In 1877, Z.Z. Zamenhof set out to create Esperanto, an “international second language. Esperanto borrowed from many traditions, but avoided ties to any particular culture. The result was the ugliest language known to man.
Esperanto’s core comprises 900 roots that can be expanded into tens of thousands of words through compounding, suffixes and prefixes. The book International Planned Languages describes Esperanto as, “a language lexically predominantly Romanic, morphologically intensively agglutinative and to a certain degree isolating in character.” Sounds catchy, right?
Esperanto was supposed to make whole the holocaust of Babel. It did not. we’re still scrambling around, not communicating with each other. As a history major, I get that the discord is ideological, not linguistic. But let’s pretend that one language could fix everything. That language would be Latin. E pluribus unum, after all.
If we all took Latin at Penn, we would understand dignity and humility. Truth and beauty. The most influential stories in Western thought were first recorded in Latin (or Greek). You could buy a translation, but it’s not the same as reading it directly. If I were taking Latin, I would have a stronger backbone and a clearer purpose in life.
My middle-school Latin helped me on my SATs, where I reasoned that “solipsism” had something to do with solus, meaning “alone,” and ipse, meaning “self.” How fitting. So maybe Latin isn’t about understanding everyone else; it’s about making sense of oneself.
It’s been ingrained in us that Latin is dead and its sole purpose is to help us achieve other ends. Yet there is something awesome about a language that we don’t have to live. It exists only to be written, read and understood completely. There is no one yelling at you in Latin. There is no future in Latin, but there is a perfectly recorded past. There is everything to understand, nothing to lose. What was lost has already been lost. Gaudeamus igitur, carpe diem, etc, etc.
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November 9th, 2006 at 1:36 pm
boo
you could at least try and tie it in to some current event if you insist on writing about this - hmm, even Babel the movie!
November 9th, 2006 at 8:16 pm
elegant writing; your middle- school Latin has served you well
November 10th, 2006 at 5:07 pm
Nolo contendere.
November 12th, 2006 at 11:27 am
Latin is overrated. there is nothing very “beautiful” about it. It’s anarchy in verse. only people who have never taken advanced Latin place it on such an undeserved pedestal.
November 14th, 2006 at 9:20 am
haters gonna hate. but why?