When first is second.

SATURDAY, JUNE 5, 2010


When first is second.

I am thinking of this a lot trying to teach DakotaDawg my first language that should be hers, English. There is so much about language that is more than just context. A lot of it was left to us by dead ancestors. Thanx all you dead guys.

Some of our beloved English actually came from the Romans. They spent a great deal of time on the island camped out, messing with local women and building a wall for the emperor. The languages that flowed directly from the Romans are the Romance Languages. Maybe they are named after those amorous legionnaires. English is more of a hodgepodge of stuff from all the conquerors but since almost 60% of English comes from Latin; I thought DakotaDawg might benefit from a lesson.


Pay extremely close attention now.


Father Fiore was a Roman born in the wrong century that taught the Cuban lady that worked in the Rectory how to make Italian food. He was from the heart of Italy and always had garlic on his breath and spaghetti sauce somewhere on his habit to attest to that fact.

Additionally, he was stuck teaching freshman and sophomores all the fine points of Latin. He drilled us on our declensions. We passed notes, shot spitballs or generally tried to ignore him unless he was lifting us out of our desks by our sideburns or hitting us with his trusty meter stick. Father Fiore could also hurl a full stick of chalk with deadly accuracy completely across a classroom more accurately and faster than any fastball ever approached home plate.

I still remember some of what Father Fiore drilled into us: us, I, o, um, o; i, orum, is, os, is. These were the endings for masculine second declension Latin nouns. Neuter second declension endings were the same, except different. In Latin, Second declension nouns are mostly masculine and neuter.

I’ll spare you the definition of Nominative, Genitive, Dative, and Ablative or of course the trusty and beloved Vocative. We didn’t bother with the Vocative too much in Latin I and II. We will not deal with it here or even conjugate any verbs.

The neuter second declension nouns are like the masculine ones except the endings are different for nominative in the singular and nominative and accusative in the plural. Endings for neuter second declension were: um, i, o, um, o; a, orum, is, a, is.

This made a couple of endings of second declension neuter the same as first declension feminine nouns. Most feminine nouns were first declension. Women usually like to be put first but there are always those few that would rather be second. So there were second declension feminine nouns. Second declension feminine nouns are declined exactly the same as the masculine ones. This is the kind of the exception that proves the rule.

If you did not know if a noun was neuter or feminine because it ended in an a, and, you had been paying attention to Father Fiore and weren’t in detention as much as I was; you could determine sexuality from the context. You could always ask Luke because for what ever reason he got it.

All of this was beyond my comprehension in the ninth and tenth grades. I was concentrating on girls, ducking spitballs and getting out of detention. My grades reflected that. I really did not care about Gaius Julius Caesar; “Veni, vidi, vici.” or whether or not “All Gaul is divided into three parts.” or even why. I was having more than enough trouble merely carrying my HUGE U.S. History book. Backpacks had not been invented; those that carried briefcases were the first generation NERDS.

DakotaDawg should have learned English first but instead she is learning it second. She really does not seem to care too much about declining Latin nouns or Father Fiore. She thinks Latin is a dead language and told me there wasn’t even anyone alive who could correctly pronounce it.

When I was working on English commands as we prepared for our walk; DakotaDawg just looked at me and said in Hochdeutsch: “First, just grab the plastic bag… Second, in context, if we don’t get going soon; Father Fiore will have me at the blackboard copying the entire conquest of Gaul in detention and we won’t even need it.”

I knew what she said because I had the Google Translation App on my homepage. I am going to send away for Rosetta Stone German software.

Nos ingredior. DakotaDawg was starting to look a little accusative.


DakotaDawg is feminine and she always come first although she is an exception to most rules.