This may not necessarily be a post that will be on a topic that’s familiar to most of you, the 30 or so people who occasionally read these posts, but it’s something that’s important to me. The ability to communicate well, and efficiently, is paramount. It’s ultimately going to be key to solving all of our problems, to making life better for everyone. I truly believe if we could, or rather would, actually sit down and talk with someone we have a disagreement with, chances are we’d find enough common ground to begin sorting our problems out.

But this post isn’t about solving humanity’s big problems, and I’m going to try to refrain from my usual upbeat optimistic conclusions that I’ve noticed I tend to write. Because this evening I want to write about a topic I’ve been interested in for nearly 20 years, one that I’ve struggled with and studied, and am only now really feeling like I’ve confidently mastered: Latin.

Latin is a language that I’ve been fascinated by for a very long time. In part, I’ll admit it’s an attraction to the prestige it embodies: the language of the Romans, and of my Church. It’s been a constant piece of the intellectual and cultural fabric of European and now Atlantic civilization (that’s another idea I’m working on) for millennia. It’s also a highly logical language, a systematic language governed by a set of rules that, once explained, make pretty good sense. Moreover, it’s the ancestor of a number of humanity’s most widely spoken languages, and has directly influenced many, many others, including English. It’s taken three tries now, but I’ve made sense of the language well enough now to feel confident not just repeating the declensions and conjugations that I’ve memorized, but understanding the intricacies of their meaning, and in so doing, to have a better idea at understanding how Latin works.

Latin has also come to reflect the people who have written in it and spoken it over the generations, particularly in their preferences in word order and writing. I’ve often thought, considering that word order isn’t as important in Latin, after all the word endings provide the meaning, couldn’t a native Irish speaker go ahead and speak Latin using a verb, subject, object order and be decently-well understood just as much as a speaker using the classical Ciceronian order of subject, object, verb? Yet there’s one thing that does survive from the ancient world in faint traces that was revived later than other customs in written Latin, something that is still not universally adopted: the macron.

Macrons: the flat line over a vowel sometimes seen in Latin writing, as well as the first family of France, is something that I believe to be fundamental in properly understanding Latin. Sure, my medievalist friends will say, it wasn’t used in Medieval Latin, so we (Medieval and Renaissance historians & scholars, myself included) don’t need to memorize the macrons. But for me, it’s the macrons that have been one of the best tools to help me make sense of Latin. It’s answered the question for me of how a Latin speaker might differentiate between līber, “a child” (lī pronounced like Lee) and liber, “a book” (li pronounced like literature). It helps me make sense of the difference between a 1st declension nominative singular noun (the subject form) and a 1st declension ablative singular noun (a slightly more complicated form).¹ The macron makes everything clear.

Without the macron, the meaning of a sentence can be understood, but with much more difficulty. This particular idea makes perfect sense to me because of my work with my primary ancestral language, Irish. In Irish, there are two types of vowels, long and short. The long vowels are represented by a fada over the vowel, essentially an acute accent (accent aigu en français). This is how an Irish speaker knows when reading my name that they’re in fact reading about a guy named Seán and not something that’s old (sean). The presence of the fada isn’t just to make the language look cool (which it also does), but it has a very real impact on the pronunciation and meaning of the word as a whole.

I think it’s best not to think of Irish vowels with fada or Latin vowels with macrons as just variant forms of those vowels but instead as entirely different vowels all together. The á in Seán is an entirely different sound, and thus ought to be seen as an entirely different letter to the a in sean. In the same way, that ī in līber is a different character, and a different sound from the i in liber.

We don’t have these same written variations of our vowels in English. We just have the 5 vowels, occasionally 6, which are supposed to represent all of the vowel sounds that English uses, in all national and regional Englishes around the globe, and in all of their local varieties. In my own accent, I can count at least 3 different sounds that each of the vowels represent. Granted, English wasn’t always like this, macrons were also used in Old English, and through generations of linguistic change, immigration, and English’s constant adoption of foreign words the language has become the exceedingly complicated, often irregular form of communication it is today. Not only is my English influenced by the most basic form of the language studied and spoken here in North America, but there’s also hints of Irish in there as well as the strong British, German, and Nordic influences in my English from all those immigrants who settled in my home region, the American Midwest, in the 19th and 20th centuries, including some of my other ancestors from England, Finland, Flanders, Sweden, and Wales.²

In English, we’ve chosen complexity in spelling as it relates to the spoken language over a 1-to-1 matching of the written language with the spoken language. Why? My best guess is it’s to preserve the unity of English. This keeps it so that all English speakers are generally spelling their words in the same way, between the two main written forms of English (UK & Commonwealth, and US English). For the most part, it’s worked for English, and I wouldn’t recommend moving away from the current model for the exact reasons why it exists; more on that at a later date.

But returning to Latin, if students trying to learn this language, famous for its now generally unspoken nature, really want to give themselves a good chance of succeeding in learning it, then those of us familiar with Latin, whether as students or as teachers, should embrace the macron even more than it already is, and use it throughout all our written Latin. Up until recently, it was challenging especially on computers with English keyboards to type any sort of accented vowels or consonants, but the technology has advanced enough that it’s readily possible today for most keyboards to make things work. On my Mac, I can hold down any of the vowel keys until a box pops up on the screen indicating each accent that can be put on that vowel. I then just have to choose them by number. So, for līber, when it comes to the ī, all I have to do is hold down the i key and press 4, et voilà, I’ve got myself an ī. We should do ourselves, and Latin itself, a favor, after all the easier we make learning this language, the more likely people are going to want to keep learning it.

I like Latin, it’s orderly, and when it’s explained well it can make a lot of sense. All of my Latin teachers to date have done a wonderful job explaining it, sometimes though it takes a bit more maturity to make sense of things. In general, I think we tend to have trouble in the English-speaking world understanding grammar. Let’s face it, our own language has so many contradictions that often English speakers don’t even really understand the rules of English grammar all that well. One of these days, I want to write a little book, a libellus in Latin, that can provide at least what I see as some of the more important rules in English, that’ll allow English to make more sense for the average speaker.

Today though, in my Latin studies (Wheelock, Ch. 20), I learned to my delight that the word frūctus means both fruit and profit. Frankly, those two make sense together, after all what are profits but the fruits of our labors. For the rare admirer of Star Trek out there who might be reading this, it came to mind that if I ever get the chance to write for them on a future Trek TV show involving the Ferengi of DS9 fame, I’d want to have a particularly smart-ass human academic offer a Ferengi a bowl of fruit (frūctus), after all the sole goal in the life of a Ferengi is the acquisition of profit (frūctus). A Latin pun set in an imagined version of the 24th or 25th century CE somewhere out in Space. I wonder what Cicero would make of it?

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¹ For the sake of the narrative flow, the ablative basically is the form that distinguishes a myriad of ways a noun relates to the rest of the sentence not covered by the nominative (subject), genitive (possessive), dative (indirect object), and accusative (direct object). I’m going to let the Latin teacher who runs the Latin Tutorial channel on YouTube explain it in this playlist:

² What can I say, I’m an American.

CORRECTION: 18 March 2021, added pronunciations of līber and liber.