Latin

OK. Today, I have read only Latin. The object is neither to communicate in Latin nor to translate from Latin into English but only to read and understand Latin texts like:

"Gaius Iulius Caesar, dux praeclarus Romanorum, in Gallia pugnans multa de Britannia cognovit."

 - meaning:

"Gaius Julius Caesar, famous leader of the Romans, while fighting in Gaul learned much about Britannia."

Word endings are crucial but word order can help. At first, I thought that Caesar was learning much about Britons who were fighting in Gaul.

My purpose is to read the Aeneid but a knowledge of Latin will also help with the background for Anderson:

there is a Latin inscription in Poul and Karen Anderson's The King Of Ys;
the phrases "Delenda est Carthago" and "Es to peregrinator temporis?" are important;
there might be other examples.

Interstellar Intercourse

As already noted, Latin phrases are occasionally quoted in Dominic Flandry's period, not only by Flandry himself but even by two extraterrestrials. This entails that some knowledge of Classical literature has survived into the Terran Empire. What I forgot to mention, however, was that the Latin language had been put to more practical use a few centuries earlier. Merchants of the Polesotechnic League had used "League Latin" for interstellar communication.

Why Latin with all its complexities and irregularities? Surely Interlingua, mentioned in James Blish's Cities In Flight, or Esperanto would have made more sense? Or is "League Latin" Interlingua? Esperanto has simple regular grammar, Roman letters and phonetic spelling with Latin and other European roots, e.g., Greek kaj instead of Latin et. "Father" and "mother" are not patro and matro but patro and patrino and "Lady" is Lordino - so the grammatical regularity is complete.

The Terran Empire mirrors the Roman Empire even down to having slaves but here is one logical difference: harems are guarded not by eunuchs but by non-humans! However, sex is possible between human beings and some other intelligent species, as we learn in the Young Flandry trilogy. Indeed, when aliens are described as both humanoid and bisexual, then we have to ask whether this might not be possible - although interstellar hybrids as in Star Trek and some Superman stories make no sense. 

Latin III

See Latin and Latin II.

(Instead of another Latin inscription, here is an image of the Spaghetti House, where we went this evening.)

In The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown's characters encounter the phrase, "Jeova Sanctus Unus." "Jeova" is a version of the Biblical Name, therefore is not Latin and unequivocally means "God," not also "a god." Thus, the phrase means either "One holy God" or "God, the holy one." However, Brown's characters, including a bishop, consistently translate it as "One true God," which in Latin would be "unus verus Deus."

Maybe I am missing something - or maybe this mistranslation is consistent with the adverse criticisms that have been made of Brown's scholarship? As always, I welcome any alternative views or corrections. Brown has perfected a particular kind of thriller in which the reader is lured on by continual promises of a big revelation although each solved clue merely leads to the next clue. In this one kind of writing at least, he excels.

More Latin

A while ago, we mentioned Latin in Poul Anderson's works, e.g.: Delenda est; Roma Mater; Tene, Mithra... Here is some more.

"'Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes,' remarked Sarlish surprisingly."
-Poul Anderson, Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight Of Terra (New York, 2012), p. 332.

Since Sarlish is from "'...Jagranath, which lies beyond the Empire...'" (p. 331), this is indeed surprising. He is also an Imperial Duke's chief Intelligence officer. This explains his knowledge of Anglic, though not of a Latin quotation. I was pleased to come across this famous line, "I fear Greeks bringing gifts," because our Latin class recently read that passage, about the Trojan horse, in the Aeneid.

Aycharaych, another extra-Imperial alien but also a student of humanity, tells Flandry:

"'I already had business in these parts - negotium perambulans in tenebris, if you like -...'" (p. 461).

I do not know how Flandry feels but I am in the dark about this phrase and have asked our Latin tutor for enlightenment. It is something to do with "a task walking around in darkness."

Addendum, 26 May 2014: "Doing the job in the dark."

Greek

I have occasionally mentioned Latin classes in these posts. Our Latin tutor has just introduced us to Greek. However, although we are Latin improvers, we are all Greek beginners, starting with alpha, beta, gamma.

Several Greek words can be transliterated directly into English, e.g., iota, delta, epsilon and alpha spell "idea." Another example is "Midas." Chi, Rho, Iota, Omicron, Tau, Omicron, Sigma is "Christos" which became "Christus" in Latin, then "Christ" in English.

Our tutor knows a Greek Orthodox priest so will ask him my question: do contemporary Greek Orthodox congregations hear and understand the New Testament read in the original or do they need it translated into modern Greek just as we have it translated into English?

Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series informs us that the Phoenicians invented the alphabet. Google also informs me that the Greek alphabet is derived from the Phoenician one. English uses Roman letters. Thus, in moving from Latin to Greek, we have moved one stage further back towards the origin.

I envy Anderson's Time Patrolmen and Terran Intelligence Officers their ability to learn languages electronically. Flandry learns Eriau, which is not an earlier human language but an entirely unrelated one. He also learns how to translate Eriau duodecimal numbers into Arabic decimal numbers. By engaging with ancient human languages, I gain some degree of insight into Flandry's ability to think in both Anglic and Eriau, although one major difference is that, in that case, the languages and their alphabets are completely unconnected.

The Roman Speech

"Delenda Est," 3.

Sf writers have ways of telling their readers first that a narrative is set in a divergent timeline and secondly when that timeline diverged from ours. Thus, Pope Martin Luther means no Reformation.

We have had some Latin on the blog, notably:

League Latin in the Polesotechnic league;
aliens quoting Latin in the Terran Empire period.

So what does the following dialogue suggest?

"'Where are you from? And how does it happen that you speak only Greek, of all known languages?'
"'I speak Latin, too.'
"'Latin?' She frowned in thought. 'Oh, the Roman speech, was it not? I am afraid you will find no one knows much about it.'" (p. 188)

The first big clue.

Classicism

This passage amused me and suggested a question about the Terran Empire in Poul Anderson's Technic History:

"The conservatives held that classicism fosters discipline - it was more likely a hope that the citizen who had endured Greek in his childhood would be able to endure the Czarist regime the rest of his life."
-Leon Trotsky, My Life (New York, 1970), Chapter III, p. 45.

What education would Manuel Argos, Founder of the Terran Empire, favor? I suggest:

the history of the Troubles as leading to the Terran Empire;
the history of the Roman Empire as the model for the Terran Empire;
the sciences underlying the technology on which the Terran Empire is based.

Would Argos revive the archaism of Latin inscriptions on buildings and monuments? This would not require knowledge of Latin among the populace. Anyone who wanted to know the meaning of an inscription would (their equivalent of) google it. Two aliens address Flandry in Latin (see More Latin) so the language is still around. The Polesotechnic League had used "League Latin," although surely the much simpler Esperanto would have been more suitable?

After the Empire, during the Long Night, "classics" comes to mean the lost sciences and thus is practical, not academic, fostering more than just discipline!

God The Father

SM Stirling, Against The Tide Of Years (New York, 1999), Chapter Fifteen.

"'Diawas Pithair!'" (p. 233)

"'...Zeus the Father...'" (p. 236)

The Latin name Iuppiter originated as a vocative compound of the Old Latin vocative *Iou and pater ("father") and came to replace the Old Latin nominative case *Ious. Jove^[106] is a less common English formation based on Iov-, the stem of oblique cases of the Latin name. Linguistic studies identify the form *Iou-pater as deriving from the Indo-European vocative compound *Dyēu-pəter (meaning "O Father Sky-god"; nominative: *Dyēus-pətēr).<sup>[107]
 -copied from here.

 Odin is Allfather.

"The Father and I are one." (See here.) 

Here is a strong common theme in theistic religion.</sup> 

League Latin

Poul Anderson and Gordon R. Dickson, Star Prince Charlie (New York, 1976), 1.

In Poul Anderson's Technic History, the Polesotechnic League uses "League Latin."

In Anderson's and Dickson's Star Prince Charlie, where there is an Interbeing League, a Hoka playing the role of an Oxford tutor utters three Latin phrases on p. 13:

"'Ergo...'";
"'...in loco parentis...'";
"'Quod erat demonstrandum.'"

For many earlier blog references to Latin, see here.

Technic History Languages

Poul Anderson's Technic History presents six stages of human linguistic development.

(i) The twenty-first century: English and other national languages. (No change yet.)

(ii) The Solar Commonwealth period: League Latin, Anglic etc.

(iii) The Terran Empire period: Anglic, Fransai, Ispanyo etc.

On Dennitza: Serbic, Anglic and archaic Merseian Eriau.

(iv) The Long Night: Anglic semantic divergences.

(v) The Allied Planets period: planetary languages derived from Anglic etc.

(vi) The Commonalty period: Anglic is now described as ancient.

In (i), other national languages include Romance languages descended from Latin and English includes many Latin-derived words. Do any Latin roots survive into the galactic languages of the Commonalty period?

Think how much fictional history this implies. How many generations speak a language before it becomes a different language?

"'We're a long way from home in space, and even longer in time. It's been twelve hundred years since the breakup of the Commonwealth isolated [the Gwydiona]. The whole Empire rose and fell while they were alone on that one planet. Genetic and cultural evolution have done strange work in shorter periods.'"

-Poul Anderson, "The Night Face" IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (Riverdale, NY, June 2012), pp. 541-660 AT I, p. 549.

"'Sir, the League, the troubles, the Empire, its fall, the Long Night...every such thing - behind us. In space and time alike. The people of the Commonalty don't get into wars.'"

-Poul Anderson, "Starfog" IN Flandry's Legacy, pp. 711-794 AT p. 722.

These quotations span nearly the whole Technic History.

Poetry And Science Fiction

Mercatores tui auroram mari persequntur.

How often do poetry and sf interact?

James Elroy Flecker wrote a speculative poem about the future. See here.

Poul Anderson, Neil Gaiman, SM Stirling and Michael Scott Rohan quote Flecker.

Until David Birr pointed it out, I had completely overlooked Anderson's character, David Falkayn, quoting the same line from Flecker that concludes Stirling's The Peshawar Lancers:

"He murmured, as best he could in Latin, 'Thy merchants chase the morning down the sea...'"
-Poul Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (New York, 2009), p. 314.

But what is the Latin translation? This post begins with my attempt. Brian from our Latin class suggests:

tui mercatores mane ad ipse mare persequuntur.

Addendum: Andrew, our Latin Tutor, says:

mercatores meridiem trans mare persequuntur.

Later: We have established that "meridies" is "midday," not "morning."

Two days later: Mercatores mane trans mare... gives us alliteration but "aurora" is a poetic word for morning. In my first attempt at translation, I miss-spelt the verb and got the ablative case of mare wrong.

Greek And Latin

Poul Anderson, Harvest The Fire, Chapter 4.

The poet, Jesse Nicol, knows the Odyssey and The Trojan Women. Even if he knows these works only in translation, he must know that they are translated from Greek. He cannot know this without also knowing of Virgil's Aeneid, the great Latin sequel to the Homeric epics.

If this much is known, then Nicol or other students of literature will have encountered at least a few words of Latin, e.g.:

Arma virumque cano;
Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.

So I find it difficult to accept that Latin is "...forgotten by all but the great database." (See Venator.)

More Latin

Blogging about Poul Anderson, I am free to dip in and out of his many works at any point. Exercising this freedom, I have just reread the 1957 short story, "For The Duration," immediately after the 1984 article, "The Discovery of the Past." In both, I found some Latin.

"...as Terence wrote in second-century Rome, 'Homo sum; humani nil a me alienum puto.' I am a man; nothing human is alien to me."
- "The Discovery of the Past" IN Anderson, Past Times, New York, 1984, pp. 182-206 AT p. 189.

Terence's exact wording means, "I think (puto) nothing human alien to me."

"'Primus inter pares.'"
- "For The Duration" IN Anderson, Strangers From Earth, London, 1965, pp. 69-90 AT p. 88.

"First among equals" - the motto of a school I worked in once.

I have mentioned Latin in Anderson before. The three examples that I remember are:

"Tene Mithra, etiam miles...";
"Es tu peregrinator temporis?";
an inscription on an Ysan boundary marker.

"For The Duration" is Andersonian political fiction. We recognize:

a post-nuclear world dictatorship called "the Protectorate";
a secret revolutionary Committee;
a force shield used as a weapon.

The title is also the punch line - always a neat touch. When one dictator, the self-proclaimed primus inter pares, replaces another, his parting shot is:

"'It's only for the duration of the emergency.'" (p. 90)

The Solar Union And Latin America

Here, I compared the Solar Union in Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History to Latin America but there are differences. In Latin America:

"...the major source of threat and conflict is securocratic, stemming from social unrest and crime linked to poverty, and the operations of major crime organizations, drug cartels in particular."
-Jeff Halper, War Against The People (New York, 2015), p. 220.

In the Solar Union, there is no poverty. Instead, there is a comfortable life for all. Further, it is difficult to see how there could be organized crime in that society. In any case, it is not mentioned. There is social unrest because the majority who had been accustomed to working for their livings can no longer do so. But they no longer need to do so. Many would regard this as a release. And the next generation would not grow up with any expectation that they should work for their living. Instead, they could be offered cultural activities to address every taste: every kind of sport and art; travel; study etc.

Those who remained dissatisfied would hardly constitute a force capable of waging global war as described in "Cold Victory." Thus, I find the historical transition from "Quixote and the Windmill" to "Cold Victory" implausible. If the psychotechnicians could allow, or even inadvertently cause, that to happen, then their science did indeed count for nothing. I think that there is another timeline in which the Humanists were an ineffectual sect while the utopian economy went from strength to strength.

Terra And SHAPE?

(Notice the inaccurate blurb.)

What kind of post title is that? What are Terra and SHAPE?

Terra
"Terra" is the Latin word for "Earth" and is used as a name for Earth in some futuristic sf. For example, there is a Terran Empire in Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization. "Terran" is an adjective coined by sf writers as an alternative to "Terrestrial." Anderson's Imperials speak Anglic which is derived from English so they might retain the Latin root, "Terr-," but with different endings. The Esperanto for "earth" and "terrestrial" are "tero" and "tera," as I had anticipated:

Latin root;
phonetic spelling;
"-o," the noun ending;
"-a," the adjectival ending.

"Terran Empire" entails a politically unified Earth. The Empire might have been merely planetary but we know, of course, that it is interstellar.

And I have arrived at my lunch break before explaining SHAPE.

Past Futures

Introducing his short story, "Kyrie," Poul Anderson wrote:

"I wrote shortly before Vatican Two set the Latin mass aside. Well, I still prefer it, and who knows but what it will make a comeback in the future."

-Poul Anderson, Going For Infinity (New York, 2002), XV, p. 344.

So "Kyrie" is set in a timeline where either Vatican II did not vernacularize the liturgy or the Latin liturgy was later restored.

In the British sf comic strip, Dan Dare, Digby wanted a bob's worth of fish and chips. A bob was a shilling. There were twelve old pence in one shilling and twenty shillings in one pound. Now there are one hundred new pence in one pound. (We still say "penny," not "cent.") So Digby lives in an early twenty-first century when there is a World President and an Interplanetary Space Fleet but there has been neither British currency decimalization nor inflation. All our yesterdays...

On an evening walk in and near Liverpool, I passed a parish church, a mosque, a Krishna temple and a Latin Rite Catholic church. Maybe the future of "Kyrie" will grow from that last.

In A Case Of Conscience by James Blish, it is the duty of every Catholic, whether lay or clergy, to administer the Last Sacrament to the dying. In reality, only clergy administer this sacrament. Blish knew that but also imagined a change of Catholic practice in future and expected his readers to understand that that was what he was doing. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow...

(Regular blog readers might understand when I say that, this afternoon, I will visit the excellent Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop in Morecambe so there will be an intermission as regards blogging.)

Lingua Franca

 lingua franca, language used as a means of communication between populations speaking vernaculars that are not mutually intelligible. The term was first used during the Middle Ages to describe a French- and Italian-based jargon, or pidgin, that was developed by Crusaders and traders in the eastern Mediterranean and characterized by the invariant forms of its nouns, verbs, and adjectives. These changes have been interpreted as simplifications of the Romance languages.

This is taken from the Encyclopedia Britannica.

I realize that I have understood the generic term, "lingua franca," but not its origin. 

In Poul Anderson's Technic History, Polesotechnic League merchants use "League Latin," which no doubt involves a simplified grammar.

In Anderson's Time Patrol series, "Temporal," an artificial language, is a lingua franca for time travellers.

For a mission in 1137, Time Patrolman Manse Everard accepts brain implants of some of the local dialects that are in the process of becoming German, French and Italian. He already knows medieval Greek and Latin and decides against Arabic because any Saracens should at least know lingua franca.

I regard fluency in more than one language as part of being educated. In other words, I am not properly educated. I wish that we had been taught French, Latin and Irish properly at school. (I was at secondary school in the Republic of Ireland.) I wish also that I had realized the importance of learning languages but that was impossible at the time. What I realize now I was incapable of realizing then.

"One of us will not leave this field."

"'As you will,' he said in Latin. 'One of us will not leave this field.'"
-Poul Anderson, "Delenda Est" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, Ny, 2006), pp. 173-228 AT p. 227.

A Time Patrolman from the mid-twentieth century addresses a Neldorian from the 205th millennium in Latin at Ticinus in 218 BC! I will try to get that dialogue translated into Latin but not tonight. Here in 2017, it is 12:51 AM.

In Change Year 10, they speak English:

"'One of us, I think, will not leave this field alive,' he said..."
-SM Stirling, A Meeting At Corvallis (New York, 2007), Chapter Twenty-Two, p. 588.

Thus, Norman Arminger has reminded us first of Brechdan Ironrede, then of Manse Everard.

Is that phrase, "One of us will not leave this field," common in jousting or in other forms of single combat?

Knowledge Of Knowledge Of

"Science" means (Latin) knowledge.
"Theology" means (Greek) knowledge of (Greek) God.
"Scientology" means (Latin) knowledge of (Greek) knowledge!
"Theontology," coined by Poul Anderson in The Byworlder (London, 1974, p. 5), would mean what? (Greek) knowledge of (Latin) knowledge of (Greek) God?

Theontologists seek the divine through diverse sub-cults of Spirits, Jesus, Brahma, Amida Butsu, Snake or Oracle. If I were being brought up in a Theontologist community, then I would want to practice in a Zen cult but otherwise let's just stick with Zen as taught by a Buddhist lineage.

The Byworlder introduces a genuinely non-humanoid extra-solar alien, the Sigman (plural: Sigmans), who has entered Earth orbit after approaching the Solar System in a Bussard ramjet from the direction of Sigma Draconis. An entire page is necessary to describe this creature. The way he moves is fairly sickening and that comes through in the description. The problem of devising a mutually comprehensible pidgin language is also recounted in the necessary detail.

The Chinese rulers who have to cooperate with the Americans and others in communicating with the Sigman are absurdly sure, first, that they represent "the people" and, secondly, that, if they get the chance to tell the alien the facts about American imperialism, then he will support the cause of the people. (Hopefully, he will indeed support the people, not their rulers.)

Terrestrial society has divided into sub-cultures. Our first viewpoint character belongs to a sub-culture that does not settle down and live in a house with a steady job but travels around, for example, by staying as a guest of Theontologists. However, far from being parasitical, he is a migrant worker with an amazing range of practical skills to offer. There is a, to Anderson readers, now familiar moment when, speculating about the Sigman's motives, he realizes something, breaks off with open mouth and yells but does not immediately divulge what he has realized. We have to read on.

Festina Lente

Monday 5 January was the beginning of the first full working week of 2015. Although we are retired, regular activities resume:

gym;
meditation group;
an Andy Warhol exhibition at the Tate Gallery, Albert Docks, Liverpool;
Latin class next week.

(We have completed the Christmas season but meanwhile our neighbors are lighting their houses to celebrate the birth of the Prophet.)

The class reminds me that I found an unexpected and unexplained Latin phrase in the van Rijn story, "Hiding Place." An engineer examining a captured alien spaceship advises one of his men:

"'...remember, festina lente.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (New York, 2009), p. 588.

The captain asks, "'For fear of wrecking the ship?'" (ibid.)

- which may be booby-trapped.

But we are not told precisely what the phrase means, which is "make haste slowly." In other words, work as quickly and efficiently as possible but without rushing, cutting corners or taking risks. I happened to understand that one but might not have. English dialogue is occasionally peppered with such Latin phrases. Are they simply adopted unchanged by Anglic-speakers and for how long will they be preserved? By the end of the Technic History, Anglic itself is referred to as an ancient language. Poul Anderson's complete works display a vast panorama of the Roman Empire and several successor civilizations.