Catalonia: an appeal for peace with simple words to say it

It was good to see Catalans, or at any rate a great many people both Catalan and non-Catalan, demonstrating on behalf of dialogue in Catalonia this weekend. That’s to get out of the crisis brought on by demands from the Catalan government for the independence of their region. The marchers wore white, the colour of no party but of peace, they carried no national flags, and they had only one demand: let’s talk. Hablamos in Spanish. Parlem in Catalan.

Marching for peace and dialogue in Barcelona

The absence of flags was a good move. Flags stand for nations and nations stand for far more than just the good. You can point with pride to a Dalí or a world-cup winning football team? Just remember that you also have to take on board the persecution of Jews and Muslims and nearly four decades of Fascism.

Instead they sought communication. “Jaw-jaw is better than war-war,” Winston Churchill said, and the words ring particularly true at a time when the Catalan leadership has pushed its case to the brink of conflict, and the Spanish government has stepped right over the line into violence which, if it wasn’t lethal in its police action against a referendum on independence deemed illegal, was nonetheless brutal.

So “let’s talk” sounds like an eminently sensible response. Watching people demanding it was heart-warming. It left me feeling hopeful for once, as few political developments do.

Though I have to admit it wasn’t just the sentiment that touched me. The words themselves struck me. They awoke memories from decades ago, memories of an amusing discovery during my student days.

It may seem odd that of the two great languages of antiquity in Europe, Greek and Latin, only the former is still spoken. There is apparently no “modern Latin” as there is a “modern Greek”. That is, however, only an appearance. The only reason there’s no modern Latin is that there are, in fact, multiple modern Latins.

Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, even French are all in fact the descendants of the language spoken across the Roman Empire at its height, altered by the successive waves of incomers that have affected some regions far more than others. French, for instance, has come a long way from the original language, heavily influenced by the Germanic speech of the invaders from across the Rhine – Burgundians, Goths, and of course the Franks, who gave the country its modern name.

The Latin from which those languages developed, however, wasn’t the elevated language spoken from the Senate. “Latin’s a dead language, as dead as dead can be,” goes the schoolboy doggerel, “it killed the ancient Romans and now it’s killing me.” Even those ancient Romans realised it was far too complex a language. Pliny the Elder admitted he spoke a different language in the market than in the Senate.

The language of the marketplace was, above all, far simpler. For instance, the word for ‘to talk’, loqui (think of ‘loquacious’ or ‘eloquent’), is particularly painful. Its form is called ‘deponent’ so it looks passive when it’s actually active (so a classical Latin scholar would say ‘I have been talked’ when what he meant was ‘I have talked’).

The more sensible kind of people who would sell you a water melon or repair a broken shoe don’t speak that way. So they looked around for different words to us.

Two are particularly simple. To tell a parable – ‘parabulare’ – and to tell a fable – ‘fabulare’ – are nice, easy, first conjugation verbs that are entirely regular and therefore behave predictably. The common people chose one or other of those two to mean “to speak’ in preference to loqui

The Italians, the French and the Catalans chose ‘parabulare’, shortened to ‘parlare’ (the word in Italian), giving the Catalan ‘parlem’.

The main branch of the language in the rest of Spain chose ‘fabulare’. The Spanish have a way of replacing the initial ‘f’ by an ‘h’ – smoke, for instance, which is ‘fumo’ in Italian is ‘humo’ in Spanish. The Spanish for ‘to speak’ morphed into ‘hablar’ and hence ‘hablamos’.

The marchers in white were therefore demanding that the two parties tell some fables or some parables to each other. What they meant was that they should speak. Any of those would be great.

Isn’t it great that they chose to say it with a particularly easy word – not a derivative of the ghastly Latin ‘loqui’?

In the end, chatting to each other instead of fighting isn’t all that difficult. It just takes a simple word. And a bit of goodwill.

The glory of the Cameron government is all Latin to me

One of the glorious triumphs of the present British government is the introduction of so-called free schools.

These schools are free in the sense that we all pay for them out of taxes. They are free in the sense that they are not under local government control which means they don’t have to follow policies chosen by elected representatives or be guided by the general interests of the community to which they belong, or at least in which they reside. And they are free in the sense that their educational principles can be dictated by a small group of self-appointed experts on education.

One of the most outspoken supporters of free schools is a journalist called Toby Young who has become chair of governors at one of the first free schools opened. One of the handful, I might say, since schools have not been flocking to his banner as he rather suggested they might, before the last election.

An aspect of his school that has attracted particular attention is that it has made Latin a compulsory subject. Many argue that studying Latin will open children to the roots of our culture, presumably on the basis that reading Virgil will be easier and more stimulating to bored teenagers than reading Shakespeare or Dickens or, come to that, even Graham Greene.

They also suggest that a knowledge of Latin comes in handy when studying modern Romance languages. I’ve learned three of them, and I leave it to you to guess how invaluable I found it to know the behaviour of a deponent verb in Latin when I came to grapple with Italian, French and Spanish, none of which has such verbs. Or declensions. Or ablative absolutes. Or most of the conjugated forms. Or the ludicrous habit of sticking the verb pretty much anywhere in a sentence, often apparently at random.

I studied Latin for years and years. Five years at school. A couple of years as an optional subject at university. It left me in a particularly frustrating half-way house of understanding: when I came to do research on science in the eighteenth-century, a time when much of the material was still written in Latin, I had just enough mastery of the language to know what the writer was talking about, but not enough to know what he was saying about it. He was, say, talking about what happened to kinetic energy in collisions between elastic bodies, but was he saying it was conserved or that it wasn’t?

Blowed if I could tell. Very exasperating. If only they’d just written their own language, it would have spared me a great deal of pain.

Not that I think that a knowledge of Latin is completely without value. No. There came the day when we were introduced to the poetry of Catullus, for instance. Far beyond our power to understand, but what the heck, with a lot of help we managed to struggle through his short elegy 101.

What was it about? He’d travelled out from Rome to grieve for his dead brother. Standing there before the ‘mute ashes’ he pays his last respects, going through the conventional motions expected of a man at a funeral, presenting grave gifts wet with his tears.

Catullus, whose sorrow for the loss of his brother echoed down the ages.
At least as far as me.

And then came closing words that I found truly searing. At least once they’d been translated for me:

‘Atque in perpetuum frater ave atque vale’

‘And for evermore, brother, hail and farewell.’

There’s a deeply moving pathos to that long, forlorn goodbye, echoing down all eternity.

Worth seven years of study? Perhaps if that’s your choice, as it was mine. Worth investing public money in the compulsion of unwilling spotty fourteen-year olds? I doubt it.

But I hope before long we’ll be able to wish ‘ave atque vale’ to the government that came up with the idea. In perpetuum.




Postscript. People have pointed out to me that I tend to take a partisan line in some of these posts and don’t give the present British government credit for its achievements. 

To set the record straight and to re-establish my reputation for political balance, here is a full list of the most notable successes of that government so far:

I fear the Greeks and can't cope with Latin

It took me years and years to realise that I wasn’t going to master Latin. An appalling language. For instance, the subject moves around the sentence and you have to track it down which means you have to recognise it. Since it has a different form in each of the six declensions, to say nothing of the sub-forms of the third, the task feels insuperable, at least to me. 

I’m not saying I didn’t get anywhere with it. In the eighteenth century, German or Nordic scientists, aware that no-one was ever going to learn to read their languages, used to write in Latin. In fact, at the time, not many could cope with English – Voltaire was exceptional in mastering it, since most of his compatriots couldn’t even be bothered to try, a tradition proudly kept alive by their descendants to this day. Even so, though English scientists also wrote Latin (viz Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica) they would occasionally stick to English (viz Newton’s Opticks with its interesting take on spelling).

It may have been that refusal of English-speakers to use an international language consistently that eventually forced the world to adopt ours. Helped a bit by the power of the US dollar, of course. And not a little by the power of the US bayonet.

Anyway, back in the eighteenth century, much scientific material was in Latin. So when I was working on eighteenth-century science I’d occasionally have to read Latin, which was always a curious experience. I could usually work out that the author was talking about planetary orbits, for instance, but couldn’t always tell whether he was saying that they were elliptical or that they weren’t. A little learning can sometimes be a frustrating thing.

Ultimately I’ve had to accept defeat. Now my knowledge of the language – until perhaps I get another chance to have a go in retirement (assuming I get to retire some day) – really comes down to a few half-remembered tags.

One of these is ‘Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes’, which seems to be saying ‘I’m timid when confronted by Danes and iron women’ but I’m reliably assured actually means ‘I fear the Greeks when they come bearing gifts.’

Well, last week was when the rest of Europe tried to make a gift to the Greeks. Or was it perhaps the other way round?

First the Eurozone offered Greece a pile of money, but only on condition it spent a lot less. Sounds like one of those ‘good news, bad news’ things, doesn’t it? ‘Have all this lovely money, just don’t use it.’ Then the soon to be ex-Prime Minister said he’d have a referendum and ask his compatriots whether they’d like a tad more austerity, reduced pensions and a lot fewer jobs, because people usually say ‘yes’ when asked that.

My first reaction to the idea of holding a referendum was one of horror. For God’s sake, I wanted to scream, there isn’t any other offer on the table. What if the electorate says ‘no’? You think Merkel and Sarkozy are going to say ‘well, in that case, we’ll dip a bit further in our pockets and come up with some more?’

So the moment I heard he’d withdrawn the referendum promise – or threat – I was relieved. But then I began to wonder. I mean, what if the Greeks had said ‘no’? Maybe it’s time someone did.

In a sense, that’s what the ‘Occupy’ protests are all about. They’re not demanding anything in particular – more money spent on schools, less on the military, or whatever. They’re saying ‘the way we’re going isn’t right. Let’s check the direction of travel before we go any further.’

And they’re right. What’s being imposed on the Greeks is just more of the same, which of course means a lot less. Less public health. Less education. Less employment. While the elite who got Greece into this mess in the first place will contrive to look sorry while hanging on to their loot. In Britain, bonuses in the Finance sector fell from £14 billion in 2008 to £12 billion in 2009 – only to go back to £14 billion in 2010. The pay of Chief Executives of our biggest companies rose by 49% last year. Some people are doing just fine in this crisis, mostly the ones who got us into the mess and then demanded we pay for it.

Those people in the tents around St Paul’s are saying that there must be a better way.

I’d have feared it if the Greeks had brought us a gift consisting of a ‘no’ in a referendum. But perhaps it would have been no bad thing to face that fear and deal with it.

Virgil's Aeneid warned us about the Greeks. I think.

Postscript. It’s not all bad news at the moment, is it? It looks like Berlusconi’s on his way out. Of course, I won’t believe he’s gone till he’s actually been replaced – he has a way, like the monster in a horror film, of re-emerging again and again when you think the hero’s finally got him. But I guess we can at least start to hope that this is, finally, the beginning of the end.