This Toga Party Shows Scholarship

At first glance Saturday, it appeared that University High School had been transformed into a wild fraternity house.

About 1,300 teen-agers took over the campus, dancing, blasting music, playing assorted games and, yes, wearing togas.

However, these students were not interested in beer-guzzling contests or practical jokes. They were too busy answering questions about Roman history and giving speeches about Virgil’s epic, “The Aeneid.”

Saturday marked Day II of the California Junior Classical League convention, which pitted California students of the Latin language--many wearing togas made of bedsheets over their clothes--against each other in varied athletic and academic contests.

On one level, the convention was designed to celebrate the Latin language and culture and to enable students to meet one another.

But the three-day event was also a way of showing the outside world that the language, sometimes belittled as useless, is very much alive and that schools should continue to offer the subject.

“If you ask the average person about Latin,” said Les Johnson, Latin teacher at University High, “they would say that it is spoken in Latin America or that it’s a dead language. We’re trying to make it a language and not just an oddity.”

Saturday’s events included speech and music contests, volleyball and discus-throwing championships--plus Certamen, a quiz modeled after TV game shows, in which school teams answered questions about Latin.

Students unscrambled movie titles from Latin into English and recited obscure facts about Roman leaders. One question, for example, asked: The Latin word for muscle is related to what animal? The answer: mouse, or in Latin, mus. (Musculus , Latin for muscle, literally means “little mouse”).

It was common for students to challenge a judge when told they did not answer correctly. That sent teachers and students alike scurrying to the textbooks to verify the answer. In many cases, the students turned out to be correct.

Corona del Mar High School student Ray Chu, 17, played two rounds of the quiz before his team was eliminated by the University High team.

“This is an all-around kind of thing,” Chu said as he raced from the Certamen quiz to watch his teammates participate in a basketball competition. “That makes it interesting.”

Rob Yale, 16, a Santa Margarita High School student, admitted that his friends often ask why he chose to take a language so few people can speak. But he insisted that knowing Latin will benefit him in ways unfamiliar to many people.

The language is similar to the more popular Spanish and French, is used in medical and legal terminology and is said to improve students’ Scholastic Aptitude Test scores, because many English words come from Latin.

“This is going to help me later in life,” Yale said.

Dominic Chenelia, 17, a Santa Margarita student, said he and his classmates often communicate privately in the language and even use the ancient tongue for private jokes about some very modern objects. Ambulare vir, for example, is the literal Latin translation for that device that so many students wear clamped to their ears: the Walkman.

Teachers at the convention said enrollment in high school Latin classes began increasing slowly in the mid-1980s after suffering severe declines for much of the century.

“Latin is considered a language for the elite and intelligent,” said Johnson, who coordinated the conference. “You can’t expect for (students) to pick it over Spanish and French if it does not have the same appeal . . . to all people.”

Latin is kept alive mainly by the Roman Catholic Church, Johnson said, adding that there has been talk by the Vatican recently of making Latin the official international language.

The teaching of Latin has changed in the last 10 years, when use increased of the Cambridge instruction method, which stresses reading stories and discussing historical figures, instead of simply memorizing words and meanings.

Nonetheless, teachers said their programs are often among the first in jeopardy when school districts are forced to cut costs.

“It all depends on how much of a fighter you are,” Pasadena Latin instructor Lura Wallace said. “You can’t give into them. When they wanted to phase our program out, we got together and stopped it.”

Marian McNamara, a teacher at Palo Alto High School, said Latin must also compete for money against languages, such as Japanese and German, that some people believe to be more practical.

“It’s always a sign of a declining school when the Latin program goes,” said McNamara--whose Latin program was severely cut two years ago.