L'Italo-Americano

THURSDAY, JANUARY 21, 2021 www.italoamericano.org 16 L'Italo-Americano M ost Italians are quite f a m i l i a r with La- tin, the language of our ancestors. Our grandparents said their prayers in Latin and were used to hear it every time they went to mass, when they were young. A large chunk of Italians of today — all those who went to a liceo, a type of Italian high school that focuses, depending on its curriculum, on pedagogy, classics or science — spent 5 years of their lives learning and translating it, when they were teens. Granted, we don't speak it, but Latin is really like a member of the family, also because our own lan- guage, Italian, derives direc- tly from it and most of our lexicon, and great part of our syntax, comes from it. Because of this, Italians may be a tad more aware of t h e p r e s e n c e o f L a t i n i n their everyday lives than people from other countries, but if you thought the idiom of the Romans left its mark o n l y o n t h e i r p e n i n s u l a , y o u ' r e m i s t a k e n . I n f a c t , there are plenty of common w o r d s w e u s e i n E n g l i s h that don't simply come from Latin, but are Latin. As a m a t t e r o f f a c t , t h e m o s t i n f a m o u s w o r d o f 2 0 2 0 , virus is nothing else than t h e L a t i n f o r " p o i s o n " o r " p o i s o n o u s s e c r e t i o n . " C o r o n a i s a l s o L a t i n : i t means "crown" and it refers to the crown-like spikes that make the bugger so conta- g i o u s . B u t l e t ' s m o v e forward, let's enjoy some Covid-19 free time, at least h e r e , w h i l e w e r e a d t h i s article. I may be biased, because in my years in college I was a Latinist, but I love Latin. H e c k , I d i d m y P h D o n a Latin text, that was the level of intimacy I shared with it. Latin is far from being a dead language: you can't say a language is dead when it survives strongly in some of the most spoken idioms in the world. True, no one s p e a k s i t a n y m o r e , a n d that's an essential feature for any language to remain relevant, but allow me to keep my romantic notion of L a t i n s u r v i v i n g t h r o u g h I t a l i a n ( a n d F r e n c h , S p a n i s h , P o r t u g u e s e , Romanian…) alive. O x f o r d U n i v e r s i t y Professor Nicola Gardini published a series of books dedicated to the way Latin influences still today our lives and the way we speak; his work is a great starting point to explore the langua- ge, even for those who never studied it. What he explains clearly is that, at the times of the Empire, Latin had the s a m e u s e a n d s t a t u s t h a t English has today, it was used across Europe and the Mediterranean to communi- cate, to make business. It h a s b e e n t h e l a n g u a g e o f c u l t u r e u n t i l t h e M i d d l e Ages and it remained, very m u c h t h r o u g h o u t t h e R e n a i s s a n c e , t h e w a y i n which elite classes would interact with one another. Latin is more than a langua- ge, it's history. Don't mind my rambling though. Let's get down to the practical stuff: do we still use real Latin words in English? Yes, we do. T h e w o r d c a m p u s , which we commonly use to i n d i c a t e a u n i v e r s i t y ' s grounds, is the Latin word for "field." Curriculum Vitae, the one we submit when we look for a new job a n d t a k e s a l w a y s a g e s t o compile, is pure Latin, too: it means, literally, the "cour- se of one's life," but it was already used back in Roman times with the meaning of "career." Science nerds are familiar w i t h t h e w o r d h a b i t a t , which is used in biology to indicate the typical environ- ment where a species can t h r i v e a n d , f i g u r a t i v e l y , somewhere a person feels f u l l y c o m f o r t a b l e a n d a t ease: well, habitat is also Latin, the third person sin- gular of the verb habitare, which means "to live." D o y o u r e m e m b e r t h a t 1 9 9 0 r o m a n t i c m o v i e , Ghost, the one with Patrick S w a y z e , D e m i M o o r e , Whoopi Goldberg and the v a s e - m a k i n g l o v e s c e n e ? W e l l , S w a y z e ' s c h a r a c t e r would find it hard to say "I love you" back to Moore, so he always answered idem t o h e r , t h e n o m i n a t i v e masculine of a Latin indefi- nite pronoun that means — you guessed it — "the same." The next two are, today, w a y m o r e c o m m o n i n E n g l i s h t h a n t h e y a r e i n Italian: do you have your father's name? Then he is definitely, say, Mark senior a n d y o u ' r e M a r k j u n i o r , because he is the older Mark and you're the younger, just like Latin teaches us. Indeed s e n i o r i s a c o m p a r a t i v e adjective meaning "older," while iunior (spelled with the "i") means "younger." L e t ' s g o o n l i n e : w h a t ' s our first stop this days? Our social media! Indeed, the very word media is Latin. I t c o m e s f r o m t h e n o u n m e d i u m ( w h o s e p l u r a l i s m e d i a ) , w h i c h m e a n s " i n s t r u m e n t . " S o , s o c i a l media are instruments to socialize and media — or c o m m u n i c a t i o n m e d i a — are instruments to commu- nicate. And where do you go when you want to leave your opinion about a speci- fic topic and you are online? You join a forum, right? W e l l , g u e s s w h a t , t h a t ' s Latin, too. Forum means "square" or "market," the place where people speak to one another the most, where interactions take place, just like in our modern online forums. T h e r e ' d b e s o m e m a n y more words and expressions t o m e n t i o n — f a c s i m i l e ? Post? Sine qua non? Quid pro Quo?— if we only had 100 and not one page to fill! So you see, Latin is not real- ly dead. And it still has a lot to say! GIULIA FRANCESCHINI We use many Latin words daily,without even noticing it (Photo: Stefano Pellicciari/Dreamstime) HERITAGE HISTORY IDENTITY TRADITIONS Who said you don't know Latin?

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