COLUMN ONE : Rome Gives Old Tongue New Twist : A Vatican dictionary pulls Latin into the 20th Century, describing sights unfamiliar to Virgil--from graphum act theatrum to fluxus interclusio.

VATICAN CITY — Latin, the ancient tongue of the Caesars and the Popes, of empire, piety and scholarship, is fighting a graceful last stand here along the Tiber where it was born.

Sic transit gloria.

Even at the Vatican, where it remains the official language of a giant global church, Latin is in free fall. A generation ago, Roman Catholics everywhere heard Mass in Latin. Today, polyglot Pope John Paul II can still decline his Latin nouns, but most of his priests wouldn’t know an ablative absolute from a passive periphrastic.

Now, more to salute a fading old friend than with any realistic hopes of staying the tide, Vatican experts have produced a new dictionary that vaults Virgil’s tongue into the Space Age. It describes sights Seneca seldom saw: cursus pedester (jogging), pharus adversus nebulam (fog lights), bracae linteae caeruleae (blue jeans), graphum act theatrum (movie theater) and fluxus interclusio (traffic jam).

The dictionary marks the first systematic effort, 18,000 entries, 450 pages, to match Latin vocabulary to modern realities.

But not everybody is satisfied with this well-meaning promenade through linguistic meadows where Cicero once strolled.

“A dictionary of clever stuff and electronic hairpins is not a solution. People don’t realize how much has been lost in the last 25 years,” scowls Father Reginald Foster, a Carmelite priest from Milwaukee who is one of the Pope’s Latin translators.

Better read than dead, rejoins the small band of priests and international Latin enthusiasts who have assembled the new dictionary for a Vatican foundation called Latinitas. Pope Paul VI created Latinitas in 1976 precisely to defend the church’s language of choice.

The authors of Lexicon Recentis Latinitatis, Volume One, A-L (with M-Z to follow next year) look to the future. They are thinking of upcoming generations of scholars who will learn Latin as a basis for further classical research. Their new dictionary, around $70, is clever, intricate, puckish.

It boldly goes where no Latinist has gone before: jet (aeronavis celerrima) to jukebox (phonographum Americanum), kamikaze (voluntarius sui interemptor) to karate (oppugnatio inermis Iaponica) .

The Vatican’s New Look Latin is a boon for translators and teachers seeking to render modern concepts into words that broaden and enliven a language at once long-dead and long-lived:

Look, Augustus, there’s an exterioris paginae puella (cover girl) in brevissimae bracae femineae (hot pants) and her friend the armentarius (cowboy) eating a pastillum botello fartum (hot dog) while watching pilamalleus super glaciem (ice hockey).

Later, they might try their luck with the sphaeriludium electricum nomismate actum , literally, the electric game with a ball put into motion by a coin. Pinball to you, gringo. Afterward, lights out, there could even occur a lascivia brevis , which might be translated (but never at the Vatican) as a one-night stand.

On its more serious level, the new work is a tribute to the small international corps of Latin scholars who gamely grapple with the lessons of a language that is one of humankind’s great cultural legacies.

The authors of the new dictionary, a bit like musicians improvising jazz, employ known Latin and extend it, as logically as possible, to things and ideas that evolved after the language was overshadowed by its Romance heirs.

If it is possible to accommodate the idea of a disco in Italian, French or Spanish, then surely it is also possible to derive a phrase-- caberna discothecaria-- for the new medium in the father tongue.

For almost 2,000 years, century after century, Europe’s elite wrote in Latin. A medieval professor of medicine could deliver the same Latin lecture in Bologna, Salamanca, Paris and Oxford with the assurance of being understood equally well.

Most Latin manuscripts, many of them beautifully illuminated in monasteries, have been lost to time. But there are enough safely stored at the Vatican Library alone to require another 50 years simply to sort them out.

“We have around 75,000 manuscripts, of which about 20,000 are catalogued. The rest are shelved; not read, not inventoried. What is inside is not always what the frontispiece says is there. We’ll need another six or seven centuries to study them all well,” says Ambrogio Piazzoni, a curator of Latin manuscripts at the library.

Like Augustine, Jerome, Thomas Aquinas and other early fathers of the Catholic Church, seminal Europeans from Erasmus and Galileo to Descartes and Hobbes, all addressed their peers in written Latin.

It survived as the language of science, medicine and scholarship through the 17th Century, Piazzoni notes, long after spoken Latin had transmuted into vernacular tongues like Italian, Spanish and French.

“Saint Augustine! Look at the man’s mind! Wheels turning within wheels as he writes in Latin. Turn an Augustine passage into English and it comes out to about 10 banal sentences,” says Foster, who fell in love with Latin as a seminarian in 1953 and is by now legendary as Rome’s most incandescent and indefatigable Latin teacher.

“Latin is long and life is short. Start early,” he counsels.

In full cry before an enraptured class of young clerics at Pontifical Gregorian University, Foster in his trademark blue jumpsuit is a Roman carnival.

“No!” he thunders. “It’s not ‘A philosopher does not make a beard.’ That’s sloppy thinking. It’s, ‘A beard does not make a philosopher.’ We are going very slowly here. Latin is discipline and maturity.”

Isaac Newton understood beards and philosophers. He recorded the apple’s historic fall in Latin in 1687. But times change. When Charles Darwin originated a new species of scientific thought in 1859, he did it in English.

Lately, these have been tough centuries for Latin in the church, too. The death knell sounded in the mid-1960s when the reforming Second Vatican Council opted for Mass in the vernacular, undercutting the 1964 decision to reaffirm Latin as the official church language.

Few prelates at church synods nowadays show any inclination to wrestle with rusty Latin. When John Paul chided bishops about it at one recent meeting, he had to do it in Italian to be widely understood. Papal speeches and church documents are still issued officially only in Latin, but few people read them, Foster laments.

French became the working language of the international committee that wrote the Vatican’s new catechism because Latin, the obvious first choice, proved too hard for too many. Italian has replaced Latin as the working language at the Vatican, and English is pressing French as the diplomatic language.

“Latin was literally the lingua franca for us and all other international orders. Now, you hardly ever hear it,” said Father John Navone, a Jesuit professor at the Gregorian who studied for the priesthood in Latin in Oregon and Toronto in the early 1960s.

The Gregorian’s Faculty of Canon Law, the last Vatican bastion with Latin as the language of instruction, switched to Italian a year ago after a revolt led by a tongue-tied American Jesuit professor. Navone was not among the mourners.

“What’s the big deal about Latin? Who laments Chaucer’s English or troubadour French?” Navone asks. “Latin’s had a healthy organic development, and it’s alive and well--as modern Italian.”

Using existing Latin or Greek words as the basis for new definitions whenever possible, the new dictionary, Italian to Latin, sturdily widens the vocabulary necessary to address contemporary issues: AIDS is syndrome comparati defectus immunitatis; alcoholism is alcoholismus; pollution is inquinamentum. And watch out for hypertensio.

The dictionary, mind you, is not the only blow being struck for Latin.

Radio Finland--of all things--broadcasts a five-minute news show in Latin on shortwave every Saturday. Latinitas publishes a Latin magazine and hosts a lively annual competition for the best new poem and essay in Latin. Italy’s government has recently reaffirmed serious study of Latin at blue-ribbon high schools preparing the next generation of Italian intellectuals.

Helen Pope, an Australian who teaches Latin and Greek at the private St. Stephen’s High School here, says that the dictionary is particularly well-timed: There’s a revival of high school Latin in Europe and the United States.

“Latin teaching in the United States is moving more and more toward oral Latin, so the dictionary can only help bring modern ideas and conversations alive in the classics classroom,” Pope says.

Indeed, the public response to the first Latin dictionary for the 21st Century has been “tremendous,” according to Father Edmondo Caruana, a Maltese priest on the Latinitas secretariat: “We are almost out of stock.”

Pliny would be pleased.

Who knows? One day, in a firmly classical way, the Vatican’s new dictionary, press run 3,000, may even fulfill one of its own new definitions by becoming a liber maxime divenditus-- a bestseller.

How’s Your Latin? A Skills Test

Msgr. Tommaso Mariucci has prepared some modern Latin booklets for the Latinitas Foundation, Vatican City; the work comprises a dictionary-in-the-making called “Latintatis Nova et Vetera.” In a recent interview, he offered some comments on the Golden State. How much of them do you understand? (Answers below)

1. Of Angelopolis, he says : Haec urbs, ad oram Pacifici oceani posita, est immensae paene magnitudinis, quippe quae plurimas urbes et oppida suos inter fines complectatur.

2. He is not a great fan of the current product of Ruscisilva or Acrifolia Silva, controversially suggesting, aurea aetas Ruscisilva iam lapsa esse videtur.

3. He admires the state, saying California ‘s spes eius ut regionis sequoiae, sidera tangunt.

ANSWERS

1. Of Los Angeles, he said: “This city, on the Pacific, is enormous and embraces many cities and towns within its confines.”

2. Of Hollywood, he observed: “The Golden Age of Hollywood, it seems, has past.”

3. Of the state, he notes, (California’s) “hopes, as the land of the sequoias, touch the stars.

A Latin Sampler

If you’re planning to chew the fat with your ol’ pal, Caesar, here’s how you can sound hip (courtesy of Vatican Latinists): Income tax return: tabellae vectigales Bulldog: canis taurinus Casino: domus lusoria Bikini: vestis Bikiniana; vestis balnearia Stock exchange: forum nummarium Good luck: fortuna tibi faveat Clown: scurra circensis Merry Christmas: faustum laetumque Christi natalem Bureaucratic: grapheocraticus Before you can say Jack Robinson: dictio citius FBI: Officium Investigandi Foederatarum Civitatum Dregs of society: sordidissimi homines Drug trafficker: rerum narcoticarum mercator Who goes there?: agnitionalis in iniunctio? To get sunburned: sole infuscari Blackout: fluoris electrici abruptio Armored: loricatus Blitz: incursio fulminea Record player: gramophonium Freezer: capsa frigorifica Leasing: locatio in emptionem convertibilis Gulag: campus captivis custodiendis * Make book on it: For more information about obtaining the Lexicon Recentis Latinitatis, write Father Edmondo Caruana, Libraria Editoria Vaticana, Vatican City.