-European (a prehistoric language theorized by linguists); this means that Latin, and its other relatives in the Italic branch (e.g. Osco-Umbrian), share a common ancestor with Germanic, Celtic, Greek and many other European language families that are thought to have their beginnings in Proto-Indo-European.
When people talk about learning Latin they are generally talking about Classical Latin, this was the language of high society and educated elite and it is the Latin we see in our textbooks. However, in Ancient Rome there was another variety, called Vulgar Latin (from Latin vulgus ‘crowd, mob, commoners’); this was the language that most Romans actually spoke and, in its original form, survives mainly in graffiti scribbled on the walls of ancient cities such as Pompeii. Vulgar Latin had a very interesting afterlife, and it is from this common Latin that the various Romance languages (i.e. French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, Catalan and Portuguese) emerged; as we shall see, even English has been heavily influenced by Vulgar Latin.
The Latin you already know
You may be further along with Latin than you think. Chances are, if you live anywhere in the Western world, you have already encountered Latin numerous times today without even realising it. Almost as soon as I started teaching myself Latin it struck me just how much of it we can see in our own language and culture. We can spot it in small everyday expressions (carpe diem ‘pluck the day’, et cetera ‘and the rest’, status quo ‘existing state of affairs’), in the names of English cities sitting where Roman settlements (castra ‘camps’) used to stand (take the cities of Chester, which derives directly from the Latin castra ‘camp’, and Doncaster, which gets its combining the Celtic don ‘river’ and castra), and in a variety of films and TV shows, most recently (much to the delight of classicists everywhere) an episode of Marvel’s Loki. We use Latin to plan out our lives, send emails, make sense of the night sky, apply for jobs (CV is an abbreviation of the Latin curriculum vitae, meaning ‘the course of your life’) and even to cast spells (reparo ‘I repair’, expecto patronum ‘I await the master’, periculum ‘danger’). But one of the most important places we encounter Latin is in hundreds of thousands of words embedded in English vocabulary.
I am always surprised by Latin’s knack of popping up in the most unexpected places; take modern typing signs like ‘&’ and ‘@’, these seem to be pretty modern inventions right? Well, the ampersand/&, used today to represent the word ‘and’ can be traced all the way back to the 1st century AD and the Ancient Roman cursive script, in which the letters E and T (Latin et ‘and’) were occasionally written together to form a ligature (a symbol to abbreviate two letters). The sign @ meanwhile is thought to have made its first appearance among medieval scribes, who used the symbol as a shortcut for the Latin preposition ad ‘to, towards’. Another very interesting place we can find the language of the ancient Romans is name by on our calendars (from Latin kalendae meaning ‘first day of the month’), particularly in our names for the months, e.g. January was named after the Roman God Janus (the God who looked both ways, forward and back) and June was named after the goddess Juno, while July and August were named after the deified emperors Julius Caesar and Augustus; meanwhile the months of Septem-ber, Octo-ber, Novem-ber and Decem-ber come from the Latin for ‘seven’, ‘eight’, ‘nine’ and ‘ten’ (I should note here that the Romans had a ten month calendar, so for them, the months of September, October, November and December were the seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth months). You can also spot Latin in an array of mottos; from cities such as London (domine, dirige nos ‘Lord, guide us’) to universities all over the world, e.g. Nottingham (sapientia urbs conditur ‘a city is built on wisdom’), New York (perstare et praestare ‘to persevere and to excel’) and Melbourne (postera crescam laude ‘we grow in the esteem of future generations’).
One of my favourite unlikely places, where we can spot a lot of Latin, is in Astronomy. Our ‘galaxy’ derives from the Greek gala ‘milk’ (can you see where I’m going with this), with the Greeks calling our Galaxy galaxias kulkos ‘the milky circle’; but it is actually the Romans from whom we get lactea via ‘the Milky Way’. We can also see Latin in the names of numerous constellations, e.g. Ursa Major ‘The Great Bear’, Orion ‘The Hunter’, Corona Borealis ‘The Northern Crown’. Even the planets in our solar system are named after the Roman gods, e.g. Venus (Goddess of Love), Neptune (God of the Sea) and Jupiter (God of sky, thunder, king of the Gods). Many of Jupiter’s moons have actually been named after the God’s various mythological lovers/victims, e.g. Europa, Io, Ganymede, etc; and in a move by NASA that never fails to make me laugh, the satellite orbiting Jupiter was christened Juno, after Jupiter’s often slighted and vengeful wife, forever keeping her eye on her notoriously unfaithful other half.
But let’s move on to the huge amount of Latin vocabulary that we already know and, more than that, actually use every day! For a dead language, Latin has had an extraordinary afterlife, it is thought that over 60% of English words come from Latin, not to mention the Romance languages (i.e. French, Spanish, Italian, etc) which owe much of their vocabularies and grammatical structures to Latin. Take this sentence, animal feminam amat; you could probably have a good guess at what it means, as words like animal ‘animal’, femina ‘woman’ and amat ‘it loves’ are all recognizable to us, because from them we get words like ‘animal’, ‘feminism’ and ‘amorous’. Even prepositions such as ab ‘from’ and trans ‘across’ look familiar because they are at the root of modern English words like ‘ab-sent’ and ‘trans-plant’.
While Classical Latin has remained largely unchanged since the golden days of Cicero and Catullus, Vulgar Latin evolved, eventually becoming so far removed from the elite version that in his book ‘Quid Pro Quo’, Peter Jones suggests that by the third century AD it may well have been impossible for someone using the elite language to understand the other (and vice versa — another Latin expression, meaning ‘the other way around’ — Jones, Peter. Quid Pro Quo page 7.) . So if it wasn’t arduously copied down, like Classical Latin, then how did this common Latin survive for so long in the West and come to be so engrained in English vocabulary?
Following the collapse of the Roman Empire in 5 th century AD, Latin remained at the heart of the Catholic church, becoming deeply embedded in educational and cultural vocabulary and ultimately developing into the Romance languages. Ironically, Latin didn’t have much of an impact on the British language (then Celtic) when the Romans were actually here. It could mainly be found among the governors and soldiers occupying the province; and when they left, to defend the Roman empire against various Germanic incursions from the North, they took Latin with them, leaving behind only sparse reminders that they had even been here in the first place. The absence of the Romans left Britannia ripe for the taking and during the 5th and 6th centuries AD the Anglo Saxons did just that. The Saxon language, which was largely Germanic, but contained some Latin (as it had been in contact with the Roman empire), did what Latin could not, ousting Celtic, and what little Latin there was, to become the basis for modern English. Latin was brought back to the British Isles by the church from the sixth century AD, but the biggest change came with the Norman conquest of 1066 and over the following 350 years the English Language became flooded with Norman French, which as we know, evolved directly from Vulgar Latin (interestingly this created a sort of ‘two tier’ vocabulary of home grown vs borrowed words — Deutscher, Guy. ‘The Unfolding of Language’, page 85 — e.g. contrast Germanic ‘hug’, ‘corn’, ‘hound’ and ‘father’ with Latin based ‘embrace’, ‘grain’, ‘canine’ and ‘paternal’). Over time, these French words evolved, for example, Latin in ‘in’ + bracchium ‘arm’, became old French embracer, this was absorbed into Anglo Saxon and ultimately evolved into the English ‘embrace’. It is thought that throughout the Norman period, about 10,000 Latin (as well as Greek) based words entered the English language (Jones, Peter. Quid Pro Quo page 10).
There are so many words that we use every day that derive (have evolved from) Latin words; within the area of arts, entertainment and literature alone there are enough to fill a small book. Take the Greek word mousa which was adopted by the Romans to become musa, this word was connected with the nine Ancient Greek goddesses of the arts, the Muses, and is the source of modern ‘museum/muse’. Then there are words like pantomimus ‘pantomime’, poeta ‘poet’ and plaudite, originally from the verb plaudo ‘I strike with the flat of the hand’, whence our ‘applause’. Politics, Law and Education have also inherited much of their vocabulary from the classical world, take the words candidate (Latin candidatus, someone standing in an election — Latin candidatus actually evolved from another Latin word, candidus ‘white’, and came to be used in this way because Roman candidates for election wore white togas to make them stand out from the crowd. ), state (from Latin status ‘stature, posture, situation, rank’), crime (from Latin crimen ‘accusation, charge’) and educate (from Latin educo ‘I support the growth of’). Considering that Latin was the language of the Christian church for over 1700 years it is hardly surprising that religious words like ‘shrine’, ‘pious’ and ‘divine’ all have their roots in Latin; and don’t even get me started on the food and drink, from vinum (source of our English ‘wine’) to salsus ‘salted’, which became salsicia in Medieval Latin and eventually evolved into the old French saussiche, whence our ‘sausage’.
Weirdly, many of these Latin derived words originally had quite different meanings; take the word ‘nice’, you might want to think twice about calling someone this seemingly innocent word when you find out it derives from the Latin nescire ‘to not know’, i.e. ignorant. The word ‘novel’ also has a fascinating history, originally it derives from the Latin novus ‘new’, along the way this evolved to become Italian novello storia ‘new story’ and eventually developed into our modern meaning of the word. But, as well as evolving to describe a fictional piece of prose, ‘novel’ has also retained its original meaning and can still be used today to mean new/unusual/unique. ‘Person’ is another very interesting example; this derives from Latin (but originally Etruscan) persona and was actually used to refer to a ‘theatrical mask’ or ‘character in a play’, eventually coming to describe the ‘part played by someone in real life’, then ‘individual’ and so on.
But the area in which we find the majority of Latin is in technical, particularly sciency, words, which have been invented over the last 400 years to provide new vocabulary for the developing areas of science and medicine; some interesting examples include alga (from Latin alga ‘seaweed’), bacteria (from Latin bacillum ‘small stick, rod, staff’ - a reference to how bacteria appear under a microscope) and germ (from the Latin germen ‘shoot, sprout’ - far more in line with our ‘germinate’ than the infectious little organisms that give you a cold). Also, not exactly a sciency word, but from the Latin word statim ‘immediately’ we get the modern term ‘stat’, which you often hear used in hospitals (or medical dramas like ER or Greys Anatomy), e.g. ‘get me that IV stat’. Some of these words have been lifted directly from Latin (e.g. plant names, like rose and lily) and others were invented using Latin stems; take adrenalin for example, the adrenalin gland is located on top of the kidneys, so it is fitting that the word ‘adrenalin’ was assembled by combining the Latin ad ‘towards, near’ and renal ‘to do with the kidneys’.
Once all of these technical words are taken into account, the amount of Latin vocabulary thought to be embedded in English jumps from 60 to 90% (Jones, Peter. Quid Pro Quo page 1). Perhaps the best example of the important position Latin held – and still does hold - in scientific terminology is the establishment of the Binomial (‘two-name’) system of classification by Swedish Biologist Carl Linnaeus (1704-78); through which all biological species, from plants and animals to tiny microorganisms, can be uniquely identified by a combination of two Latin names, representing a genus (Latin ‘birth, kind, class’) and a species (Latin ‘appearance, nature’), e.g. Homo sapien (wise man), Canis lupus (a wolf), Tyrannosaurus rex (loosely, King of the Lizards).
You encounter a lot of words like the ones mentioned in this section when learning Latin and the fact that so many modern English words have their roots in Latin comes in handy when you’re trying to memorise vocabulary. This also works both ways, learning Latin is a wonderful foundation if you want to get into a discipline like science, medicine or law. So hopefully I’ve managed to illustrate not only the volume of Latin we can spot in our daily lives and vocabulary, but also how Latin is still very much alive and kicking.
Where to start?
There are lots of different resources for learning Latin out there and deciding where to start can be a bit of a headache, so in this part I’m going to try to give a good idea of what’s out there and whether it’s for you. However, what works for one person doesn’t necessarily work for another, so to get a more diverse range of suggestions (rather than just the resources that have worked for me) I ran a Q&A on Instagram and Twitter asking Latin learners to share their recommendations.
So let’s start with textbooks; I received a lot of amazing recommendations here, with the most popular answer by far being the OCR ‘Latin to GCSE’ books by John Taylor. But ‘Wheelock’s Latin’ (7th edition), the ‘Cambridge Latin Course’ books (Cambridge university have a fantastic website with lots of resources based on this course, and the CLC course books are currently free to access online in web book format) and ‘So You Really Want To Learn Latin’ by N.R.R Oulton were also favourites. I started out with ‘So You Really Want To Learn Latin’ (which is excellent), but I was having trouble getting hold of books two and three, so after I had worked my way through book one I switched to the more updated ‘Latin For Common Entrance’ books by the same author and I really couldn’t recommend them enough; they are very easy to follow, I love the focus on grammar and there are plenty of exercises and translations to practice what you’ve covered. Based on these recommendations I recently bought the OCR ‘Latin Stories for the GCSE Reader’ which is fantastic for extra translation practice; and finally, as an alternative to conventional textbooks, I have also heard great things about Imperium, a series of Latin textbooks in the format of a story (about the Roman Emperor Hadrian – so you’re also learning some history) which starts very simple and slowly becomes more advanced as you progress.
Moving onto online resources/apps; I received some absolutely fantastic suggestions here (that I will definitely be using myself in the future), including websites like Latin is Simple and Derigenda (which has vocab from a range of Latin courses, including OCR and CLC). You can also find Latin quizzes on websites such as Sporcle; and Perseus, along with the Latin Library, is great for finding original texts to translate. I would also include studyclassics.co.uk, who have various resources to help with GCSE and A Level Latin (from vocabulary and grammar lists to tips on how to study, as well as an excellent guide to translating Book XI of Virgil’s Aeneid) and for help with spoken Latin I would recommend The Latin Qvarter, which has a guide to Latin pronunciation, recordings of passages read in Latin and links to short films in Latin. A lot of Latin Learners in my Q&A also recommended Duolingo, which is a brilliant app; it has really helped me refine my Latin, especially pronunciation. Although I should say that, for me, Duolingo works best as a companion to learning Latin, as it doesn’t have the in-depth explanations of grammar and sentence structure that you find in textbooks.
If you’re getting a bit tired of staring at your textbook YouTube can be an excellent alternative. I mentioned ‘So You Really Want To Learn Latin’ above and I recently discovered that the author, N.R.R Oulton, presents a YouTube series with simple 15-30 minute Latin lessons based on the textbooks (so they give a great flavour of what the books are like, if you want to know more). Someone in my Q&A session suggested Latin Tutorial, which takes you through the key concepts, particularly grammar, in short and informative 3-8 minute videos. You can also find lots of great social media pages dedicated to Latin, some of my personal favourites include Carpe Latin, who do mini lessons and words of the day; and Legonium, who take Latin and blend it with pop culture to create entertaining and very educational posts.
If you would prefer a bit more guidance with your Latin, a lot of people recommended Belfast Classics, run by Helen McVeigh, who offer online Latin and other classics related courses, from total beginner to advanced. AcademusOnline, who run an online summer school in Latin and lots of other interesting virtual workshops on the ancient world, were mentioned too. Another popular suggestion, that I would also highly recommend, was Open Learn, run by the Open University, who offer free and flexible courses that you can complete online in your own time and at your own pace.
Finally, for me, wider reading is one of the best ways to get comfortable with a subject and over the last couple of years I have discovered some books that are fantastic to read alongside learning Latin. I have gone a little bit into the Latin we find in the English language above, but the best way for you to truly appreciate the impact Latin has had on our language is by reading ‘Quid Pro Quo’ by Peter Jones. This book is the perfect companion to learning Latin; and as well as tracing the roots of a myriad of Latin words embedded in English and revealing the immense impact Latin has had on our language, it also subtly teaches you a lot of actual Latin vocabulary while remaining light and entertaining. If you would like a brief overview of Latin I highly recommend ‘Latin Inscriptions’ by Dirk Booms, the main purpose of this book is to teach you how to decipher the Latin inscriptions you can find in museums and dotted around cities steeped in Ancient History, such as Rome; but there is lots of very interesting information on the Latin language in general and it would be a great choice to familiarise yourself with some of the main concepts. I briefly touched on the history of Latin above, and for more on that I would recommend ‘Ad Infinitum’ by Nicholas Ostler, which is a comprehensive and very readable biography of the Latin language, tracing Latin from its beginnings to its decline and afterlife in English and the Romance languages. Reading around linguistics and the history of languages in general is very helpful for putting what you’re learning within a wider context, so with this in mind I would also recommend Guy Deutscher’s books, particularly the ‘The Unfolding of Language’ which dives into the evolution of languages (Latin is actually featured quite a lot in this book, especially during the chapters on sentence structure and grammar). Finally, once you get going, if you don’t feel like working with ancient extracts, you can find lots of modern works of literature that have been translated into Latin, from ‘Alice in Wonderland’ Alicia in Terra Mirabili and ‘Asterix the Gaul’ Asterix Gallus to ‘The Hobbit’ Hobbitus Ille and ‘Winnie the Pooh’ Winnie Ille Pu.
Hopefully I’ve managed to give a good idea of what’s out there. For more on Latin learning resources I would recommend this collection on the Warwick Classics website; and of course, if you have any questions about learning Latin you can always contact me directly via Instagram or Twitter.
My Experience and Why Latin is Useful
In my experience, the most important things when it comes to learning any language are persistence and patience, and Latin is no different. When I first tried to learn Latin, during my GCSEs, I was juggling hospital appointments and medical tests with increasingly lengthy school absences, and when I was physically able to be at school I was faced with a mountain of work to catch up on. Passion and enthusiasm light the spark that makes learning a language enjoyable, but it also takes a lot of dedication and in that period of my life I didn’t have any time or energy to spare. When I returned to Latin 3 years later I was poorlier than I had ever been when I was at school, but I also understood my illness and my limits a lot more. Because the symptoms of my health condition become worse if I over-exert myself I can only do 10-20 minutes of Latin per day, which is usually just enough time to read about a new concept and do a set of questions, or a short translation. This might not seem like much at first and it does get very frustrating sometimes, but it’s been two years now and I’ve almost worked my way through the GCSE course content.
Until I had to piece together a sentence in Latin I had no idea just how complex and interesting languages could be; and although learning Latin, as with any subject, means putting in a lot of hard work, the rewards are fantastic. I started teaching myself Latin while I was still doing my Biology A Level and to my surprise it helped enormously with remembering things, one example that stands out is the time I used the prepositions ad ‘to/towards’ and ex ‘out of/away from’ to remember which arteriole took blood towards a particular region and which arteriole took blood away from it; as we saw, Latin is deeply embedded in scientific vocabulary and, as it turned out, the name of each arteriole actually derived from ad and ex.
English spelling is notorious for being tricky, how for example would you explain to someone who has no knowledge of English that the words ‘plough’, ‘enough’ and ‘thorough’ – all spelt the same – sound completely different. But another way that Latin comes in handy is that it helps navigate these little minefields; for example once you have learnt about present participles (which, in English, end in -ing, i.e. running, laughing) there are a whole host of English words that you stand a better chance of spelling correctly, particularly those ending in -ent, -ant, -ence and -ance (the difficulty with words like these is knowing which vowel to use before the n; is it an a or an e? This trick doesn’t always work, but it’s handy. If you’re unsure, think about which Latin verb is involved, and then look at that verb’s present participle, i.e. ambulance, from Latin ambulans - walking ; audience, from Latin audiens - listening; and so on. Oulton, N. R. R Latin for Common Entrance Three, page 55). The thorough grounding in grammar and syntax (sentence structure) that you get from learning Latin also gives you an excellent base when taking on other languages, both ancient and modern; according to recent data by Classics For All, 71% of school pupils studying Latin reported a better understanding of grammar, 80% exceeded their targets in Modern Foreign Languages and 78% reported having a larger vocabulary (figures taken from Classics For All 2010-2020 Impact report). I have noticed my vocabulary increase tenfold in the last two years and ever since I started learning Latin I have become such an etymology nerd. I mentioned above how many English words have come down to us from Latin, and it’s surprisingly fun to look them up; forget Pictionary (a blend of ‘picture’, from Latin pictura ‘picture’ and ‘dictionary’, originally stemming from Latin dicere ‘to say’), let’s play Etymology!
Whether you’re learning Latin, thinking about learning Latin, or even if you’re just curious about ancient languages, I hope this article has given you an interesting and enjoyable introduction to this surprisingly addictive language and, if you want to get into Latin, a great base to spring from. Latin can be challenging, intriguing, complex, fascinating and sometimes outright ridiculous (deponent verbs, I’m talking to you), but when I’m translating a passage in my textbook, or even tearing my hair out trying to memorise a new set of noun endings, I’m having so much fun, and I can’t possibly see myself doing anything else. I absolutely adore learning Latin, and I really hope you do too.
A Bit About The Author, Lorna:
Hi, I’m Lorna and I created the Instagram account unexpectedlearningjourney; where I talk books, classics/ancient history, learning ancient languages and, of course, a little bit about my chronic illness and how it affects my studies. As you probably figured from this article, I’m a bit of a language nerd; as well as Latin I can speak Norwegian, I have just started learning Italian and I am hoping to start Ancient Greek next. Even though I’m not able to get through books as fast as other people, because of my health condition, I absolutely love to read (my favourite genres are fantasy, historical fiction, YA, classics and pretty much anything to do with the ancient world). I am starting my Classical Studies degree with the Open University next year and I am also a Classics Ambassador for the Lytham St Annes Classical Association. I am interested in all aspects of the ancient world and I’m so excited to learn more!