Buried

Interesting fact: in the language centers of the brain, the part that deals with a lexicon is quite pliant, and most people can learn new words even in their old age. Syntax, however, and the rules of that grammar (or the phonology) are quite solid, and so it's very difficult to really internalize a new syntax once you're older, just as it's quite difficult to make sounds that you've not grown up producing (which is why people have accents). So, someone who knows a language like English, where word order is quite crucial to understanding the meaning in the sentence, might be rather thrown by a language where all the syntactic information is tied up in affixes and word order is not an issue. Don't believe me? Well, I didn't either for a while.

The reason I bring this up is because I'm trying to translate a few selections from the Aeneid, desperately trying to study for the final (which happens on Monday at 8:30 in the morning, on my dear sweet gods) and though I know I have only a few hours to study, I can't, somehow, get any of this to click in my brain. Virgil, obviously, is a highly poetic man, which means that trying to deduce a good English sentence from his agglomeration of inflective words is extremely difficult if your syntax doesn't quite know how to let go if its preconceived notions.

Another interesting problem (or is it just interesting tidbit? Let's call it a res and get over it) with Latin is that the language has an incredibly small lexicon - about 500 pieces that contain individual meaning, and then enough for two thick books when you record everything we have from all Latin, ever, which, if you compare it to English, a language with shelves upon shelves worth of words, is a pittance. So each words has to do a great deal of work if anyone wants to say anything. So the dictionary entry for the innocent word constituo, constituere might say something like this: "v put, set, place; constitute, appoint; decree, decide, determine; fix, establish; range; build; establish; agree (upon); manage; dispose; intend; settle" (Pocket Oxford). A word like res can mean literally anything that someone needs it to mean, so you're never quite sure if you've got it right, but the chances are that no one who was reading that was ever quite sure either, even back when it was new. It means thing, but people hate it when you translate it like that, so you're expected to substitute a noun for it. And know which noun to use. Which, strangely, sometimes, you don't.

Then again, I know that inflective languages aren't that hard if you know what each ending means. In fact, I can see how one might think it quite liberating, to be learning something as free-sounding as a language with no rigid word order. But there's a lovely problem: Latin likes to reuse suffixes that mean completely different things in different contexts, and their prefixes have about as many meanings each as res. So you might look at a word you don't know, and see that it ends with -a, and you think, "Oh, wonderful! I have found the subject! It is feminine nominative singular! Quelle joie!" and you go about your business, only to discover ten heartbroken minutes later that it's really a neuter nominative/accusative plural, or a feminine ablative singular, and now your translation might make more sense, but you have to change everything. Not a pretty case, people.

Okay. That's my tale of woe and misery, and me misera, I must go back to studying.

Kate