How to Ask Politely in Latin

Guest post writ­ten by Peter Bar­rios-Lech, Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor of Clas­sics at Uni­ver­si­ty of Mass­a­chu­setts Boston.

Introduction: What Is Bradley’s Arnold?

This semes­ter, for the first time in four years, I’m teach­ing Latin Prose Com­po­si­tion, or, more accu­rate­ly, the “Trans­la­tion-of-pas­sages-of-Eng­lish-prose-into-a-Latin-prose-that-accords-with-the-norms-of-the-Clas­si­cal-Peri­od.” This is a ven­er­a­ble exer­cise in the Anglo­phone world, whose chief guide was a text­book first pub­lished in the mid-19th C. by the then rec­tor of Lyn­don, Eng­land, Thomas Kerchev­er Arnold. Arnold’s first text­book, Greek Prose Com­po­si­tion, had made his lit­er­ary for­tunes, and the Latin coun­ter­part to this book seems to have proved equal­ly pop­u­lar (and per­haps equal­ly lucra­tive). Yet the Rec­tor of Lyn­don did not live to see what proved to be the most pop­u­lar ver­sion of his Latin man­u­al, a revi­sion under­tak­en by George Granville Bradley, a Dean of West­min­ster Abbey. This revi­sion, appear­ing at the end of the 19th C., and now (affec­tion­ate­ly?) called Bradley’s Arnold, has been the sta­ple of the Latin Prose Com­po­si­tion Class­room ever since. You can read the whole inter­est­ing his­to­ry of this text here.

Now, Bradley’s Arnold (revised by Pro­fes­sor of Latin at Liv­er­pool, Sir James Fred­er­ick Mount­ford, in 1938; then again for Bolc­hazy-Car­duc­ci, by Don­ald Sprague, in 2005), is a clas­sic of the GT (Gram­mar Trans­la­tion) Method, which takes for grant­ed that teach­ing of Latin should hap­pen through gram­mat­i­cal analy­sis of Latin sen­tences. Indeed, as Bradley, in the intro­duc­tion to his revi­sion writes, the “log­i­cal analy­sis of lan­guage is by this time gen­er­al­ly accept­ed as the only basis of intel­li­gent gram­mat­i­cal teach­ing, whether of our own or of any oth­er lan­guage” (pp. v‑vi). This is not the place to engage in a debate on the best means to learn Latin gram­mar; a top­ic which could per­haps become the focus of a series on this very site.

Sug­gest­ed read­ing: Latin prose com­po­si­tion: Books and Method

Bradley (And Arnold And Mountford And Sprague) On The Latin Imperative

At any rate, despite some ini­tial reser­va­tions, I was con­vinced by a good friend and col­league to use Bradley’s Arnold in my own class. And so, as my stu­dents and I were trudg­ing duti­ful­ly through the burn­ing remains of besieged cities and wit­nessed cir­cum­stances treach­er­ous to the repub­lic, we came across the fol­low­ing passage.

140. The imper­a­tive mood is used freely in Latin, as in Eng­lish, in com­mands and entreaties, in the sec­ond per­son sin­gu­lar and plural.

• Ad me veni! Come to me.
• Audite hoc! Hear this.

141. But, espe­cial­ly in the sin­gu­lar, where one per­son, an equal, is addressed, there are many sub­sti­tutes for so peremp­to­ry a mode of speak­ing. For exam­ple, instead of scribe we might say:

• tu quae­so (obse­cro) ad me scribe
• cura ut scribas (see 118)
• scribas velim (see 121)
• scribe sis (si vis=please)
• fac scribas (see 125 Note)

(Bradley’s Arnold, p. 93, 2005 Bolc­hazy-Car­duc­ci edition)

Context Matters

The authors raise an impor­tant point. The addressee – the per­son whom we’re address­ing – plays an impor­tant role in what we say and how we say it. “Give me five bucks for a hot dog” is fine if direct­ed to an inti­mate friend – when you find your­self hun­gry and short of cash at the ball park – but will not do when addressed to some­one you know less well. You might want to avoid ask­ing your boss for a sta­pler at the office, but feel more com­fort­able mak­ing the same request of your co-work­er. When email­ing a pro­fes­sor for a rec­om­men­da­tion, you’re less like­ly to ask direct­ly: “Dear Prof. X.  I need a rec­om­men­da­tion. Please write me one in the next month.” Much more like­ly are you to make use of one of many avail­able scripts, for instance, “begin by point­ing out a pre­vi­ous con­nec­tion to the pro­fes­sor, explain the sit­u­a­tion, and then ask as nice­ly as pos­si­ble for recommendation.” 

Cicero Asks Tiro To Take Dictation

Latin­ists have recent­ly been study­ing these things with inter­est­ing results. We now know more about the soci­olin­guis­tic dimen­sions of Latin, or how the iden­ti­ty of the addressee and speak­er affect­ed what was said, we under­stand bet­ter Cicero’s let­ter writ­ing prac­tice, specif­i­cal­ly, what kinds of scripts were avail­able to him in mak­ing cer­tain kinds of weighty requests, and how the great man asked for some­thing nicely. 

Which brings me back to the Bradley’s Arnold pas­sage. It’s most­ly right, but it gets some things quite wrong (not fault of the authors; our knowl­edge of Latin has advanced in leaps and bounds in the last four decades). So, in Sec­tion 140 (The imper­a­tive mood is used freely in Latin, as in Eng­lish, in com­mands and entreaties), the authors are cor­rect. Latin speak­ers did use the present imper­a­tive for almost every­thing, from the most peremp­to­ry com­mand (tace!, “shut up!”) to the most abased entreaty (parce, pre­cor! “spare me, please!”).  But as the two exam­ples indi­cate, the present imper­a­tive is like a chameleon, tak­ing its col­or from the imme­di­ate con­text. So we find the first exam­ple (tace) put in the mouth of a mas­ter address­ing a slave in Plau­tus (Cur­culio v. 131). The sec­ond is Horace’s hum­ble request of a god­dess (Horace Odes, 4.1.2).

But like I said, the pas­sage miss­es the mark on oth­er points. Thus, sis does not mean please (explain­ing why would require anoth­er post). In fact, the oppo­site:  accord­ing to J.N. Adams – a world expert on Latin social vari­a­tion, bilin­gual­ism, and more – “where­as obse­cro, quae­so and amabo usu­al­ly tone down a remark, sis and age can be described as ‘inten­si­fiers’.” And so I just can’t imag­ine Cicero telling his dear amanu­en­sis Tiro to take down a dic­ta­tion with scribe sis, unless, that is, the great man hap­pened to be in a real­ly bad mood that day. I haven’t stud­ied things like fac scribas and cura ut scribas in Cicero’s let­ters, but the rel­e­vant forms in Roman com­e­dy sug­gest to me that these are no more and no less polite than the present imper­a­tive (scribe):  that is, they were rather neu­tral ways of get­ting a request across.

Now, what did Cicero do if he had to impose and want­ed to do so polite­ly? As Eleanor Dick­ey shows, the bar­ris­ter from Tus­cu­lum used velim ut facias and quae­so ut facias for minor requests (such as ask­ing for a response to a let­ter), but reserved rogo ut facias and peto ut facias for more bur­den­some ones.

Asking A Friend For Five Dollars In Latin

So, want to ask a friend for five bucks in Latin? You could say quae­so, da mihi quinque thalaros (See, again, Eleanor Dick­ey on the word order of quae­so and the relat­ed words for please, here). Or why not velim ut mihi des quinque thalaros or quae­so ut mihi des quinque thalaros. But you prob­a­bly won’t want to say da sis quinque thalaros, unless you didn’t real­ly need the mon­ey in the first place.

Still, what is the dif­fer­ence between cedo mihi quinque thalaros and da mihi quinque thalaros? And between da amabo, da obse­cro, and da quae­so?  In the next post, I’ll turn to these ques­tions, in a dis­cus­sion that I hope will be of inter­est espe­cial­ly for those who cul­ti­vate spo­ken Latin.

Peter Bar­rios-Lech is an Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor of Clas­sics at Uni­ver­si­ty of Mass­a­chu­setts Boston.

If you’re inter­est­ed in writ­ing in Latin, Bradley’s Arnold is a great tool! You can pur­chase the book here.