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Roman history alive

Each year, my goal is to focus on three languages of the eponymous nineteen. 

This does not mean that I am to use only these three. 

My life is multilingual by default. Every day, I use on average five different languages, depending on time, place and activities.

But each year, I chose to deliberately engage with three languages, by spending time and effort improving my knowledge and understanding.

The first language for continuous improvement is English. English is my bread and butter, and I always strive to improve it.

The second is a language I am actively learning. In 2023, I am continuing with Estonian, which I started in early 2020. I follow an online course, watch videos, and read articles.

But which language will be number three? After some soul searching, I decided on Latin.

Why on earth Latin? 

First, Latin is a powerful and precise language. It is highly synthetic, using suffixes and endings to indicate grammatical categories. Reading a Latin sentence is like assembling a puzzle piece by piece. I learned some Latin at university, but my knowledge got rusty and needs brushing up.

Second, I came to think that one should never learn two similar languages at once, nor one after another. Latin, being an Indo-European synthetic language, is extremely different from Estonian, which is a Finno-Ugric agglutinative. No risk of confusion here! 

Third, Tacitus. I want to improve my Latin because I want to read more Tacitus, who is one of my favourite Latin authors ever, by far. 

Tacitus is also notoriously difficult, due to his compact syntax. I have read Agricola several times, and have just read Germania. Every time I am in awe of his ability to balance depth of thought with brevity of expression.

He wrote about his own period, Roman history, but his texts sound surprisingly modern today.

Abat-jour

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che diffondi la luce blu

To protect against infection, washing hands is a critical gesture, and to do so properly, the washing should take as long as singing Happy Birthday twice.

I don’t like the Happy Birthday song at all.

That’s why I decided that every week I would choose one song among those I do like but have never looked up the lyrics, and would learn them by heart, to accompany my hand washing routine.

The first song is in Italian, chosen in honour of our Italian friends, although its name is French, abat-jour, from abbattre (to through down) and jour (daylight).

It is a song from the 1960s. In a film Ieri, oggi, domani (Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow), it accompanies the famous sensual scene with Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni. 

Abat-jour che soffondi la luce blu
di lassù tu sospiri chissà perchè
Abat-jour mentre spandi la luce blu
anche tu cerchi forse chi non c’è più

In some versions of the song, the verb soffondi (you suffuse) is replaced by diffondi (you diffuse). The two verbs are related, but different: soffondere means to suffuse, to spread in a manner of light or fluid, and derives from Latin suffundere, with the etymology of spreading upon (‘sub’ ). A more common diffondere, from diffundere, means to diffuse, to spread around, away (‘dis’).

You can watch the famous spogliarello scene here.

Ferrantomania and language

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Latin, Italian

Ferrantomania, or Ferrante fever. After several years wondering what was this fuss about, I have at last caught the Ferrantomania bug.

I picked the first volume on a business trip to Brussels last November. Going back to the train station, I entered a bookshop to get something to read on my way back, and was delighted to discover a foreign language section.

L’amica geniale was there, and I bought it thinking that at least I should give it a try. But I did not read it until this January, when I decided to brush up my Italian in anticipation of two trips to Italy.

My Ferrante fever symptoms were the same as described by millions of readers worldwide: you buy this Ferrante book because you have heard that you should definitely read it. You read a couple of pages, and when you finally put the book down, it is after midnight, the book is over, and you desperately want to read the other three titles of the “Neapolitan Novels”.

When I started the first volume, I was not aware that language plays such a crucial role in the story. Much has been written about the use of Neapolitan dialect in the book, about sociolinguistic mechanisms, and about some enigmatic language-related metaphors, such as ‘il suo italiano che assomigliava un poco a quello dell’Iliade’ (‘Italian that slightly resembled that of the Iliad’).

Not only languages, but Classical languages specifically, play such a crucial role in the story. Thanks to private Latin lessons, Lena is able to continue her education; then, Latin and Greek (and their teachers) become her favourites, and eventually she goes on to study them at university.

A passage in the first volume struck me.

Elena is struggling with her Latin, and when she tells Lila (who has stopped the school because her parents could not afford it), Lila recommends the change of approach:

“Leggiti prima la frase in latino, poi va’ a vedere dov’è  il verbo. A seconda della persona del verbo capisci qual è il soggetto. Una volta che hai il soggetto ti cerchi i complementi: il complemento oggetto se il verbo è transitivo, o se no altri complementi. Prova così.”

Provai. Tradurre all’improvviso mi sembrò facile.

In language learning, we have moments when suddenly something clicks and we finally get it. I have experienced it myself multiple times, and now I am really looking forward to reading about Lena’s linguistic (and other) discoveries.

Last week, I went to the local library knowing that it held the entire trilogy, and indeed, volumes 1,3, and 4 were there. The volume 2, exactly the one I was eager to read, was on loan. I made a recall and am impatiently waiting for the book to become available.