You’re richer than you think

Small Latin and Less Greek
Essay by Christopher Levenson

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Those words were used by Ben Jonson of Shakespeare, but if that was true of Shakespeare, how much more so of most of us today! In post-war England, having done well in the so-called ‘eleven plus’ exams, I started attending what was then called a ‘Grammar School’ and was assigned to the ‘A’ class which took Latin. At that time a pass in Latin was still required of anyone who wanted to study an Arts subject at the two ‘ancient universities,’ Oxford and Cambridge. 

I did not take to Latin which, as it was taught then, was largely a matter of rote learning. Moreover, the Latin texts we were required to translate mostly came from what I felt were boring historians such as Caesar or Livy. Had I known for instance about Ovid’s Metamorphoses, my school career might well have turned out differently. However, what having to learn Latin gave me was firstly, a clear understanding of grammatical terms and concepts that was helpful when I picked up other languages, all of which were more systematic than English, and secondly, a solid grounding in certain Latin stems, prefixes, and suffixes so that I was able to work out, or at least make an educated guess at, the meaning of unfamiliar but Latin-derived words.

There are so many of these! Linguistically, you are richer than you think. I’m not referring now to all the Latin phrases, such as ex officio, pro bono, per annum, status quo, or de facto that litter our public and judicial lives. Our daily speech also overflows with Latin prefixes and suffixes, such as circum-, con-, contra-, e- or ex-, extra-, inter-, intra-, multi-, ob-, pre-, post-, sub-, super-, trans-, and ultra-. But we don’t need to be told what each of these prefixes means: we have acquired them subconsciously, by osmosis to use a Greek term, through a host of words such as transport, pre-natal, or supermarket. 

So too with many of the words to which they are attached. ‘Port’ we realize, when we think of import and export and portable, has to do with carrying, from the Latin ‘portare.’  Thus, whereas ‘support’ means to help carry a physical or an emotional burden, ‘report’ means to carry back news or information, while transport means to carry goods across–but also in earlier times, to be carried away (or enraptured, as in ‘It was a transport of delight’), which does not refer to a tour bus, (abbreviated from the Latin word omnibus, meaning ‘for everyone’). Transfer also means to carry something across, whether it’s a person, as in ‘transfer onto Line 4 at the Central Station,’ or money or goods.

But doesn’t ‘translate,’ which comes from another part of the same verb in Latin, also mean to carry something across, usually something written in one language into another language? The two concepts are close but not identical.  So, it’s handy to have two words. Or take the stem ‘vent’ which comes from the Latin venire, to come. If we know this we can see that a convention is not only an in-person coming together but also, as in a conventional greeting, or ‘it was a convention to start the State Dinner with a toast to the visiting dignitary’– thus something that has been agreed upon and expected. Similarly, if you intervene, you come into or between two people, while if you prevent something happening you act (come) before it happens. The same applies to ‘scribere,’ the Latin for ‘to write,’ which gives us inscribe, subscribe, prescribe, ascribe, script all involving writing.

With ancient Greek I am shakier ground. Although I never learnt Greek, like most of us I imagine, I have picked up both a lot of prefixes and suffixes, such as peri -, philo-, para -, poly -, -crat, and -logy, as well as a number of basic words such as sophy, morph, graph, pathos, phobia, psyche, trope, and hydro. Thus, if I know that the term ‘poly’ means ‘many’ and ‘seme’ as in semantic means ‘meaning,’ I can work out that polysemous means having many meanings. So too, if I know that a ‘kleptomaniac’ is someone who cannot help stealing things, it’s not too hard to figure out that, even if all property is theft, a ‘kleptocracy’ is a system of government intent on stealing others’ property.  Likewise by combining ’morph’ which means to change, and is often now used on its own as an English verb, and -ology, we get the name for the study or science of change and if we combine anthrops, humankind, with morph, we get a succinct way of describing how some people attribute human characteristics to animals by changing them into Jemima Puddleduck or Mickey Mouse.

The history and mythology of  ancient Greece has also contributed so much directly to our vocabulary from adjectives such as laconic, lethal, spartan, erotic, sapphic, sardonic, titanic, herculean, oedipal, priapic, hermetic, or pyrrhic to nouns such as cereal, (from Ceres, the goddess of the harvest), odyssey, panic, iris, nemesis, vulcan, thespian, and argonaut (and other -nauts such as astronaut). 

Take the physical sciences: medicine in particular, would be lost with such Greek derived terms as hypodermic, thrombosis, encephalitis, pathology.

What is much less healthy but typical is the way advertisers and the news media mangle language by hijacking Latin or Greek suffixes as if they were interchangeable. It all started with hamburgers. In German this favourite fast food was originally called Hamburger Bifsteak, hamburger being the adjective form, just as someone who comes from Augsburg is an Augsburger and someone who comes from Frankfurt a Frankfurter. Burger on its own simply means a citizen, but we now have cheeseburgers, baconburgers, pizzaburgers, as if ‘burger’ meant bun.  Such suffixes are specific, not generic. 

The same applied after Richard Nixon’s 1974 Watergate scandal: subsequent scandals, such as Tunagate also found the suffix -gate attached to them. Likewise because a classic 26-mile run was called a Marathon, after the town in ancient Greece where it all started, doesn’t mean to say that the ‘thon’ can be detached and then tacked on to any long-lasting activity such as a danceathon, yogathon, or a telethon.  

This kind of lazy thinking and slipshod labelling ultimately homogenizes unique experiences by reducing them all to one level–the exact opposite of what language is supposed to do, which is to distinguish and to make individual. 

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Born in London, England, in 1934, Christopher Levenson came to Canada in 1968 and taught at Carleton University till 1999. He has also lived and worked in the Netherlands, Germany, Russia, and India. The most recent of his many books of poetry is Moorings. He co-founded Arc magazine in 1978 and was its editor for a decade; he was Series Editor of the Harbinger imprint of Carleton University Press, which published exclusively first books of poetry. [Editor’s note: Recently we’ve published the initial chapters of Christopher Levenson’s memoir Not One of the Boys, Beginnings & Schools. Hardly the happiest years. Christopher previously contributed the essays on the subjects of the malleability of language in Animals and language and The world’s favourite second language and the evolution of language in On Permanent Loan, and has reviewed books by Margaret Atwood, Kelly Shepherd, Cynthia Woodman Kerkham, Jess Housty, Susan Musgrave, and Katherine Lawrence for The British Columbia Review.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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