Last month, I interviewed Latin teacher Suzanne Nussbaum with a series of questions centered around her early life and how she came to be a wonderful teacher at IHS. This article is a continuation of last month’s interview, in which Nussbaum discusses the state of the Latin language and her personal favorite Latin phrases.
Anna Westwig ‘21: Latin is considered an obsolete subject to a lot of people. It is a dead language, despite repeated attempts at necromancy, and it’s not one you can hold a conversation in, like Spanish or French or Russian. What is the value, in your opinion, of learning Latin, especially for high schoolers, the majority of whom will not pursue a classics degree? Does it have any relevance in our modern society?
Suzanne Nussbaum: Why study Latin? Well, it’s the parent language of Italian, Spanish, French, and other Romance languages. It’s had a disproportionate influence on English, even though English is a Germanic language (French speakers took over England in 1066 and infused the English language with Latin-derived vocabulary). Since it’s a dead language, the focus is on reading the texts written by the Romans, which means we try to learn the grammar as quickly as possible. So the beginning language course moves pretty fast (all six tenses in one year, for example). It’s a more analytic approach than you’ll find in a modern language, where the focus is on speaking without having to stop and analyze all the time. Studying any language teaches you a lot about your own native tongue, which you never think about unless you have to.
Latin is fairly difficult: there’s a lot to memorize. You can’t keep looking at charts in a book when you’re trying to read a text any more than you can keep checking the fingering chart (“How do I play a high G#” or whatever?) while playing a musical instrument. But that’s a good thing! It’s a kind of discipline (by which I mean training, like making yourself go to the gym every day), and it teaches you to look for and notice the grammatical patterns that occur. Just as plenty of students study musical instruments without necessarily planning to go into a career in music, they play because they like making music, they like challenging themselves, and they know they’re having a unique experience playing together in a band or orchestra. Students can get a lot of benefits from Latin even if they’re not planning to study it in college.
I know that one of the Cornell Linguistics professors, Abby Cohn, who comes to IHS every year to talk about the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (in which IHS students can compete), thinks that Latin is a good introduction to the study of linguistics, which isn’t a subject offered in high schools. Studying Latin offers a lot of chances to talk about how languages work and also to see how languages change over time (so anyone who comes to Latin with a background in Spanish or French or Italian or Portuguese can see this).
Just because Latin was spoken/written long ago, that’s no reason to “write the Romans off” as irrelevant. For better or worse, they have had a disproportionate influence on the world that followed their time; that alone makes them interesting. There are also things about the Romans—slavery (which all cultures at the time and place practiced) and the slaughter of people and animals for entertainment—that we can hardly bear to think about. When you study people who lived in a very different time, you can address such questions as what makes them similar to us, what makes them different, and so forth. Maybe it’s important that people in the 21st century think about what, if anything, is constant about human beings.
AW: What do you think of the attempts to reinstate Latin as a living language? For example, Duolingo treats it like any of their other modern languages, acting as though it were spoken today.
SN: Some of the attempts to treat Latin as no different than from a modern language strike me as silly. I would never want to spend a lot of class time getting students to respond to commands in Latin like “Open your books!”, “Walk to the door!”, “Open the windows!”, etc. It seems to me that students should be taking Spanish, French, or German if they want the experience of learning a language that’s genuinely spoken by people with whom they can have a conversation with. On the other hand, I’ve had some experience with people who take very seriously the idea that those who know Latin already should try and experience what it’s like to use it in speech. These are advanced scholars and teachers and they’re not wasting their time! Apparently, about two hundred of them gathered in Spain this summer for a conference and gave papers in Latin and talked to each other in Latin the whole time. It’s a little hard for me to imagine, but recently I participated with other Latin teachers and professors in a baby-steps version of this at Syracuse University, and it was interesting. You can, in fact, start thinking in terms of “I’m setting up for a purpose clause!” or “I’ve got to switch to the accusative and infinitive for indirect statement!”, and that’s fun. I still don’t think anything beats reading and understanding actual Latin off the page, though!
AW: What’s the most misused/misinterpreted Latin phrase, or the one that annoys you the most?
SN: Most misused phrase: something that goes like “Illegitimi non carborundum.” It’s supposed to mean “Don’t let the bastards get you down!” I have no idea when and where it started up, but it’s gibberish, so far as I know (unfortunately).
AW: On the flip side, what is your favorite Latin phrase?
SN: Favorite phrase: a line from the Aeneid, where Aeneas sees on the walls of the temple of Juno in Carthage scenes that he lived through during the Trojan War, invoking the pathos and suffering of the Trojans. “Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt. There are tears for (human) affairs and mortal things touch the heart.” The line is almost untranslatable. “They cry over life here” is something like what I suppose “Sunt lacrimae rerum” must mean. Anyway, in the story because he sees these pictures of the Trojan War, Aeneas takes heart and assumes that the Carthaginians will welcome him and his people kindly, as indeed they do. . . .
AW: Vergil or Virgil? [There are two conflicting spellings of Vergil’s name. I, personally, am a fan of Vergil.]
SN: I like the spelling Vergil because it goes back to his name in antiquity (Publius Vergilius Maro). The spelling Virgil is cool, though. Apparently, because he described Aeneas’ descent to the Underworld in Book 6 in late antiquity, they connected his name with the word “virga” (which IHS Latin students know as “whip” or a stick to hit horses with, but became the term for a magician’s wand). By any spelling, though, he’s pretty fabulous!
AW: If you could only save one book of The Aeneid before the rest would all be destroyed in a fire, what book would it be?
SN: I’m glad that we have The Aeneid. Did you know that Vergil, on his deathbed, begged his friends to burn it up because it was unfinished? I couldn’t possibly pick just one book! I’m glad I don’t have to for real, but I suppose either Book 2 (the story of the night Troy fell, including the Trojan Horse episode, and Aeneas’ first intimations of his mission to lead the survivors of Troy to “the Western Land”) or Book 1 (introductory to so much and containing that great scene I described earlier, where Aeneas discovers that his own life experiences have already been turned into artistic representation) would be my top choices. Book 1 also introduces us to the “divine plane” of the poem, where Jupiter lays out the coming glory of the future Roman race that is meant to compensate their Trojan ancestors for all their suffering. The contrast between how the gods see things, and how people experience them, is one of the most interesting facets of the poem.