The De Vere Journal
Morality is an old-fashioned word, which signifies a code of conduct handed down over the generations. This code of conduct forms the basis of a particular society’s values. Morality is thus rooted in time and tradition. It tends to be a collective concept…
The basic meaning of the root verb—putare—in the word ‘reputation’ is ‘to prune’, as in pruning vines. It can also mean ‘to purify’ and is related to the Latin words putus and purus, both meaning ‘pure’. Reputare would thus be ‘to prune again’ or ‘to repurify’…
The Latin word invidere, from which our words ‘envy’ and ‘invidious’ come, is a compound of the word videre meaning ‘to see’ or ‘to look at’. The prefix in- here gives the sense of ‘to keep one’s eye fixed on an object (with sentiments of secret jealousy)’….
Latin Illuminations: I shall be taking a different English word each week and attempting to cast new light on its meaning by looking at the Latin word or words from which it derives. I begin with the word ‘Altitude’.
Juno was an old Italian goddess of central Italy and was related to Astarte, the Phoenician goddess who presided over fertility and war. As Juno Regina, the Queen of Heaven, her cult was brought to Rome from Veii in Etruria in the 5th Century B.C.
It is difficult to imagine two more antithetical deities than Athena and Pan. Athena, one of the Olympian Twelve, was both parthenogenically born and a virgin; was the patron goddess of the two greatest city states of Hellas, Athens and Sparta, and a proctectress of cities in general; was a mistress of strategy in war and stratagems in peace; and invented the plough, rake, ox-yoke, horse-bridle, and chariot, as well as handicrafts for women.
The Latin equivalent of ‘coals to Newcastle’ (ligna in silvam) was the subject of an earlier post. The Greek equivalent is γλαυκ' Ἀθηναζε [ἀγειν], meaning ‘to bring an owl to Athens’. The owl was the bird of Athena, the patron goddess of Athens, and it is said that owls used to roost in the rafters of the old Parthenon, Athena’s sanctuary on the Acropolis (destroyed in the Persian invasion of 480 B.C.).
Naris, the word for ‘nostril’ in Latin, is used in the plural (nares) to mean ‘nose’. The Latin word derives from the Greek verb ναω meaning ‘to flow’ (just as the Greek word for ‘nose’ (ῥις, ῥινος) dervies from ῥεω, another verb meaning ‘to flow’). So the nose is associated radically with its flux―a throwback, perhaps, to an ancient theory of humours.
The Perfect Tense in Greek, unlike in Latin, is always a true Perfect and cannot do duty for the Simple Past (i.e. the Aorist). It represents an action as already completed at the present time, such as in the sentence την εἰρηνην σεσωκα, ‘I have saved the peace’. This sentence can never be translated ‘I saved the peace’ (for that would imply nothing as to the completion of the action).
Our word Nature comes from the Latin noun ‘natura’, which itself comes from the verb nascor, natus sum meaning ‘to be born’. Therefore the word natura has the primary meaning of ‘birth’. Its secondary meaning is ‘nature’, both as the order and constitution of the universe and as the natural disposition or character of a person, creature or thing…