Latin

This is a random thought brought on by today's "Quote of the Day", Julius Caesar's famous "I came, I saw, I conquered." I want to learn Latin.

I don't know why exactly. Maybe it's because it's one of those huge root languages. Learning it might give me insight into its children. Learning a language helps you to understand what a people values, what they think heinous, how they speak to one another in love and in hatred. It's fascinating. It would be interesting to see how much of the values of Latin crept into Spanish, Portuguese, French, and the other descendants.

Maybe it's because Latin in everything I read. Especially in the Elizabethan and Enlightenment literature, Latin is everpresent. It gets tiring to have to go to the footnotes when I can't reverse engineer from Spanish, which is most of the time. Latin at the time of those compositions was considered to be a part of a normal education. Needless to say, rural MS has different ideas on what a normal education consists of compared to those times and places.

Maybe it's just because it's another language. I love languages. I love the sound of the words and the shapes of the different symbols. I love learning the proverbs and idioms. I love the fact that language is the heart of a people distilled into the articulation of tongue and teeth, into the movement of hand commanded by heart and head.

I think we too often take for granted the miracle of being able to tell someone we love them or even read badly written technical manuals. Language, communication, is something we are born learning, and we do it with such incredible skill that we can't imagine not having it at our disposal, yet just the learning of the grammar as infants and young children is a mental task on par with the construction of the pyramids or the cathedrals of Europe. Just learning to call things by their proper names, just the infant cataloging of cat, dog, ball, momma, and daddy, much less the training of the hand to reproduce the symbols in the correct order to make a physical representation of those names should bring us to our knees in awe.

Latin isn't the only language I want to learn. I want to learn Portuguese, enhance my pitiful Japanese, and toy with Russian or German. Portuguese, especially Brazilian Portuguese fascinates me. I can hear bits of it that I recognize from Spanish, but it has a music and a lilt that are utterly charming. It's lovely, and if it were possible, more expressive than even Spanish. I suspect it's a language for poetry.

My Japanese is truly sad. I was there for two years, and it's still a struggle for me to carry on a baby conversation. I was a bad student there, and although I understand the psychological reasons for it, I am still sad that I wasted that chance because Japanese is also a language for poets, restrained, elegant, every spare syllable echoing with the strength of deep and fast-moving channeled emotion.

As for German and Russian, although they are so completely unrelated to one another, their difference from English appeals to me. Learning the alphabet for Russian will probably be a wooly bear, but I've had a love for puzzles and secret codes since childhood. German, too, is a distant cousin of English, and finding those similarities would be an exploration of culture.

I woke up with a linguistic hunger this morning. It's a shame I can't just go back to school forever and learn language after language. I don't really think my family or my current employer would be too impressed with that goal. Latin is really hard to find around here, so I don't know if I could even take courses in it locally. Maybe I'll pull out my Japanese texts and see if I can't assuage the appetite that way.