Salvete, discipuli et hospites! Greetings, students and guests.

I have taught Latin at the same high school since the autumn of 1969, which means I have now explained the ablative absolute to roughly three thousand adolescents, several of whom went on to become lawyers, physicians, a bishop, and one fairly successful proprietor of a plumbing concern who still sends me a Christmas card signed Semper fidelis. In that time I have heard every variation of the question "Mr. Hager, why do we have to learn a language nobody speaks?" This page is my answer, set down once so that I may direct people here instead of delivering it in the hallway, which my colleagues tell me I do.

My students will find the current phrase of the week and the reference tables from Chapter One here, so that "I left my book at school" ceases to be a defense. Everyone else is welcome to browse. Latin belongs to anyone who wants it.

The customary answers, all of them true:

1. Vocabulary. More than half of English words come to us from Latin, directly or by way of French, and in the vocabulary of science, medicine, law and government the proportion is far higher. A student who knows that aqua is water, duco is "I lead," and bene is "well" has a key to aqueduct, aquarium, conduct, educate, benefit, benevolent and a hundred others without ever opening a dictionary. My students' verbal scores on the college examinations are, year upon year, well above the school's average. I do not claim all the credit. I claim some.
2. Grammar. Latin is an inflected language: the ending of a word tells you its job in the sentence. To read it at all, you must know what a subject is, what an object is, what a clause is, and why it matters. Students who have never quite understood English grammar (and there are many, through no fault of their own) frequently report that Latin was where it finally made sense. It is grammar you can see.
3. Roots and precision. A person who knows Latin uses English more carefully, because he knows what the words actually say. Decimate does not mean "destroy." Alibi means "elsewhere." A candidate was once a man in a white toga. This is not pedantry; it is ownership of one's own language.
4. Other languages. Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian are Latin, four hundred years on and somewhat the worse for wear. A student with two years of Latin will find the first year of any of them a comfortable stroll.
5. History and literature at the source. Caesar wrote about his own wars. Cicero wrote the letters himself. To read them as they wrote them is to remove a translator from between you and the past. Nothing else does that.
6. Discipline of mind. I put this last because it sounds the most like a schoolmaster, but I believe it most firmly. To parse a sentence of Cicero is to hold six things in your head at once and arrange them in order. It is weightlifting for the intellect. There is no shortcut, and the student who learns that there is no shortcut has learned something that will serve him in every field for the rest of his life.

And an answer that is not customary: Latin is beautiful. It is compact, sonorous, and exact. A thing said well in Latin cannot be said as well in fewer words in any language I know. That alone would justify a year of one's youth.

Week of September 27, 1999

Non scholae sed vitae discimus.
"We learn not for school, but for life."

A schoolmaster's favorite, and one I should confess something about. In Seneca's letter the phrase actually runs the other way: Non vitae sed scholae discimus, "we learn not for life but for school," and it is a complaint. He was scolding the philosophers of his day for chasing clever arguments instead of wisdom. Later generations turned it around and put it over the doors of schools, where it has done a great deal of good. Note the ending of discimus: first person plural, present tense. We learn. The verb includes the teacher, which is as it should be.

Week of September 20, 1999

Tempus fugit.
"Time flies."

Chosen because we are already three weeks into the term and several of you have not yet acquired a notebook. The phrase descends from Virgil's Georgics, where the poet writes that time flees and cannot be recovered: fugit inreparabile tempus. Observe that fugit is the same verb that gives us fugitive and refuge. Time is not merely passing; it is running away from you. Purchase the notebook.

Latin nouns change their endings to show their function. A set of these endings is called a declension, and the first declension is where every student begins, because it is the most regular. Nearly all first-declension nouns are feminine. Our model word is puella, "girl." The long marks (macrons) are a help to pronunciation and are shown here; the Romans did not write them.

Notice that three of the singular forms (puellae, genitive and dative; puellae, nominative plural) look identical. Context decides. This is the first lesson of Latin and also, I have found, of life. Other first-declension nouns to practice with: aqua (water), terra (land), via (road), porta (gate), fēmina (woman), rēgīna (queen), and the two famous masculine exceptions, agricola (farmer) and nauta (sailor), which decline exactly the same way and merely take masculine adjectives.

Every Latin student for two thousand years has begun with this verb, and I see no reason to break the chain. Amāre is a first-conjugation verb; its stem is amā-, and you attach the personal endings -ō, -s, -t, -mus, -tis, -nt. Because the ending tells you who is acting, Latin does not need the pronouns I, you, he; they are built in.

The Latin present tense does the work of three English forms: amat may be translated "he loves," "he is loving," or "he does love," as the sentence requires. Other verbs that follow this pattern exactly: portāre (to carry), laudāre (to praise), vocāre (to call), labōrāre (to work), spectāre (to watch). Students: I expect these six by Friday.

The language is not so dead that you can get through a newspaper without it. Here are twenty phrases that turn up in ordinary English, with what they literally say.

My annual proof that Latin is not dead but merely official. More than a third of the states have Latin mottoes, and so does the nation: besides E pluribus unum, the reverse of the Great Seal carries Annuit coeptis ("He has favored our undertakings") and Novus ordo seclorum ("A new order of the ages"). Look at the back of a dollar bill. A selection from the states:

Students: for extra credit, find our own state's motto, tell me what language it is in, and translate it if you can. If it is in English, tell me what it ought to be in Latin.

Every March, students across the country sit for the National Latin Exam, a forty-question test given at several levels from Introduction to Latin through the advanced reading of prose and poetry. It is sponsored by the American Classical League and the National Junior Classical League, it takes under an hour, and it is graded so that a student is competing against a standard rather than against his neighbor. Gold and silver medals, certificates and ribbons are awarded, and I have a drawer full of the pins from thirty years of them, which I distribute in class with what my wife calls "unseemly ceremony."

Our school will give the exam in March 2000. All of my students take it; the fee is small and the school covers it for anyone who needs that. I will send in our registration in January, and we will begin reviewing after the winter holidays. Last year Latin II produced three gold medals and a perfect paper, which I mention only because it is true. The perfect paper's author is now in Latin III and has been asked to pretend she does not know all the answers so the others can catch up.

Bernard Hager. B.A. in Classics, M.A. in Latin. Teaching Latin I through IV at a public high school since September 1969. Faculty advisor to the Junior Classical League chapter, custodian of a plaster bust of Cicero that has been in Room 214 longer than I have, and the last man in the building, I am told, to grade in fountain pen.

The page was assembled with Notepad and a manual, over the summer, with a good deal of help from a student who has asked not to be named and who was, I suspect, embarrassed by my typing. I welcome corrections to the Latin; I welcome them less to the opinions. Students who wish to argue about a grade should do so in person, in the ablative absolute.

Other pages on GeoCities.us of interest to the classically minded: Mrs. Fowler's Civics Corner (the Roman Republic is in there somewhere), The Sonnet Workshop (poetry, by a fellow professor emeritus of everything), and Mr. Delgado's 7th Grade Science, whose vocabulary is three-quarters Latin whether he admits it or not.