latin won't let me go

I’m picking up some research work I began 35 years ago and never had the time or opportunity to do more than write some preliminary reports. And this revising means I have to brush up my Latin. For the first time in my life I’ve been able to make a very reasonable shot at translating some of Julius Kaiser’s war reports. He doesn’t exactly write a glowing account of the Britons he faced when he raided the south coast. The men, he says, grow their hair and moustaches long but shave off all the rest of their bodily hair. Then they cover themselves wth woad which turns their skin sky blue. Ten or a dozen brothers share their wives with each other in a very friendly kind of open marriage arrangement. When a woman gives birth, the father is considered to be the mother’s original husband. They didn’t teach that at any school I went to.

And that’s not the only thing they didn’t teach us. The latin primers introduced us to ‘hasta’ a spear and ‘gladius’ a sword. (But not to ‘vagina’, which is the correct term for a sword’s sheath. I learned that one day when I was singing the Proper of a Latin High Mass. ) In short, we were taught a rather restricted version of the language in an imaginary setting which was supposed to inspire us to emulate the Romans and their great empire. (We, the British, did rather better with our Empire, of course. Or so we were led to believe.)

What I’m finding now is that working with carefully chosen scraps of genuine classical Latin, I’ve once again become very sensitised to nuances of meaning. I’m asked ‘Are you free next week?’ – and I find myself saying ‘I shall be free next week’ or, if pushed, ‘I *will* be free next week’. But that’s next week. In the future. Which requires a future tense of the verb. Today I am free. Am I free tomorrow? Perhaps, by the end of tomorrow I shall have been free – a Future Perfect tense. Perhaps, even, a perfect future. But then I should remember (is that a subjunctive?) our English came to us in ‘three keels’ and more across the dark North Sea. We are no longer constrained. We are free. Free today. And free tomorrow?

francis cameron, oxford, 27 july 2012

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