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Margaret Kammerer
Professor Vaughn
English 2089
4 November 2016
My Fluency in a Dead an Immortal Language
Why are you studying that? Isnt it dead? That is probably the question that I have been
asked the most in my lifetime. No, I am not an archeologist, or a paleontologist, or a forensic
scientist. I am a classicist, meaning I study Latin and Ancient Greek. Ive been hearing the
question, No, but really isnt Latin dead? What can you do with that? since I was in the
seventh grade. People assume I am going into medicine or law, to align with the standards of
intelligence everyone seems to think I have. But I say no, I think Im going to teach high school
Latin. And it is surprising how many people get bent out of shape when you tell them this. I am
going to teach high school Latin because my skills in the language have developed to the point
that I am literate. I am going to teach high school Latin because I want to inspire others with the
same love for the language that I have, but that has also grown due to my literacy in the subject.
In addition to STEM fields becoming the pinnacle of academics, theres also been this prevailing
belief for awhile now that theres one big moment that should define and give meaning to ones
life. I disagree. I dont think that anyone is going to find that. My life, and more specifically, my
experience and development in the Latin language, has been a series of smaller moments. Its
almost hushed. It has developed without me taking much notice of it, which I think is due to the
circumstances surrounding how I first learned the language.
I started learning Latin in the seventh grade at a school where I was required to do so. I
still dont know what first got me hooked on Latin. Perhaps it was because this was my first

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experience learning another language, or perhaps it was that I already had a great interest in the
Romans. Regardless, I have very vivid memories of that class every day. I still remember doing
my first assignment. I didnt really understand how my teacher wanted our translation set up
(even though he explained it, in detail, during class that day) so that was a bit of a stretch, but the
Latin? Oh, the Latin I picked up easily. Granted, it was a paragraph in which every sentence
followed the same format (Roma est in Italia; Italia est in Europa; Italia est paene insula; you
get the point), but I understood it! Thus began my eternal love for Latin and my overwhelming
desire to prove to be the best. I was good at it. I joined countless competitions and got extra
teaching. My Latin academic team even placed at a competition. (See Fig.1) ADD CAPTION
Making the finals itself was rare for our team, and this time we had gotten second place!
Everything was coming so
naturally and any work I put in
immediately paid off. But, like
Icarus, I was flying a little too
close to the sun, and things soon
fell apart.
In proving my literacy, I
feel as though I must at first
mention how illiterate I feel at
times. And, I must mention how
my confidence just wavers, teetering wildly like a possessed seesaw. Or perhaps the trite and
overused metaphor of a roller coaster is more appropriate here. For a time, Ill think, No one has
ever been better at Latin!! I understand everything!! and then suddenly I will start thinking,

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Latin is so hard; why am I studying this; I know nothing and I need to just give up. This
continual up and down can even occur from one sentence to the next. At times, Latin and I have
a love-hate relationship, which tends to manifest itself either in the form of glory and relief at
understanding a passage or an ever-increasing amount of self-doubt.
My first seeds of doubt

Figure 1 The certificate I received for placing at the Miami University

certamen my senior year of high school.

came my senior year of high

school. Our class was down to only four students, and we were now reading one of the greatest
epic poems in the world: Vergils Aeneid. Latin had always come so easily to me, so I ignored
my doubts about my literacy and just told myself that I wasnt putting enough effort into my
reading, but once I did so, I would obviously be able to understand everything that was going on
easily enough. Oh how wrong I was. It was a culture shock to go from high school Latin, where
we were taught culture as well as the language itself, to college Latin where my grammar skills
needed to be phenomenal. I was suddenly thrown into a whole new environment where what Id
learned in high school just wasnt going to cut it. My first day in college Latin was an experience
unlike any other.
I sat in that seat in Blegen 214, in my first ever college class, at 9:05 on a Monday
morning. I was surrounded by about ten people who were evidently older than I (so clearly that
must mean they were better than I was as well) and the two people whom I recognized from high
school Latin competitions and the test for the huge Latin scholarship awarded by UC (so I knew
for a fact that they were better than I was), and wanted to simultaneously throw up and run out of
the room. I am not kidding, I had to tamp down every urge within me that was telling me to
Flee!! Flee immediately!!! I remember every aspect of the class that day because I was so
terrified. I wont ramble with the details of that class period, but suffice it to say that there was

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no way I felt even competent enough in Latin to even be in the class, let alone literate in the
language itself.
This experience gave me what I will affectionately call an existential crisis. I already
didnt know for sure what I wanted to do with my life; the only reason I was studying Latin at all
was because I just couldnt imagine my life without it. But after a few days in my college
courses, I realized that I did not know how to translate Latin effectively. No one had ever given
me just a block of Latin text and told me, Translate. Because of this, I knew exactly how
Malcolm X felt in his essay, Learning to Read, where he says, Id never realized so many
words existed! I didnt know which words I needed to learn. Finally, just to start some kind of
action, I began copying (120). That was what I soon had to do with Latin. There were so many
words just in every stanza that were new to me
(because Vergils vocabulary is just not the same as
Ciceros; it doesnt help that theyre writing in two
different genres). So I started looking through the
assignment for the night ahead of time. And I wrote
all over the text and made connections between
words and made flashcards for vocabulary words I
struggled with. But I still wasnt getting translations
right. To the right is a copy of one of my translations,
after being corrected in class.
Even with all that work I was putting in, I still
wasnt translating effectively. Every assignment took way longer than I expected it to, and every
class I sat in still caused me enough nerves that I was not going to volunteer to translate in front

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of everyone. Latin was suddenly so hard, and I felt so out of my depth that I thought that there
was no way to get past it. I had to adapt quickly or be left behind. Critics of the Latin language
Figure 2 A page from my Latin
notebook during my first year at UC,
showing the extensive corrections my
ancient texts or pick up other Romance languages more
translations had to go through.
say that no one actually learns Latin to be able to read

quickly or study medicine or law or the other responses to that dreaded question, What can you
do with Latin? Instead, some say that a person learns Latin in order to learn how to learn. Bear
with me. Because it is an ancient, Indo-European language, Latin has an incredible amount of
structure to it. The biggest difference in Latin, as opposed to English, (besides, obviously the
vocabulary) is that word order is really not important. Oh sure, there is a conventional word
order (subject-adjective-object-verb for the most part), but order is not essential to understanding
the meaning of the sentence, as it is in English. Instead, Latin has cases, different endings for
nouns and adjectives depending on what the words purpose is in the sentence. For example, if
the word puella, meaning girl, is the subject of the sentence, it looks just like I have already
written: puella. However, if it is the direct object, it looks like puellam. Or if the word appears as
puellae, it can either be the plural subject, or the singular possessive, or the singular indirect
object! The problem occurs when sentences become more complex, and it is almost impossible
to just read left to right anymore. That is when I realized that I had been coasting. I had not
learned how to learn, and thats why I was struggling so much with anything more than a simple
sentence.
That almost makes the little moments even sweeter. As Ive said, my Latin victories have
never been one definitive moment that I can point to and say, Yes! That, kids, that moment right
there is where I knew I understood Latin. Its the series of small moments that I have to remind
myself to think back on when I get discouraged or feel illiterate. This past summer (so, well into

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my Latin journeyabout seven years in fact), a friend sent me a picture of a page in the book he
was reading that contained a quote from the great Roman poet, Vergil. I looked at that picture,
thought for a moment, considered what it could mean, and within a few minutes, I was texting
him back with a translation. That was one of the first times that I had ever looked at anything in
Latin and just immediately understood what it meant, and it was the first time that I was able to
give someone a full translation for a quote that the person asked me about. This was one of the
best experiences regarding Latin that I have ever had, and all it was was a simple text message of
two lines of Latin. It took no scrawling all over the text of Latin I had before me, or scribbling
my hurried words onto a notebook page, rushing to get everything out of my brain and onto
paper before I forgot it all, only writing on every other line so that I would have extensive room
for corrections. It did not take a dictionary or a look to a reference grammar book. All I had to do
was look at the sentence and read it.
But being able to read Latin is not the only benefit of having a literacy in Latin. It can
lead to literacies in other areas as well. Sometimes, while writing papers for other classes, I get
hung up on how to make a sentence understandable. I have too many words and I cant move any
of them anywhere because then the sentence will not make any sense to the reader. It is at this
moment that I wish I could be writing in Latin. Occasionally, embarrassingly, I have tried to
translate it into Latin to see if that would help me, but unfortunately, it doesnt. My literacy in
Latin has led me to gain more of an understanding of the English language as well, because there
is no way to discuss grammatical concepts that, for the most part, exist in every language,
without having terms for these concepts. Poetic devices slowly creep into my writing as well.
Latin has very carefully insinuated itself into my life, wrapping itself ever tighter around my
heart and brain, and its showing in every aspect of my life. Stephen King believes that writing is

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telepathy. In his work On Writing, he says that We're not even in the same year together, let
alone the same room ... except we are together. We're close. We're having a meeting of the
minds (106). And that right there is why I read Latin. It is a way for me to learn what people
over two thousand years ago thought about their gods and their government and the people
around them, and the effects of their history.
Even more than being a presence in my life, Latin has dominated it for over seven years
now. I have made major life decisions based on the pursuit of this language. In fact, my career
goal has become teaching Latin to high school students, which is something I never thought that
I would be able to do. Good teachers are not just rejects who couldnt find a job in their field.
Teaching is not just the result of not being able to do. So throughout high school, when my
experience with Latin was that it was easy and teaching is a good fallback, I held those same
horribly misguided ideas. In my sophomore year, we got a new Latin teacher. He was younger
and from our area, so those of us who went to area Latin events regularly already knew who he
was. He was clearly smart and had often led his academic team to victory and had earned perfect
scores on the National Latin Exam throughout his high school years. But no one learned anything
the year he taught us. The program suffered: we went from 40 people to send to the state Latin
convention my freshman year to 16 my sophomore year. No one had any interest in taking Latin
anymore. It wasnt fun and to make things worse, we werent learning anything! Once I could
get my brain out of its panicked thoughts of, Oh no, Im not going to learn anything this year,
how are we going to win certamen [Latin academic team], were going to do terribly at
convention, how is he going to be my teacher for another two years?! I started to realize that it
was possible for me to be a teacher just like him: ineffective and unhappy. In contrast, my Latin
teacher for every other year, Mrs. Kless, my biggest supporter, told us stories all the time about

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how long it took for Latin to click for her and about how she didnt understand the many uses of
the subjunctive (a nasty mood for verbs that causes verb forms to morph into other forms) at first
either. If Mrs. Kless, my Latin hero, who taught us everything we ever needed and made it fun,
had struggled, and I was struggling now, maybe, I could turn out just like her.
So as it turns out, my seeming illiteracy in Latin is also going to be one of my biggest
strengths in teaching it. I will understand what my students are going through when they dont
understand and I will be able to break it down into more easily managed explanations. If I can
keep one person from feeling the way I felt my first day in Cicero, then I will consider myself
successful. Thus, when my students are asked, Isnt that a dead language? Why are you even
studying it? they can respond, I am studying Latin because I enjoy it and because my teacher
has made it understandable. And no, its not dead. Its immortal. This has also given me more of
a sense of what all of my classmates are going through. Literacy, in anything in fact, is not just
an inherent skill that is automatically attained. One has to work to become literate in a skill, and
the harder one works, the faster and easier the literacy is earned.

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Works Cited
King, Stephen. "What Writing Is." On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. New York: Scribner,
2000. 103-07. Print.
X, Malcolm. "Learning to Read." Writing about Writing: A College Reader. Ed. Elizabeth A.
Wardle and Doug Downs. 2nd ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2014. 120-26. Print.