07.04.24: the code breakers

Before I post the next text, I wanted to share something which, I think, will be relevant in terms of reading Latin.

Before I retired, I worked in one school where there was a student who was an absolute computer whizz-kid. The UK GCSE ICT examination was a walk in the park for him, and, independently, he was also studying Advanced Level Computer Science, as well as Additional Mathematics. This lad knew everything about computer programming, html, coding i.e. all the things that I knew nothing about. More than that, he was a fanatical online gamer – something else I know nothing about but, whatever he was doing, it looked complex. Interestingly, he also attended Chinese classes.

One day I mentioned casually to a colleague that this boy should study Latin but didn’t really explain why beyond saying that he had the sort of mind that would like it.

Some time went by and we reached International Day – a lot of schools have that. All the kids are divided according to their “house”, each house is allocated a country and they then have to do presentations, performances and displays e.g. cookery pertaining to that country.

Purely by chance, this boy’s house had been given Italy.

On the day of the presentations, he stood up and gave a speech – in Latin – perfectly pronounced and with no errors. I nearly fell off my chair. My colleague whispered “Did you tell him to learn Latin?” “No,” I replied “I had no idea he was doing that.”

At the end of the presentation, I asked him why he had chosen to learn Latin by himself. This is what he said:

“It’s like Computer Science or Mathematics, they’re codes, to get to the answer you need to look at the endings, see how the words are related to each other, sometimes the words look the same but they’re not. Each sentence is a challenge and, to get to the next level, you need to break the code.”

I could also see why Chinese would appeal to him; every character was a code to be cracked. I suggested to him that, at some point in his life, he should also take a look at Russian, and the Hieroglyphs.

Now, for him, Latin was not of historical or cultural interest – he was far from being a “History” man – but he recognised the intellectual challenge which Latin presented and that the mental skills involved in analysing what is happening in a Latin sentence, learning ‘formulae’, applying information and seeing connections captivated him as much as Computer Science and Advanced Algebra.

The deeper you get into Latin, the less likely the “answer” is going to jump off the page. You need to be familiar with the endings, but you can’t just learn the tables. How it’s all working together in a text means you do have to be able to ”crack the codes”.

But that doesn’t happen quickly. The next couple of posts will give some simple practice in it.