Precerpt from My 20th Language: L2 Latin - Fourth Grade
Latin, L2
Latin was perhaps
my second language. Perhaps French was. It would be difficult to say since I grew
up in a monolingual English household in a French-English bilingual community.
French was “around” but had not arisen to a level of awareness by the time
Latin came into my life—and stayed there for a lifetime.
Fourth Grade
My father never completed high
school. The oldest of six living children (a set of twins died right after
birth), he had to drop out of school during the Great Depression and take a job
to help support the family. He always wanted to finish, and he even signed up
for a correspondence high school course. With eight children, however, he had
his hands full feeding, clothing, and raising them. He was still working on
that correspondence course when he died of a heart attack at the age of 58.
Not having a formal education never
held him back from intellectual activities. Neither did his daytime job as a
shoe cutter nor his all-consuming work as a farmer. He loved to write, and as a
child he had written several short stories that he saved and read to us when we
were children. He also loved physics, and as a child he had gotten himself into
a lot of trouble by building his own radio and intercepting FBI traffic. His
mother nearly died from fright when the FBI came to the door and confiscated
her 12-year-old’s radio. The third thing he loved was Latin, which he had
apparently taught himself after having been exposed to it in school.
I inherited all these loves from
him. How much was innate and how much he inculcated in me, his oldest child,
would be hard to say. It did not matter to him that I was a girl. He taught me
to drive the tractor before I was old enough to have a license. He assigned me
to read all nine volumes of his radio theory books as soon as schools had
taught me to read and then took me on radio and television repair calls, a
moonlighting job he carried on for nearly ten years until my mother said enough
was enough and that he needed to spend a few hours a week at home. He guided me
in building a darkroom in my early elementary school years so that I could work
with issues of light/physics. Ultimately, the most important thing he did for
me, though, was to bring home the high school Latin textbook.
Since he had been elected to the
school board, he had access to the schools in ways that other parents did not.
My ninth summer arrived together with the loan of the high school Latin book.
The previous summer I had finished reading the radio theory books. This summer
was to be my Latin summer, and for the next eight years, my interests, hobbies,
and activities would alternate between physics, writing, and foreign languages.
Even as a fourth grader (or maybe
because my brain was more plastic because I was only a fourth grader), Latin
made perfect sense. I loved the conjugations and cases, perhaps the first
indication that I had linguist blood in me. I immediately saw the connections
with English, the way many words had roots in both languages. Later, I learned
the historical relationship between Latin and English, due in great part to the
influence of French on English as the result of the events of 1066 under
William the Conqueror. And even later, I would learn about the common use of
Latin for medical terminology.
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