For the Love of Latin

“I would make them all learn English: and then I would let the clever ones learn Latin as an honor, and Greek as a treat.”

--Sir Winston Churchill

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Reginald Foster is an American priest, a plumber’s son with a pipeline to the Vatican as chief Latinist for Pope John Paul II. Foster also teaches the faded yet apparently immortal language of Cicero and Virgil and has a standard repudiatio for those who say Latin is too difficult to learn: “Every prostitute and bum in ancient Rome spoke it. . . .”

That’s not quite the case today, not even among the homeless and hookers of Italy. Nor in Los Angeles and certainly not on Hollywood Boulevard, unless you count the language of courts and cops in describing some of the world’s oldest professional services--particularly when movie stars are caught in flagrante delicto.

Ergo, and in conclusio, Latin may be wilted and worn to conversational nubs and smatterings. Caveat emptor. Persona non grata. Ad infinitum. Et cetera. But in more than 2,000 years, this supposedly dead language has yet to spend one day on life support.

Rigor mortis refuses to set in.

In fact, the language of laws and governments, medicine and botany, liturgies and literature that forged Western culture may well be blinking awake, taking nourishment and resuming a limited but surprisingly visible half-life.

Nationally, in the past decade, an estimated four dozen small, typically church-based classics academies have opened. At Cornerstone Christian Academy in Conyers, Ga., Latin schooling is mandatory because, says headmaster James Ferguson, “over 60% of words in the English language come from Latin, and over 80% of the Romance languages are Latin-based.”

Latin instruction will begin in kindergarten when the Veritas Christian Academy opens this fall in Mills River, N.C. It has been a three-year course at Long Beach Polytechnic High School since 1898; Jerry King, a 31-year Latin teacher, says, “We have a class limit of 39 students, and we have 37.”

The American Philological Assn. says the number of university students studying Latin increased by 25% between 1994 and 1996. This year, 103,400 students took the National Latin Exam. NLE spokeswoman Sally Davis, a Latin teacher from Arlington, Va., reports that applications to take the test have been “growing bit by bit for 20 years . . . but this is the first time we have gone over 100,000.”

In Finland, there’s talk radio in Latin. In Germany, a flowering of Latin clubs. In Norway, a tape of the best of Elvis sung in Latin, but with no adequate translation for “hound dog.” In France, there are Latin comic books, while Italy’s more forward bookstores are selling “Io Parlo Latino,” a phrase book packed with contemporary uses of Latin:

Telecopia, for fax. Germen magneticum pestilentiosum, for computer virus. Tela totius terra, for World Wide Web.

“Omnia dice possunt Latine,” notes “Io Parlo” author Davide Astoria. “You can say anything in Latin.”

Like cacullulus, for cappuccino.

Or, Frictos cum ista cupisna?

You want fries with that?

“We’re out in the forest, and we’re peering around the trees,” says Latin scholar Nancy Llewellyn of her fellow Latin scholars. “Latin is quivering back to life, and it will go kerboom if I have anything to do with it.”

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Llewellyn, 35, a high school teacher and postgraduate classics student at UCLA, may have much to do with the kerbooming of Latin. She is president of the North American Institute for Living Latin Studies, just one year and one national convention old, but with 179 members in 37 states and 14 countries.

The institute, Llewellyn says, hammers at a central theme: To converse in Latin is to form a direct connection with the prose of Julius Caesar and the poetry of Virgil, the comedies of Plautus and the letters of Cicero “without going through the filters of translation.

“It’s not just a matter of learning nouns and verbs, but of speaking to better understand the fundamental ideas . . . . If you speak the Latin language and read Latin letters, you share a vocabulary with everybody who was anybody in Western Europe from Caesar Augustus to the 1500s.”

One certainly becomes a standout at duller cocktail parties by remembering Lord Byron, who spoke of “that soft bastard Latin, which melts like kisses from a female mouth.”

Ipso facto, claim Latinists, the benefits of talking the talk and loving the Latin are multifarius:

* To know Latin is to expand one’s English vocabulary, e.g., exempli gratia means “for example.” Or, e.g.

* This year, a British study reported that 7-year-olds studying Latin move quickly ahead of their peers in spelling, grammar, history and European languages.

* Research in this country shows that high school Latin students tend to score an average 150 points higher on the SAT. College grades are typically higher.

“Interestingly, the student who will benefit most from learning Latin is the average or below-average student, those who get steamrollered by today’s process-driven educational methodology,” says Gary Prechter, headmaster of the planned Veritas Christian Academy. “In elementary school, Latin provides grammar, sentence structure, all the tools. In middle school, kids learn the principles of formal and informal logic, and start questioning.”

By high school, he continues, Latin students will have entered the rhetoric stage and be involved in communicating facts and philosophies, explaining themselves and debating by individual presentations. In short, says Prechter, Latin teaches youngsters how to think, not what to think.

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Far from coincidentally, schools that offer Latin are seen by many parents as a classical alternative to a besieged public school system geared more to instruction in how to earn a living than how to learn for living.

However, all the reasons behind the gentle surge in classical studies aren’t quite so sophisticated (from sophista, a wise man).

According to its disciples (from discipulus, a learner), some of the new popularity (from popularis, belonging to the same people) can be traced to those old seducers (from seducere, to lead aside)--movies and television.

“Xena: Warrior Princess” has apparently sparked as much interest in myth-based cultures as in leather teddies. Walt Disney’s “Hercules” has added its influence. Even “The English Patient” is picking up a modicum (you fill in the root) of credit for a character who read from the “Histories” of Herodotus.

Once in the mainstream, can T-shirt slogans be far behind?

They’re already here.

The current Signals catalog follows its highbrow PBS tradition with a $29 sweatshirt imprinted with “Si Hoc Legere Scis Nimium Eruditionis Habes.”

Translation: “If you can read this, you’re overeducated.”

Then there’s a T-shirt worn wherever Latinists convene.

Slogan: “Patre Troiae X Annos Longos Proeliato Nihil Mihi Datum Nisi Haec Tunicula Pediculosa.”

Translation: “My Father Fought 10 Long Years at Troy and All I Got Was This Lousy T-shirt.”