Mensa, Mensa, Mensam… and Other Memories of Learning Latin

'In wine there is truth, in water there is health'

Back in the day - 1979, when I was a 15 year old schoolboy, Year 10 came along (we called it 4^th form back then) and we had to choose our options for O’ Levels - an academic rite of passage for UK kids.  These would, a few years after I did them, be renamed GCSEs in yet another governmental attempt to reinvent the wheel – standing for General Certificate in Secondary Education.  If you’re not from the UK, these are the main qualifications kids do when they hit 16 (sometimes before, but usually at that age). The “O” in O’ Level stood for “Ordinary”, so I suppose the name change made the process of gaining the qualifications (a Herculean task, which it remains to this day) seem rather more dignified than merely scraping through something “ordinary”.  Without irony, the next Level, which was and is still called A’ Level stood and stands for “advanced” so you can see the logic in changing the name, at least. Image

Still with me? Now when it came to our “options” – we had some choice.  Nationally, every school had to offer English Language and Literature, with Maths the cherry on the top of compulsory subjects.  We also had to choose at least one science (from Physics, Chemistry and Biology). Then there was RE – Religious Education – there was an O’ Level for this, from which my school bizarrely opted out, meaning we had to be the donkeys without a carrot.  We also had to do PE (Physical Education), which again was not examined but for the most part was fun. So much for options!

It is as good to do as not to do

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So, I went with two sciences (Biology and Physics) and a language (French, but I also did Welsh as a private candidate because living just over the border in England, the school did not offer it).  I chose History over Biology and Art over Technical Drawing.  I had room for one more and the choice was between a new-fangled subject being piloted called Computer Studies and a slightly more established one called Latin.  I chose the latter.  So, I ended up doing ten examined subjects (some did less, others a few more).

Even back then, taking Latin was a minority decision.  I ended up in a class of about a dozen other kids, with the same teacher we had for French (who we all adored, so that was cool too). Today, a subject would probably get dropped by a school if only 13 people opted to do it, but mine in its wisdom kept it on not just for the tiny bit of prestige the offer lent it academically, but also because they probably didn’t want a group of resentful teenagers on their hands for the next two years.

I will either find a way, or make one

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I got to learn some programming in the lunchtime “computer club”, so got to do that too, but without the pressure of an exam.  “Why did you choose Latin?” was a question we were repeatedly asked, often with the addition of “It’s a dead language!” at the end as a dig at the sagacity of our choice.  As was quickly pointed out in our first class, the aim was not to make us conversationally proficient in this “dead” language, but to teach us its complex mechanics and introduce us to (some of) its literature in its original form.  It sounds like study for study’s sake when put like that – and of course it was. 

Initially, we didn’t really know what we were letting ourselves in for.  Although we had all studied “classics” in one form or another, none of us had studied Latin before – and so getting ready for an O’ Level from scratch in two years was a challenge.  Before long, we were immersed in conjugating verbs (amo, amas, amat and so on), something we were already used to in our other language studies but the major shock came when we were introduced - in the  very first lesson - to the declension paradigm.  The what? Exactly. We left the room bewildered because I suspect we thought that Latin, being an older language, would be less complex than any modern language we were also learning (including English, of course). 

However, to be presented with the fact that a noun changes its form depending on its job in the sentence was discombobulating to say the least. Each form was known as a “case” – nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive (which made us titter, inexplicably), dative and ablative (the one I always forgot). And so, the process began, using “table” – “mensa” in Latin - as our first noun, we declined it in the singular, we declined it in the plural.  We declined it when it meant “to the table” or “under the table” or “on the table”. We declined that bloody table into oblivion (and sometimes correctly).  I can still decline “mensa” in both singular and plural form, but it hasn’t become a party trick, unfortunately. I tried it once to blank faces, and that was the end of that.

Virtue, not pedigree (is the mark of nobility)

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I could expand on the horrors that awaited us, but that would bore you – and I would not be telling the entire truth.  Although we hadn’t suspected Latin’s complexities, I was at least a little better equipped than my classmates to take it on board as in Welsh we have treigladau (“mutations”), which changes the first letter of a word depending on grammar and sentence structure. Take for example, Bangor, a city in North Wales.  The name starts with a B, right?  Yet, if you go to Bangor, you go "i Fangor". If you are in Bangor, you are "ym Mhangor". They are one of the most distinctive features of the Welsh language (and come naturally to first language speakers and as a nasty surprise to learners!).

Back to the truth of the matter. We loved Latin. The teacher helped a lot (Miss Roe, thank you!) because she had an immense enthusiasm for the subject, was slightly dotty and exited the room whenever we had something slightly risqué from the set texts to translate – “I’ll leave you to translate the next few lines on your own”.  We were also, before it became a badge of shame, shamelessly clever.  Latin was a new challenge, and we collectively egged each other on (no better verb for it, frankly), to see who could get things right or who could translate something (either way) first.  As part of the “grammar stream” kids, (schools would select your “stream” according to your academic ability which is as damning as it sounds), we represented the nerdier end of even that spectrum.  We weren’t so much outcasts from the rest of the school - I was on the gym team, for example - but in Latin, we were kindred.

Was it a waste of time?  That’s a question that has come up regularly over the years? In and of itself – that’s very much debatable. Did it help me, in other ways? That’s a resounding yes. It taught us how languages work - structure, logic, patterns, and exceptions. It trained our minds to notice detail, to think in systems, and to accept that rules can be both rigid and bizarrely, sometimes confoundingly elastic at the same time. It also left me with a vocabulary of grammatical terminology that has proven surprisingly durable, even if the Latin itself has faded at the edges.  Plus, some fun facts. Latin has neither a definite nor an indefinite article (“a” and “the”), while Welsh has only a definite article (“the”), but no indefinite article. English, of course, has both.  Not a lot of people know that!

Creation from Nothing

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Here’s another - the three languages I studied (Latin, French, Welsh) are all historically connected and, in diverse ways, still share traces of vocabulary that can be spotted today (if you know where to look!). For example, words like “window” and “bridge” reveal these connections.

French fenêtre comes from Latin fenestra, while Welsh ffenestr shows the same Latin root filtered through different sound changes and centuries of borrowing. Likewise, Latin pons gives us the French pont, and the Welsh pont is clearly from the same source - all meaning “bridge,” and carried elegantly across languages through Roman influence and later contact. It’s a reminder that languages are not sealed systems, but overlapping histories: layers of conquest, trade, education and everyday use, all leaving their mark in the words we still use without thinking.  Was it a waste of time? Not for me.

More than the collection of “fun facts” about languages, it created a shared experience - a small, slightly bewildered community of us grappling with declensions, conjugations, and the occasional existential crisis over a table that refused to bloody well stay a table. And oddly enough, those lessons have a way of resurfacing decades later, uninvited but useful, like old friends who never quite leave but are never unwelcome.

If you got to the end of this, thank you! As a reward, here’s a lovely video by BBC Ideas, presented by Dr Daisy Dunn, covering five Latin phrases that are still meaningful today.  My own personal favourite in featured. Can you guess what it is? Responsa in tabella missa (that’s the closest I could get to “answers on a postcard”).