When in Rome

The story of English is one of plundering words from far and wide and ipso facto from the Romans.

In 1573, the language purist Ralph Lever tried to replace fancy Latinate words with honest to goodness English ones. For conclusion, he suggested

end say; for condition, if say; for proposition, shew say.

As with all such attempts to manhandle language, he failed dismally. His word for negation, naysay, is the only one that survived. Although I have to applaud a couple of suggestions: for definition, saywhat, and for logic, witcraft.

The vast vocabulary of English is drawn from Germanic and Graeco-Roman stems, notes Peter Jones in Quid Pro Quo, which makes it the rich, flexible language it is. And, he doesn’t mention, it raids just about every other language under the sun, to fill perceived gaps of expression and colour in shades of meaning.

Jones, a retired Cambridge classics lecturer, takes us on an entertaining etymological stroll through Roman life, from

politics, justice and warfare to medicine, illuminating our enthusiastic borrowings – and theirs from Greek – through subsections a paragraph or two long. Because he’s a natural storyteller and clearly knows this stuff inside out, you learn an awful lot about how Roman society was run too – although his earlier book Veni Vidi Vici might be regarded as a more thorough guide to Roman life. (Incidentally, based on the evidence, Julius Caesar’s pronunciation of those words would have sounded more like “waynee, weedee, weekee”, which is less triumphant general and more Monty Python.)

Jones sets right other misconceptions, including the idea that Roman soldiers were paid in salt (a Pliny the Elder invention). But mostly the book is a pleasant collection of hundreds of examples of how Latin words morphed and slid around to slot into English. Such as how infantry is related to infant, the origin of cynics and sceptics, the link between glamour and grammar and how the word dildo came about.

The fact that it’s written in short chunks might be off-putting for some readers wanting an expanse of argument. For me, the text is only marred by a few moments of repetition, such as four “these islands”, meaning Britain, in two pages. A book I shall return to.

QUID PRO QUO: What the Romans Really Gave the English Language, by Peter Jones (Atlantic Books/A&U, $24.99)