Page:The Making of Latin.djvu/10

vi of an intelligent set of boys and girls of about fifteen, as well as the needs of older students; so that the book might serve as the basis of a short series of lessons—between thirty and forty should suffice—in any Classical VI Form or in any class doing Latin work above what has come to be known as ‘Matriculation-standard.’

English-speaking students especially have much to gain from the study of Latin Etymology. Their own language is so largely based on Latin that their understanding of it is deepened and enlivened by knowing the history of Latin words and idioms; and all the time they are increasing their enjoyment, and consequently their profit, in reading Latin authors. To know, for instance, that English quick is close akin to Latin vivus (§ 1) and once meant ‘living’; that temere (§ 2) (whence English temerity) means ‘in the dark’; that purgare (from *pur-igāre § 89) means properly ‘to treat with fire,’ adds a picturesque element of interest to a multitude of passages in both English and Latin writers. One of the schoolboy’s first troubles in Vergil (Aeneid I. 8) may be made into a pleasure if it is explained to him that nūmen is a ‘portmanteau-word’ (p. 113 footn.) in which a simple derivative of nuere ‘to nod,’ meaning ‘a nod, assent, decision with authority,’ has been packed into one with the Latin equivalent of the Greek  ‘spirit’; so that nūmen means, in this passage and often, neither ‘decision’ nor ‘deity’ but a fusion of the two, ‘divine will, divine intention.’

But besides the help which etymology thus gives to interpreting Latin authors, there are many interesting questions which a student meets directly he begins to compare English with Latin, or indeed with any Romance language, but to which the answers have been only recently