Great Caesar! You Can Say Fax in Latin

You’ve just conquered Gaul and would like to invite that nice-looking slave over there for a cup of coffee. What to do? There’s no word for cafe in Latin, the language of ancient Rome.

Yes there is, or could have been, says Davide Astori. He is the insistent author of “Io Parlo Latino,” or “I Speak Latin,” a Latin-Italian phrase book recently released. Astori argues that if the book had been published 2,000 years ago, it would have been a snap to order a cup of espresso--cafea expressa. Or even a cappuccino--er, a cucullulus.

“Visne mecum ad cafeum venire?” you ask, adjusting your javelin. “Come with me to the cafe?”

Astori’s book, a first for Italy, is a half-fun, half-serious look at the study of Latin, an embattled discipline even here on its home turf. It’s an expression of an unrealizable dream: that in a united Europe, Latin would return as the language of unity it was centuries ago.

Astori wrote the book on a bet made over dinner, wagering that he could produce a manual to enable Latin speakers to order modern meals, play games, talk computer talk, make a date, hurl insults and basically carry out just about any 20th-Century verbal chore--all in a language considered dead.

“I wanted to show that Latin is alive. People study English for five years and then know how to speak it. Study Latin forever and no one speaks it, because it’s treated as if it were mummified,” he said.

It seems strange that the reputation of Latin would need a boost in Italy, whose ancient, medieval and Renaissance history is rooted in the language; this is not the United States, where Caesar is mainly a salad. In Rome, it’s practically impossible to be out of sight of some old Latin message carved above a church doorway, on a pillar or marble fragment.

And even though the Vatican dropped Latin as the language of Roman Catholic liturgy 30 years ago, permitting the use of local tongues in churches around the world, it still is used for papal pronouncements and official documents.

But Latin also evokes a bitter history for many Italians. The church dominated Italian life for centuries and sometimes ruthlessly protected its privileges. Latin separated the clerical elite from the linguistically vulgar masses. It also was the language of law, which many Italians mistrusted for its impenetrable complexities.

Lovers of Latin are heartened by a few creative efforts to keep it going: a weekly half-hour news show, “Nuntii Latini,” on Radio Finland, of all places. A flowering of Latin language clubs in Germany. A couple of comic books in Italy. And, most important, an effort by the Vatican to produce a dictionary of new concepts in Latin, called “Lexicon Recentis Latinitatis.” It uses neologisms to describe contemporary things and concepts through a vocabulary true to the ancient language.

“Omnia dice possunt Latine,” Astori promises. “You can say anything in Latin.”

Astori, 24, is a doctoral student of classic literature who, besides Italian, speaks German and English and has a scholastic knowledge of French and Romanian. He is preparing a manual on Esperanto, an amalgam of languages fused into a single tongue, which adherents want to see used universally as a way to bridge cultures.

His thin book--only 154 pages--is packed with contemporary uses of Latin. Expressing modern technologies is sometimes easy. Many--television and stereo, for example--use Latin and Greek roots. The fax is easily translated to Latin as telecopia.

Awkwardness is no obstacle. Computer virus? That’s germen magneticum pestilentiosum. Going skiing with Hannibal? This way to the decursio flexuosa--the slalom.

The Io Parlo series, printed by the Milan publishers Garzanti, includes manuals on Albanian, Turkish and Serbo-Croatian. The publishers insisted, to spice up the text, that dirty Latin words be included. Latin literature is full of bawdy vocabulary. “Can’t say it’s dead in that respect,” Astori said.