Homo: corpus et animus

This session is in two halves, and each teaches something the other cannot.

Half one: the people, and what they tell you about the corpus

Notice what is not there. No word for mother, sister or daughter in the first two hundred ranks. No friend. No word for woman at all.

That is not Latin being strange. That is the corpus talking.

Latin survives in the texts somebody chose to copy, and overwhelmingly that means history, oratory, philosophy, epic, law, and - by an enormous margin once you count everything - the Bible, the liturgy and a thousand years of theological commentary written after Rome fell.

Deus at rank 76 and dominus at 113 are not there because classical Romans said god and lord constantly. They are there because ecclesiastical Latin is a very large share of surviving Latin, and it says both on every page. Rex, pater, filius and frater are the vocabulary of dynastic history and religious writing at once.

Knowing this is useful rather than merely interesting: it tells you what kind of Latin you are being trained to read, and it explains why an early Latin vocabulary feels formal in a way an early Spanish or French one does not.

homo versus vir

The one distinction here you must get right.

Homo is a human being, of either sex. It is behind human, homicide and homage.

Vir is specifically a man, an adult male, often with a flavour of being someone's husband. It is behind virile and virtue - virtus meant something like manliness before it broadened.

omnes homines - all people, everyone

omnes viri - all the men

Getting this backwards is the commonest vocabulary error beginners make in Latin, and it changes what a sentence says.

Half two: the body and the mind, which you already own

Ten words. Roughly forty English ones, and you did not have to learn any of them.

Use the English word to remember the Latin one, never to deduce it. Meanings drift, sometimes a long way: caput gives chapter because a chapter was originally a heading, and capital both for the city (head of a country) and the money (head of an account). Nothing in those would let you guess head working backwards.

The stems, and the trick hiding in the English

Most of this session is third declension, which is where the nominative tells you nothing:

Now look at the English derivatives again: corporate, capital, oral, nominate, generic, hominid, regal, patriarch, fratrernal.

The English words are built on the Latin stem, not on the nominative. That is not a coincidence - English borrowed the oblique forms, because those are the ones that appear in running Latin.

Which gives you a genuinely useful trick in reverse. If you know an English derivative, you very often already know the Latin stem, and the stem is the hard half of a third-declension noun. Corpus looks like it should give corpus-; corporate tells you it is corpor-. The whole difficulty of the word, solved by one you have known since childhood.

Homo to homin- is the one that still catches people. The accusative is hominem.

os deserves a warning

There are two Latin words spelt os and they are unrelated:

• os, oris (neuter) - mouth, face. Gives oral.
• os, ossis (neuter) - bone. Gives ossify, osseous.

The genitive tells them apart, which is one more argument for learning nouns with their genitive rather than without.

Try it

Rex filium habet. - The king has a son.

Omnes homines mortales sunt. - All human beings are mortal.

Corpus et animus unum sunt. - The body and the mind are one.

Manus caput non est. - The hand is not the head.

Vita brevis, ars longa. - Life is short, art is long.