For quite some time, I’ve wanted to learn Latin. “Why would you want to learn a dead language?” you may ask. It’s a fair question. And I don’t quite know the answer. What I do know is that I’m a scanner by nature, which means I have a lot of interests and hobbies. Sometimes I do deep dives on subjects, but most of the time I go an inch deep and a mile wide. For years I felt bad about my jack-of-all-trades approach to the world, until I read Barbara Sher’s book Refuse to Choose.
Anyway, language has always fascinated me. When I’m studying the Bible, I like to look up the Greek and Hebrew words. I took Spanish in school, but I only remember a handful of phrases. In fact, the only language I came close to being half-way competent in was American Sign Language, though I have grown quite rusty in the past couple of years due to lack of practice.
Latin has always intrigued me. As luck would have it, my husband found a free eBook version of the Rule of St. Benedict (which I read a bit from each day) with both Latin and English. (If you prefer a newer physical version that has both languages you can get it from Amazon here.)
Having this handy dandy translation is proving a fun way to learn a little bit of Latin each day. My method is as follows: I first look at the day’s reading in Latin. It’s usually very short, a paragraph or two. I’ve read the entire Rule in English a couple of times through. I therefore have a little bit of a context hint. My next step is that I guess at what it’s saying. Then I read the English version to check myself.
The neat thing about Latin is that there are a lot of words that are easy to decode:
angelis = angels
propheta = prophets
scriptura = scripture
humilitate = humility
And some make a lot of sense when you think about it:
fratres = brothers (as in fraternity brothers, or fraternal twins)
animam = soul (as in animation, animal)
Some I just can’t link to English at all and thus have a harder time with:
qui = who
coelum = heaven
absque = without
The other day, I came across this line:
Inimicos diligere.
I couldn’t figured out inimicos, but I was pretty confident that diligere had to mean diligent. As it turns out, the correct translation is “love our enemies.” If you’re ever stumped on a Latin word, try saying it out loud. If I had remembered to do this, I might’ve guessed inimicos was enemies. But diligere was love? This threw me for a loop.
I was intrigued. So, I opened my handy dandy etymology app and looked up the word “diligence.” Sure enough, the original meaning was to single out and value highly. Over time, it has come to mean “constant and earnest effort to accomplish what is undertaken.”
The more I thought about this, the more it made sense. Ask anyone who is married: love truly is a constant and earnest effort. To love someone or something requires that we set it apart, and give our attention to it. In fact, the more I think on it, the more I’m convinced that love cannot exist apart from diligence.
PS: The full proverb is: “Jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.”