Hear this episode at theallusionist.org/latin.
This is The Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, poke language with a stick to see if it's still moving.
To warm-up, here's some word history. Today, we're taking a look at "panic", a word we've had in English for about 400 years, having nabbed it from the French, but it came from the Ancient Greek "panikon", meaning "pertaining to the deity Pan", the half-man, half-goat god of fields, woods, and theatrical criticism. Like a lot of Greek gods, Pan seems to have been a real jerk. He was awful to women, he was responsible for the panpipes, and he was fond of playing pranks, such as making loud noises to scare herds of cattle and even armies. So Pan became known as the source of mysterious sounds that caused people and animals inexplicable but contagious fear, i.e. panic. On with the show.
HZ: Every week since September 1989, a radio station in Finland has broadcast a news bulletin in Latin.
CLIP FROM LATIN NEWS: No deal Athenee Radio for an F indicate an Italian course colleague in Atlanta narrowed it down. Hey, a bit. Charamba It's adult women in the D.A. Medical Hrishi Kinky Peski the title Ukrainian Rouzier Datamonitor Franco Galili Air.
HZ: Nuntii Latini - that's Latin for "news in Latin" - goes up every Friday evening just before the main news, and it is the world's only news bulletin in Classical Latin. And it's now the Finnish Broadcasting Company's longest-running show. What began kind of as an experiment caught on around the world, and remains very popular amongst Latin enthusiasts, particularly students and priests. Each week, Nuntii Latini does cover the latest developments in the Latin language and archaeology. However, the primary focus, like a regular news bulletin, is Finnish and international news stories. So how do you talk about current affairs in a language that was last really current a couple of thousand years ago?
ANTTI IJÄS: My name is Antti Ijäs. I prepare the weekly vocabularies for the broadcast.
HZ: To do that, Antti can't just rifle through the Latin dictionary. He has to come up with Latin words for concepts the Romans didn't have, from "electric cars" - "autocinetica electrica"- to "cash machines" - "apparatus pecuniarus automaticus" - and "macho man" - you know, like the Village People song "Ostinato Anime Masculi".
ANTTI IJÄS: In this respect, contrary to popular belief, Latin is not that different from modern languages, for example. Obviously before computers we didn't have, in Finnish, any words for computers, but we just made some up. It's the same thing for Latin. A "computer", in English, is actually more or less based on Latin. The verb "computo" means "to calculate", so "computer" becomes "computatrum", an instrument of calculating.
And while the same thing goes for "internet", the first part of the word, "inter", is actually a Latin prefix, so "internet" becomes "interrēte", which is basically just a literal translation. Obviously, you can't really make up words that the listeners wouldn't understand, so it's not coining words out of scratch. And very often, especially in the case of international words for modern concepts, they often are derived from Latin and Greek, so there is a multitude of words which are readily usable. Just like a "nuclear missile", it becomes "missile nuclēares", because both elements are fundamentally Latin.
HZ: Do you have arguments over the correct pronunciation of some of the words, how the Romans would have pronounced them, or do you figure, "No one can prove it," so you can just decide?
ANTTI IJÄS: Yeah. Well, it's not that simple, obviously. As far as grammar is concerned, Nuntii Latini follows the so-called classical model, and also when it comes to pronunciation. But, with pronunciation, there are two different things that need to be taken into account. First is what historical linguistics can sort of figure out about how the Romans actually pronounced the language, and for this we have a lot of material. We have grammatical treatises that the Romans wrote themselves, we have commentaries by Cicero on how Latin was pronounced in his day, and we have spelling errors in inscriptions, et cetera, et cetera. So we have a lot of information, based on which we can reconstruct the original pronunciation. But then, of course, there is the tradition of pronouncing Latin. So, because Latin has been used continuously, every nation has developed some of their own idiosyncrasies in pronouncing Latin. But it's a very, very intriguing and mentally-challenging exercise altogether.
HZ: At least Latin is so regular, it's a bit like a machine.
ANTTI IJÄS: Yeah, but the thing with Latin actually is that it's another of these illusions that you get, because the tradition of grammar, or writing grammar, is actually based on teaching Latin grammar. So obviously, because all the terminology has been developed for Latin, or actually, well, borrowed from Greek, then it will make it seem like Latin is so logical because all the terms, they fit exactly, and all the categories, and so on, they have their exact matches and so on. But this is actually just because writing grammar was originally just an endeavour of Latin teachers. And if you look at English grammar, for example, or Finnish, older Finnish grammar, they are really confusing because they are trying to impose this Latin system on these vernaculars.
HZ: Fair enough. I don't imagine the classrooms of the Roman Empire were full of children being drilled on amo, amas, amat...
MULTIPLE HELEN ZALTZMANS, RECITING AS A CHORUS: ...amamis, amatis, amant. Amabam, amabas, amabat. Amabamus, amabatis, amabant. Amabo, amabis, amabit. Amabimus, amabitis, amabunt.
HZ: Fellow former Latin students, there will always be part of your brain that sounds like that, right? But even if its grammatical structure has been reverse-engineered, Latin is quite reliable compared to, say, Ancient Greek, or Old English, with far fewer irregularities of pronunciation and spelling. Certainly compared to modern English. Just take a look at words like "cough" and "through". The last four letters are the same written down, but neither the verbs nor the consonants sound the same. You wouldn't get that kind of mess in Latin.
Perhaps I'm coming round to the idea of Latin making a comeback. Maybe Latin could actually be the solution people have been looking for when they attempt to establish a universal language. Generous estimates suggest there are only around a couple of million Esperanto speakers in the world. A lot more people than that already know a smattering of Latin, or a Latin-derived language. In fact, I wonder whether Nuntii Latini exists because more people around the world are familiar with Latin than Finnish.
ANTTI IJÄS: Well, in a way, that could be the reason for the existence of the programme as such, because obviously we do have news in Finnish, but I don't think many people abroad would be interested in listening to them.
HZ: Or it'd just be difficult, because Finnish looks like a hard language to master.
ANTTI IJÄS: Ah, yeah, I would say, I mean, that's just an illusion because people don't hear Finnish that much, but most people would say that Latin is pretty hard as well. But of course, Latin occupies a very different place within the European history, because, as the editors often say, Latin is in a way the mother tongue of Europe. And in, up to, or I would say, well, 18th century, it occupied, especially in university, in the academia, it occupied a place very similar to what English has today.
HZ: And in the present day, there are numerous schemes to keep Latin alive. Along with Nuntii Latini, there are Latin translations of books like Harry Potter and Winnie the Pooh. You can sign up for a free monthly Latin puzzle book, "Hebdomada Aenigmatum". The Pope tweets in Latin. You can choose Latin as your language option on Google and Facebook. There's a Latin version of Wikipedia, with 113,450 articles at time of recording. But I still have to ask, why is Latin relevant to life today?
Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan. I've always been partial to ancient languages. I started studying Latin at the age of eight and I loved it. Yeah, all right, I was a weird child, but it came in so useful when I was learning modern Romance languages like French and Italian and Spanish. Made them a lot easier to learn. And moreover, Latin taught me so much about English itself. It's the source of two-thirds of the words in modern English. But are these things enough to justify learning something which isn't ostensibly useful in itself?
Around 10 years ago, I was confronted with that question in the form of 13-year-old boy who had just been uprooted from his school in the USA and dropped in a traditional English public school, where everyone else had been learning Latin from the womb. So he had to play catch-up, and I was hired as his Latin tutor. To be fair, he tried his best to care, but he gave off a very strong "why are you making me do this?" vibe, and I just couldn't give him a decent answer. Turns out I couldn't teach him Latin either, but unless he's now seeking a career in the Vatican, I'd imagine this hasn't hampered his life all that much. So, what is the point? If only Antti had been around then with the answer.
ANTTI IJÄS: Latin has this prestige as a language that has been used in Europe since the Roman Empire, and it has been continually used all the way up to the 19th century. So this is actually part of a very long tradition, and I think keeping it alive is an aim that sort of justifies itself. So this is part of the European heritage that should never be forgotten. Part of this tradition of using Latin to communicate modern concepts, modern events, and so on, I think it gives you the feeling of belonging to something greater.
HZ: This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman. Thanks very much to Antti Ijäs and Nuntii Latini. If you're out of range of Finnish radio signals, you can listen to Nuntii Latini online. I'll link to it at theallusionist.org, and it's also available as a podcast.
Your randomly-selected word from the dictionary today is…
Skelf. Noun, Scottish. One, a splinter or sliver. Two, informal, an annoying person.
Try using it in an email today.
If you want to contact me, seek out @AllusionistShow on Facebook and Twitter.
Rafe has been in touch. He says, "A friend today mentioned that in game shooting, snipe is considered the hardest test. I'm not a fan of game shooting, but does 'sniper' come from 'a shooter of snipe'?" It does, Rafe. Well done. I pronounce you etymologist of the day.
And listeners, I welcome your linguistic enquiries, but also I make another podcast called Answer Me This, in which, for the past eight years, I've been answering questions about words as well as a whole load of other things, so give that a go to keep you occupied in the fortnight until the next Allusionist.
