“UT with the subjunctive positive, ne with the subjunctive negative, except after iubeo and ueto, which take the present infinitive!” intoned Jonathan Crick, master extraordinaire of classic languages, to his class of inattentive boys in a bright, sunny classroom overlooking North Street in Kingston. Mr Crick, who came to these shores from Barbados, imparted the intricacies of classical Latin and Greek to perhaps three generations of young Jamaicans during a long and fruitful career in his adopted land.

That arcane grammatical injunction has remained in my head for well over half a century since I first heard it in second form at Kingston College. We recipients of that instruction would grumble about why we had to learn an old dead language spoken only by a few men who wore priestly garb and some scholars residing in dusty old libraries and museums.

Curiously though, although I abandoned Latin after only two years, it remained with me and proved useful time after time. For example, I would come across a word in a foreign language, even one without Latin roots, and was able to recognise the origin of the word and thus figure out what it meant. Latin may be long dead as a vehicle for conversing, but it lives on in myriad forms in diverse languages.

Latin goes back some 2700 years as the vehicle for communication among the inhabitants of the city of Rome and Latium, the area around the city. The Romans weren’t content to be confined to the peninsula we know today as Italy and fanned out across the Mediterranean Sea and beyond. They implanted their language, systems of law and government, customs, culture and ways of doing business.

But language is a fluid thing and adapts itself to local conditions and habits. Thus Latin spawned a family of tongues we call today the Romance languages: French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish as well as the less well known ones like Aragonese, Corsican, Catalan and Sardinian. Other languages acquired much of their vocabulary from Latin, which was the principal international language of science and scholarship until the 17th century. By then the local indigenous languages had developed sufficiently to supplant Latin in daily use.

It continued to be the language of the Roman Catholic Church which is its principal repository today. It remains the official language of the Holy See and the Vatican city-state, and is the medium of papal bulls and other official church edicts. Masses used to be said exclusively in Latin, but the Second Vatican Council authorised the use of local languages for masses and documents. You can still hear Latin masses in some places, and the Vatican is the only place in the world where you can find an ATM that greets you in Latin before spitting out Euros.

English is chock-full of Latin terms, generally in the legal field, but also in science and government. It has been standardised in the naming of living things with an admixture of Greek terms. Animals, plants and micro-organisms are named by genus and species in mostly Latin terms. We all know who Homo sapiens is, but we may not recognise Blighia sapida as the national fruit, the ackee, or Guiacum officinale as the national tree, the mahoe.

It’s not until you look at an actual list of Latin terms and phrases that it becomes clear the extent to which the language is with us in our everyday speech. So, exempli gratia, we can form an ad hoc committee in situ to look into the bona fides of a de facto head of a council who was persona non grata to another group. That persona may regard this as a casus belli and render the whole thing sub judice by invoking habeas corpus and declaring the whole thing ultra vires.

Perhaps the reason Latin is still with us is its remarkable flexibility, allowing it to work even in the most up-to-date technological adaptations. So the person surfing around unknown or potentially risky sites on the internet may be well advised Caveat depasor! (browser beware) or warn someone else, Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum! (Don’t you dare erase my hard disc.) And even in these days of vast electronic storage, we still like our hard copy, hence we often overhear someone ask, “Why won’t you print out?” (Cur ullum imprimere non vis?)

And as every computer user knows, Pergamentum init, exit pergamentum (garbage in, garbage out).

Latin also stays with us in mottos and slogans. The US chose E Pluribus Unum (out of many, one) as its national motto, which was the template for ours. Military units love Latin mottos, as you can clearly see at Curphey Place – Per ardua ad astra (through adversity to the stars) which is the motto of the Royal Air Force, with which the founders of that veterans’ group served during World War II. It’s also the motto of several Commonwealth air forces as well as the Lacovia High School in St Elizabeth. In the US, the Coast Guard chose Semper Paratus (always ready) while the US Marines prefer Semper Fidelis (always faithful).

Our high schools almost invariably use Latin mottos. The one for Wolmers’, for example, is Age Quod Agis (Do well whatever you do), while Kingston College, founded by an Anglican priest, sports the lofty Fortis cadere cedere non potest (The brave may fall but never yield), and Jamaica College trumpets Floreat collegium, fervet opus in campis (May the college flourish, work is burning in the fields), while the University of the West Indies proclaims Oriens ex occidente lux (Light rising from the west).

Then there is silly Latin, in which we either translate aphorisms and common terms or make up faux-Latin phrases. So “Have a nice day” comes out as Die dulci fruere. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” translates as Si fractum non sit, noli id reficere, and Me transmitte sursum Caledoni means simply “Beam me up, Scotty”! In the made-up category we find variations on the old phrase attributed to Julius Caesar: Veni, vidi, vici – I came, I saw, I conquered.

Here are a few: Veni vidi, V8 – I came, I saw, I left quickly; Veni, vidi, vodka – I came, I saw, I drank; Veni, vidi, Visa – I came, I saw, I shopped. And Veni, vidi, Volvo – I came, I saw, I drove away. After all that you may want to take this advice from a jaundiced observer: Nil illigitimati Carborundum: Don’t let the bastards grind you down!

Universities all over the place are now finding renewed interest among students for Latin. At the University of Toronto, for example, undergraduate classes in Latin are full. Professor Jarrett Welsh of the faculty of classics says there was a dip in interest more than a decade ago but now the media have played a role in its revival and people are just more aware of Latin now. “Harry Potter made Latin really popular and fascinatingly, among kids in elementary schools, there are lots of Latin clubs. The Harry Potter books made language play with English words and Latin words magical.”

So now you can haul out that old book of Virgil and try to sweep the mental cobwebs. If anybody asks what you are up to, you can always respond, Sane, paululum linguae latine dico (Sure, I speak a little Latin), and if they really press, hit back with, Id legi modo hic modo illic, vero latine loqui non est difficilissimum (I picked it up here and there. Really … Latin isn’t that hard!)

keeble.mack@sympatico.ca