Carolyn Cooper | Why do so many words come from Latin?

On the very last day of our language arts classes for this term, my seven-year-old student gave a report on Martin Luther King Jr. He chirpily said Dr King was eloquent. When I asked him what the word meant, he couldn’t answer. And all I said was, “Parrot!” That’s a running joke we’ve had for the last seven months of our virtual classes. He was not amused by the name. He knew I was making fun of him for repeating a word he didn’t understand.

He quickly googled it. And I told him the word came from Latin. Then, my student completely redeemed himself from parrothood by asking this perceptive question: “Why do so many words come from Latin?” Over our months of conversation, I’d been telling him about the origin of the ‘big’ words he didn’t know. And, most of the time, they came from Latin. So now he wanted to know why. It’s such a joy to teach an intellectually curious child. You are challenged to provide age-appropriate answers.

I had to go back to 1066 AD That’s the year William, Duke of Normandy, conquered England and French became the official language. I explained that many Latin words actually came into English through French. Like ‘eloquence’! That’s a 12th century Old French word, from Latin ‘eloquentia’, which was borrowed by English in the 14th century. This child now understands the relationship between political conquest and language acquisition. Not in those terms, of course.

MerriamWebster.com elaborates the cultural consequences of political domination: “The Norman Conquest, as William’s takeover came to be known, set off many changes in English culture, including its language. William put French-speaking Normans in nearly all of the positions of power in the country, and the result was the disappearance of vernacular English from the written record for about two centuries. Meanwhile, English got Frenchified. French words – mostly Anglo-French words as we call the particular kind of Medieval French used in England – dominated the language of literature, law, and administration. Many of these dominating terms have stuck around.”

INHERITED PREJUDICES

Unlike my seven-year-old student, many hard-back Jamaicans are not intellectually curious. They don’t seem to understand that one of the consequences of colonisation is mental slavery. They are not in the least bit inclined to question the prejudices they have inherited. Like parrots, they uncritically repeat the same old misconceptions. Their contempt for the Jamaican language, for example, is congenital. As far as they’re concerned, Jamaican is nothing but ‘broken’ English and a ‘corruption’ of a ‘pure’ language. You just can’t get them to open their closed mind.

It’s no use making the point that English isn’t all that ’pure’. Nor is it English to dat! Dictionary.com confirms that, “About 80 per cent of the entries in any English dictionary are borrowed, mainly from Latin. Over 60 per cent of all English words have Greek or Latin roots. In the vocabulary of the sciences and technology, the figure rises to over 90 per cent. About 10 per cent of the Latin vocabulary has found its way directly into English without an intermediary (usually French)”.

On April 12, my column on creative masks made from undergarments was published with this headline, ‘Female unmentionables out in the open’. This is how John H. Christian responded: “Great Article Carolyn Cooper only the English Language could, with a smattering of your Beloved Patios [sic] be able to paint such a picture ... well done ... Now write the entire piece in Patios [sic] .. lol ...” Because I sometimes like to humour readers, I translated the first two paragraphs into Jamaican. BaronBM jumped into the conversation: “Not bad at all. How long do you think it would take you to translate Macbeth into Patois?” Mi just kiss mi teet.

‘UWI PATOIS INTELLECTUALS’

Globe Trotter eagerly responded to BaronBM: “LOL! I’ve been waiting for a translation of a physics lesson for several years now, in vain! So far, none of the UWI Patois Intellectuals seem willing to indulge me in my mockery of their efforts. Too bad – seeing them twist themselves into knots translating uniserial modules over finite dimensional algebras would have been priceless!”

As was to be expected, most of the words in Globe Trotter’s Mickey Mouse test are of Latin origin: uni, serial, modules, finite, dimensional. ‘Algebra’ is from Arabic. And even ‘over,’ which comes from Old English ‘ofer,’ is of Germanic origin. I asked Dr Andre Coy, a physicist at the University of the West Indies, Mona, to do the Jamaican translation. His research focus is on speech and language technology and he’s developing a Jamaican/English translator.

Dr Coy didn’t need to twist himself into a knot. Here’s his translation: “Tek one non-zero module over one finite-dimensional algebra. If di lattice weh come from di sub-module dem form one chain, den yu call di module uniserial. Dem ya module a di simplest type a indecomposable”. Like speakers of English, we can borrow scientific terms from Greek and Latin. That’s how languages expand.

It was Geoffrey Chaucer, the 14th century poet, who brought English back into the written record. He is honoured as the father of English literature. Perhaps, two centuries from now, Jamaican will be respected in the land of its origin and literacy in the language will become standard practice. A curious child may ask, “Wa mek so much a fi wi Jamaican word dem come from English?” Because bilingualism will be the norm, the child could just as easily choose to ask that question in English. And the answer would start at 1655.

- Carolyn Cooper, PhD, is a specialist on culture and development. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and karokupa@gmail.com.