craven.fr (.ox.ac.uk)

Of late I have been revising my Cherokee, a language which, as one might expect, I rarely have occasion to use. Okay, in all honesty, a language I have never had any occasion to use. Even so, every time I do study Cherokee I get something out of the experience, so I felt it worthwhile to write an article explaining why.

I have written before about how learning an endangered language is a meaningful way to build a connexion with a culture that is at risk of dying out (Benefits of Yiddish for the non-Jew). I have also written before about how learning some languages can be of benefit, because the mere ability to think in them actually increases mental capacity (Why Everyone Should Learn a Celtic Language).

The Cherokee language holds merit in both respects. While learning a language may not be something most people consider a social justice action, I have already explained, with regard to Yiddish, how the unparalleled exposure one gains to a culture through its language can be exceptionally meaningful when that culture has been brought close to extinction. Those statements hold just as true for the Cherokee, as indeed for all American Indians.

Cherokee originally held my interest, among the many native American languages, for a number of reasons that make it unique. For an American Indian language, it retains an above-average number of speakers, making it easier to find material in the language. (This is relative, of course—if one brought every Cherokee speaker in the world together, it would still not be enough to sell out an NHL arena.)

Besides accessibility, though, what truly made Cherokee irresistible to me were its writing system, and its unique linguistic properties.

Cherokee is the only native American language to use an indigenous writing system, the Cherokee syllabary developed by Sequoyah. This was the only case in recorded history of an illiterate member of a non-literate people independently creating an effective writing system, making Sequoyah the linguists' equivalent of the Wright Brothers or James Watt. It is one of the most impressive achievements of all time, made all the more so by the fact that nothing like it has ever happened before or since.

The syllabary takes some getting used to. There are 85 characters to learn, and while many of them have deceptively familiar forms, the pronunciation is completely different. D is pronounced a. A is pronounced go. K is pronounced tso, while 4 is pronounced se. Ꮳ, Ꮆ, Ꮸ, and Ꮯ all may look a bit like our letter C, but are all completely different letters, pronounced jah, loh, tsunh, and dli.

Besides taking some time to get used to, that means that Cherokee words are often much longer than they appear. For example ᏥᎪᎯ might look to an English-speaker like "haa", but is actually pronounced tsigohi. In spite of the time it takes to get used to reading and writing Cherokee syllables, however, I strongly feel that it is worth it: unlike any other native American language, it means one gets to use a writing system totally adapted to the language, and one with a unique history behind it as well. (And just because an Indian language is written in the Latin alphabet doesn't mean it will be easy to read.)

Cherokee really captured my attention, however, when I begin to study its grammar. I am already on the record as a proponent of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and believe that learning new ways to process language in our minds actually allows our minds to function in new ways as well. It makes us more creative, and more intelligent. Well, if I thought the VSO word order of the Celtic languages was unique, Cherokee's grammatical properties have blown my mind.

The only surviving member of the Southern Iroquoian languages, and one of only a small number of native American languages still spoken by children, Cherokee has linguistic properties unlike anything I have ever seen. Verb conjugations change according to the category of the object of the verb.

I'm sorry if that sentence is hard to understand, but no European or Asian language I've ever studied has any such concept, making it hard to express: "give me" can be ᏕᏍᎩᏁᎲᏏ if I'm saying give me something liquid, ᏕᏍᎩᎧᏏ in the case of give me something living, and ᏕᏍᎩᏅᏏ for give me something long. A polysynthetic language, the phrases ᏗᏇᏅᏒᎢ ᎨᎦ "I am going home" and ᏗᏤᏅᏒᎢ ᎮᎦ "you are going home" actually vary not only in the verb conjugation, but in its object, since the word for home changes according to whose home it is—the word cannot be separated from its relation. A distinction between living and non-living things permeates the grammar. The pronoun system is amazingly intricate (inclusive and exclusive first person plural forms, etc.). I could go on and on.

I congratulate any readers who are still reading this, as reading about grammatical properties of any language, let alone a language one does not know, probably cannot make for very interesting reading. Rather than prolong the agony, let me just summarise by saying that learning to think in Cherokee is a mind-expanding experience. For this reason, I have found that studying this language is its own reward, and one I do not regret undertaking.

I have talked before about my interest in pursuing the HSK as a long-term goal. The idea of a ranked certificate to showcase my Chinese ability appealed to me as a way to put a definite achievement milestone along the practically infinite road of learning Chinese characters. I will probably never be able to say I speak Chinese fluently, but if I pass HSK level 3 or 4, I will at least have that to hang my hat on.

Recently, though, I decided to test out just how much Chinese proficiency that level of mastery would actually get me. Using the character lists I found here, I coded up a little program that takes a website and highlights the characters that are included at a given HSK level.

The resulting program was actually pretty interesting to play around with. Trying it on different websites, with different types of content, allowed me to see, visually, how much I would be able to read after having learned a given number of characters. For example, here is a section from the Wikipedia article on railroads (chosen as an example of a page with fairly straightforward content), with only the level one vocabulary (176 characters) highlighted in pink:

That should make it fairly clear that at HSK Level 1, one remains quite illiterate. (As I can testify from experience!) Now here is the same text with HSK levels 1-4 highlighted (the most I ever expect to learn, 1067 characters). In this and the following image, the different shades of pink are progressively lighter according to the level of the character (1, 2, 3, or 4 in this case):

Finally, here is what one who achieves the full HSK levels 1-6 (that's 2631 characters) would know. Again, the lightest characters are those of the highest level; the black ones are those that a reader still would not recognise even after learning the entire HSK list:

While it is said that at level 4, one has mastered enough characters to read 90% of Chinese text, and at level 6 that number rises to 98%, viewing the texts in this way allows one to see things in more practical terms: a level 4 reader can read a text, but it will require a lot of trips to the dictionary to do so, making it quite a chore to get through anything more than half a page long.

At level 6, reading is much more fluid, but still by no means perfect. Still, dictionary trips are rare enough that one should be able to read real texts, even long ones, when motivated enough to do so (in the example above, learning 轨—gui3, 'rail'—alone, would eliminate half of the black characters remaining in the text).

This is probably why the HSK only tests up to this level: once one has attained this level of literacy, the remaining 1500-odd characters that an adult Chinese person knows can be picked up in the wild, in the course of immersing oneself in the Chinese language, rather than through further classroom learning.

I thought I would share these findings, because I think it is a useful visual illustration, even for someone who cannot read any Chinese, of what knowing a certain number of characters actually gets you.

Classical Latin is a very artificial language, which both in prose and poetry favours complex constructions that to this day define what Western culture considers erudite sounding, intellectual speech. Because of this, it is hard to read, in a "pick up a book and read it" sort of way. This sentence from Cæsar is a typical, and by no means extreme example:

Ubi (Cæsar) se diutius duci intellexit et diem instare quo die frumentum militibus metiri oporteret, convocatis eorum principibus, quorum magnam copiam in castris habebat, in his Diviciaco et Lisco, qui summo magistratui præerat, quem vergobretum appellant Ædui, qui creatur annuus et vitæ necisque in suos habet potestatem, graviter eos accusat, quòd, quum neque emi neque ex agris sumi possit, tam necessario tempore, tam propinquis hostibus ab iis non sublevetur, præsertim quum magnâ ex parte eorum precibus adductus bellum susceperit, multo etiam graviùs quòd sit destitutus queritur.

That's from de Bello Gallico I.16, and you don't need to know any Latin to get my point: all that is one sentence! You need to keep a lot in your head to keep track of that many subordinate clauses, and that means that even with a perfect grasp of Latin grammar and vocabulary, you still need to read very attentively. And Cæsar is considered one of the easiest classical authors to read! (I'm told that some of Thucydides' sentences run over four pages.)

In contrast, a lot of the Latin written after the fall of Rome, mostly by monks, is a lot closer to the way we talk today. The Gesta Romanorum is exactly the kind of book you can just pick up and read once you know the basics of Latin grammar and vocab, but it's not considered appropriate to give to students because its style is so "barbarous" in comparison to the eloquent classicism of Cæsar and Cicero. (I really have to question that reasoning—it seems to me to be akin to giving King Lear to kindergarteners because Dr. Seuss' works lack literary merit—but that's an whole other article.)

This leaves students of Latin and Greek with a hurdle even greater than that of students in modern languages: not only do they have the same difficult leap from the textbook to the real thing, but the only "real thing" they come into contact with is exceedingly difficult in terms of its content!

Even though grammars, dictionaries, and introductions to Latin abound, there is still relatively little material that guides the beginner gradually yet expeditiously towards a confident mastery of classical material. For all too many aspirants, the leap (or toss) into the primary texts has entailed a falling into a kind of void: suddenly, the project slows down, often ending in a perpetual stall.

That quote comes from Claude Pavur at Saint Louis University, whose site takes one approach to the problem which you can read about there. While I don't doubt that his accelerated readers are a godsend to some, it's not a method that resonates with me. (In fairness, he's targetting the 'beginning intermediate' level whereas I probably fall closer to 'advanced intermediate'.) But I am in total agreement with him as to what the problem is:

Under such conditions, reading Latin becomes puzzle-solving, an adventure in decoding, a challenge to patience, a therapeutic escape in "busy work" — anything but an instructive and vital encounter with an interesting, complex, and vastly influential culture that often offers great writing, important ideas, valuable teachings, and significant personalities.

What I ended up doing back in university was instead turning to mediæval texts like the Gesta Romanorum that were easier to read, or less erudite Roman texts like the Passio Perpetuæ. They might not be the pinnacles of world literature that the canonical classics are, but at least I could have "an instructive and vital encounter with an interesting, complex, and vastly influential culture" through them. But I still moved like a snail through classical Latin, going to the dictionary with what seemed like every other word.

It so happens however that I recently stumbled across a fantastic new way to learn Classical Latin that makes getting across this hurdle so much easier. It came to me when I was looking for Ovid's Metamorphoses on Google Books, which has a huge selection of beautifully typeset Latin and Greek books printed in the XVIIIth and XIXth centuries (when, as I've already asserted, typesetting conventions were also superior to those of the present day). I found just what I was looking for: an 1821 edition of Ovid, beautifully typeset with js and ligatures. At first I noted with amusement that the explanatory notes, pointing out the meaning of difficult words or allusions, were themselves in Latin, which didn't seem very helpful on the editor's part! But as I started looking it over I discovered something even more amazing: in addition to the footnotes, each page has a paraphrase of the text in simple-to-understand Latin! After some assiduous searching, I was also able to find an even more copiously annotated edition of Virgil based on the same principle (this time with a Talmud-inspired page layout, no less). Here's an excerpt:

An intermediate-level student can usually understand the Interpretatio and Notæ on his own, but the poem itself would be too difficult without a lot of dictionary work. But with their help, he can understand the sense and context of the poem (all the while excercising his Latin skills), and so figure out how to read the verses all by himself.

This strikes me as such a brilliant way to bridge the gap between learning the basics of Latin and learning how to deal with the intricate literary complexity of the great classics. And the reader is never discouraged to be looking at the "interpretation", since it is still Latin after all: There's no shame in being told that tellus means terra—the reader will go on to discover the nuances on his own, and through his own experience, which is much better than just being told it and adding it to one's vocab list to memorize. (And if you don't recognise even the simple word in the paraphrase, then looking it up is only half the chore, because you know that when you do you will most likely learn two words in the process, since it is a priori the synonym of another word you don't know in the text itself.)

The effect of all this is that you no longer feel "I don't know Latin because I can't read pages of Virgil effortlessly"; instead you feel that "I can read Latin, but Virgil is a difficult author who takes some effort to tackle"—which after all is just what English students feel when dealing with Shakespeare or Milton for the first time. It's an important difference for the reader's self-confidence—and a more realistic acknowledgement of the difficulty of the great classics.

My own level in Latin was until recently stuck precisely in that rut between being able to read the Gesta Romanorum without ever picking up a dictionary, but feeling like an idiot when confronted with a page of Cicero (the goal of my recent Latin kick has been to at last rectify that). Now with these books I am really looking forward to "leveling up" on Virgil and Ovid, and bet I will progress twice as fast thanks to this brilliant, yet sadly no doubt long-forgotten, idea!

I've written previously about the ways in which Latin and Greek complement each other in traditional classical education. Another interesting parallel exists in the texts that are most often read by students as their first introduction to real classical prose: for Latin, Cæsar's De bello gallico, and for Greek, Xenophon's Ἀνάβασις.

Both texts are chosen by teachers because of their style is clear and direct (and therefore not too confusing for beginners), and because their style and vocabulary are considered exemplary by the standards of classical prose for the two languages.

It is surprising, then, to note that, by pure coincidence and independently of their suitability for education, the books' actual contents are very similar. Both are autobiographical texts, narrated in the third person, about military campaigns that the author took part in. As such, they are edifying reading, both for history—giving the reader a vivid picture of the very different world that people lived in over 2000 years ago, and as guides to leadership: both tales are some of the most inspiring texts in history in this regard, and the simpler world they took place in makes it easy to take lessons from the various leadership techniques and trials that the protagonists went through.

Despite the similarities, though, I think it would be unfair to Cæsar to equate the two. Firstly, the historical impact of Julius Cæsar on world history dwarfs that of Artaxerxes, let alone Xenophon, so the opportunity to hear him in his own words is so much the more valuable. Not only that, but he is the commander in chief of the campaign he narrates from start to finish, while Xenophon only comes to a position of leadership through necessity. And of course, although both outcomes can give instructive lessons, Cæsar was victorious in his conquest of Gaul, while the Anabasis, a story of a successful escape, takes place in the shadow of Cyrus' defeated attempt to overthrow his brother. Cæsar is a genius in terms of leadership and military strategy (as he intends his writings to get across to us), and also in literary terms: his Latin prose really is outstanding, and he probably still holds the literary title for best use of understatement.

Xenophon cannot be put on the same level, in my opinion. In fact I suspect that were I teaching Greek I might use Plato's Apology and Symposium as my baseline texts for Attic prose. (I think it might also be cool to compare and contrast Xenophon's and Plato's Apologies, but I haven't gotten around to doing this yet myself, so I can't vouch for this approach.) They are sublime stylistically without being too difficult, and the lessons they teach are perhaps of greater use to beginning students. The Anabasis is an adventure story, very exciting, to be sure—but you have to be able to read Greek at a certain level for a page-turner to be a page-turner!

That is not to sell the Anabasis short, though. When military campaigns go wrong, as here or in the events recounted in the movie Black Hawk Down, the ensuing story is often more exciting and more replete with heroism than when everything goes according to plan. (Cæsar's victory at Alesia, however, is a fine counterexample.) When I was a beginning student, in both Latin and Greek I skipped over these texts in favour of others that seemed more interesting to me at the time, but now that I've had time to go back to them later in life I really do think that their place at (Cæsar) or near (Xenophon) the beginning of any classicist's reading list is well deserved.

It's time for a poem in English this time:

In A.D. 2101
War was beginning.
Captain: What happen ?
Mechanic: Somebody set up us the bomb.
Operator: We get signal.
Captain: What !
Operator: Main screen turn on.
Captain: It's you !!
CATS: How are you gentlemen !!
CATS: All your base are belong to us.
CATS: You are on the way to destruction.
Captain: What you say !!
CATS: You have no chance to survive make your time.
CATS: Ha ha ha ha ....
Operator: Captain !!
Captain: Take off every 'ZIG'!!
Captain: You know what you doing.
Captain: Move 'ZIG'.
Captain: For great justice.

This is of course the introduction to the Sega Genesis/Mega-Drive game Zero Wing, and was not intentional poetry. Rather it is the most famously egregious case of bad Japanese-to-English translation, something that Western gamers struggled with regularly in the 8-bit and 16-bit eras.

That said, however, it is one of the most quoted texts in the history of the internet age, and after the De-CSS haiku, the poem that I would consider most representative of our unpoetic age. Not only that, but I'm sure that most of the confused kids playing the game thought that the odd language was intended to be poetic.

As a poem, too, "All Your Base Are Belong to Us" holds up rather well. One proof being that it is so eminently quotable. I have seen separate references not only to the celebrated "all your base are belong to us" but also "somebody set up us the bomb", "how are you gentlemen !!", "what you say !!", "you have no chance to survive make your time", and of course, "for great justice". And if I ever have a voice-activated television or computer, you can bet I will program it to respond to "main screen turn on"!

We're not quite to the point where we have an instance of a famous poem created by a computer, but in some ways I feel like "All Your Base" comes close :-)

I was reading A Dissertation on Reading the Classics on Google Books, an XVIIIth-century book written for the son of a duke, telling him what classics he ought to read, when the following quote gave me pause:

I will go no farther in the Poets, only for the Honour of our Country, let me observe to Your Lordship, that while Rome hath been contented to produce some single Rivals to the Grecian Poetry, England hath brought forth the wonderful Cowley's Wit, who was beloved by every Muse he courted, and hath rivalled the Greek and Latin Poets in every Kind, but Tragedy.

He's referring to Abraham Cowley, but I had to look him up in order to know that! (I had assumed he was building up to Shakespeare.) Amazing that the author assumed Cowley to be of such enduring greatness that he would go down in history as the equal of Homer and Vergil! The fact that he was so far off the mark gives us some perspective on history all the same, though—and how surprised we might be at how the things we assume to be historic or enduring from our own lifetimes could end up being in the scheme of things.

O tempora ! O mores !

To me it sums up visually the sort of internal process of education that one gets out of learning Latin, the language that is at the foundation of our civilisation. It is at once humorous to me while still making its point very effectively.

What I did not expect, was to read in Cæsar's De Bello Gallico a passage which all but justifies this picture as being in fact an accurate depiction of the state of the ancient world! Here is an excerpt of his description of the Germanic tribes:

Neque multum frumento, sed maximam partem lacte atque pecore vivunt multum sunt in venationibus; quæ res et cibi genere et cotidiana exercitatione et libertate vitæ, quod a pueris nullo officio aut disciplina adsuefacti nihil omnino contra voluntatem faciunt, et vires alit et immani corporum magnitudine homines efficit. Atque in eam se consuetudinem adduxerunt ut locis frigidissimis neque vestitus præter pelles habeant quicquam, quarum propter exiguitatem magna est corporis pars aperta, et laventur in fluminibus.

I find it striking not only that the barbarians not only actually were basically wild hulking giants dressed half-naked in furs, but also that the Romans were so sophisticated in comparison, with a standard of living that after the fall of Rome would take a millennium to recover. This picture, which I had merely found humorous, speaks the truth in more ways than one.

One of my favourite moments in the movie The Blues Brothers occurs when the band finds itself preparing to go on stage at "Bob's Country Bunker". As our heroes slowly come to grips with the hints (hay, cowboy hats, a suggestion that they set up their steel guitars) that they are in the wrong kind of place, Elwood hesitantly asks, "ma'am, what kind of music do you usually play here?" Her chirpy reply, "oh, we've got both kinds—country and western!", underlines just how far out in the sticks they are.

Besides underlining just how country this country bar is—definitely not the kind of place for Chicago blues musicians, the joke also plays on the stereotype that country folk have very limited horizons, mistrusting anything that "don't come from 'round these parts," as it were.

It is because of those disparaging associations that I was so delighted to read the preface to Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria, precisely because that work is, to me, just about the polar opposite in terms of accepted erudition. Quintilian is considered one of the most heavily educated, serious writers of the ancient world, and his work has exerted an influence on education and literary criticism that can be felt to the present day. With all this running through my head, then, I opened the noble tome and read the first sentence:

Post impetratam studiis meis quietem, quæ per viginti annos erudiendis juvenibus impenderam, quum a me quidam familiariter postularent ut aliquid de ratione dicendi componerem, diu sum equidem reluctatus, quòd auctores utriusque linguæ clarissimos non ignorabam multa quæ ad hoc opus pertinerent diligentissime scripta posteris reliquisse.

As openings go, I must say, this is as pompous and formal as my understanding of Quintilian's reputation would have led me to expect, calling attention in the very first sentence to his twenty years of scholarship and long experience as a teacher—one who only hesitates to bestow his great knowledge upon us, for the humble reason that he is so widely read! The expression that surprised me so much, though, was the casual way he refers to "auctores utriusque linguæ"—both languages: Greek and Latin! No need to even enumerate them: for Quintilian it is just as much a given that these languages have all that's worth reading as it is a certainty for Bob's wife that country and western cover all the music worth listening to.

What it means, though, is that education in itself is no defense against close-mindedness. Indeed, often education—or rather, the assumption that one has done one's due diligence—is a key cause of close-mindedness. After all, with both Quintilian and Bob's wife, I think, we are dealing with people who have 'done their homework' and now feel confident that they know what they like. Presumably, at an earlier stage, they were more open to new things, but now that they consider themselves informed, they no longer are. "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing" at work? Perhaps, but the remedy to the phenomenon that that proverb describes is usually assumed to be more knowledge—more complete knowledge. I think that Quintilian's case proves that assumption false: it can happen that the more educated you are, the more susceptible you are to assume you know best.

The implication, for me, is that an open mind needs to be seen as something worth cultivating in and of itself, regardless of how much one may know about the world. However much one may adore or value something, the light that something brings into our life should not be the cause of a blindness to things outside of it.

(*in the two weeks since Tom put me on to reading Dinosaur comics anyway)

See it here

For reasons which will already be evident to regular readers of this blog, I especially appreciated learning that "he who can speak many languages is suspected by his peers to be a ultra super genius times two (sic)," and that "maybe in 3 months languages less spoken will be the very CURRENCY of coolness."

Perhaps then I'll get more comments on the Esperanto sections of my blog :-)

The introductory lecture to Stanford's course on Hannibal is one of the most chilling, disturbing things I have ever listened to. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, I think it is extremely important to listen to for some people.

The lecture in question gives background into some of the practices of the ancient Carthaginians, in order to better understand Hannibal's culture and the things that would be weighing on him psychologically in the course of his war with Rome. Apart from that connexion, though, Hannibal and the Punic wars do not really figure into this lecture. Rather it details the discovery of a facet of Carthaginian culture that history had tried to erase from memory: the widespread practice of sacrificing their first born sons when they were little boys.

Obviously, to me as a father, this was disturbing material to hear about, so I don't think I need to justify why this lecture chilled me so. Rather, the question is why, for some, I so strongly recommend listening to it.

For one, the Carthiginian civilisation was arguably the most advanced in the world at its prime, and inarguably it was near the top of the list. For a civilised human culture to develop along lines so alien to what we think of as civilisation today is an important revelation. Hearing about the Carthiginian practices poses important questions: What does it mean to be human? What attrocities are we as a species capable of if we develop in the wrong direction—and how can we ensure that we develop in the right direction, or even understand reliably what "right" is, if our "natural" senses can be so perverted?

Secondly, developing a better understanding of Carthaginian culture is absolutely necessary in order to understand another somewhat influential historical figure: Abraham. Carthage was actually a prosperous colony of the Canaanite Phœnician civilisation, and shared a common language and religion with those peoples. The same peoples who occupy a large part of the Old Testament. The story in Genesis of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac is, I believe, completely incomprehensible without the context of the Canaanite practices that this lecture describes.

These are dark questions, and it is easy to understand why they are not often addressed (indeed, this is why knowledge of the Carthiginian sacrifices—or at least of their reality and extent—was lost to us until recently). But for those who wish to understand the story of Abraham, the life of Hannibal, or some very probing questions on human nature, I think that the first lecture of this course is an important element.

Cui dono lepidum novum libellum
Aridâ modo pumice expolitum?
Corneli, tibi: namque tu solebas
Meas esse aliquid putare nugas
Jam tum, quum ausus es unus Italorum
Omne ævum tribus explicare chartis
Doctis, Jupiter, et laboriosis.
Quare habe tibi quidquid hoc libelli
Qualecumque; quod, patrona virgo,
Plus uno maneat perenne sæclo.

I saw a blog somewhere that was built around the idea going through the poems of Catullus, one by one, and commenting on and translating them. (I don't have a link; this was a random thing I came across going through some search results, and I can't find it again.) In any event there are probably a lot of people who do similar things, probably with all kinds of content (I would bet that Shakespeare's sonnets lead the pack.)

So I thought, what the hell, it might be fun to throw up the occasional poem and a few thoughts on it. I'm not going to offer a translation, though, since I find that that really ruins poetry, and it's counter-productive to share a poem you appreciate if in so doing you make it seem unattractive. It would just give the impression that I like unattractive poems to those who can't read Latin, reducing my audience to those who can. But in that case there's no need for a translation. Anyway, this first one is pretty easy to read; the only external context that it helps to have is knowing that Cornelius Nepos, whom the poet is addressing, wrote a three-volume history of Rome. (It says as much right there in the poem, but anything said poetically is easier to figure out if you're already aware of the facts.)

Anyway then, on to some thoughts on this Catullus' introduction to his libellus: It is a pretty darn impressive way to start a collection! From the very beginning it is clear that he indeed does wield language in a way that is expolitus arida pumice. I do always find it odd how in so many Latin poems you get these proper names in the vocative. Here it of course makes since, since it is a dedication, but Catullus does it all the time. Every time I see these references to random people this funny little epigram from Martial pops into my head:

Non amo te, Sabidi, nec possum dicere quare.
    Hoc tantum possum dicere: non amo te.

What a way for Sabidius to be remembered two millenia later! Other than that remark, for me the absolute best part of this poem comes at the end: Quare habe tibi quidquid hoc libelli qualecumque. Something about that construction habe tibi just strikes me as particularly quaint and pleasant. This poem starts out asking itself a question and immediately answering it (tibi!), so we know from the get-go that the poet is having a little fun, almost childishly, even as he goes on to express real gratitude to Cornelius. Lepidus indeed!

Finally, the almost throw-away reference to the patrona virgo hardly qualifies as an invocation of the muse; it's ironic to me that Lucretius invokes his Venus more sincerely than Catullus does his Minerva, though I know it has more to do with the type of poem than anything deliberate on either's part. That said Catullus' invocation of Jupiter could be considered somewhat blasphemous—although I suppose the pagans didn't really have such a concept, rooted as it is in the decalogue.

Miser Catulle, desinas ineptire,
Et quod vides perîsse perditum ducas.
Fulsere quondam candidi tibi soles,
Quum ventitabas quò puella ducebat
Amata nobis quantùm amabitur nulla.
Ibi illa multa cum jocosa fiebant,
Quæ tu volebas nec puella nolebat,
Fulsere verè candidi tibi soles.
Nunc jam illa non vult; tu quoque, impotens, noli,
Nec quæ fugit sectare nec miser vive,
Sed obstinatâ mente perfer, obdura.
Vale, puella, jam Catullus obdurat,
Nec te requiret nec rogabit invitam.
At tu dolebis, quum rogaberis nulla.
Scelesta, væ te! Quæ tibi manet vita?
Quis nunc te adibit? Cui videberis bella?
Quem nunc amabis? Cujus esse diceris?
Quem basiabis? Cui labella mordebis?
At tu, Catulle, destinatus obdura.

This is, if I'm being honest, probably my favourite poem in any language. (Officially though that honour still belongs to the Iliad, the fons fontium.) I'm aware that this poem probably speaks to me so clearly now because it is simple to understand, and my tastes may well evolve with my language ability, but even so, it speaks to me on a very personal level (taking our puella as a personification of another feminine noun in my case...) Nunc jam illa non vult; tu quoque impotens noli, nec quæ fugit sectare nec miser vive, sed obstinatâ mente perfer obdura pretty much sums up the story of my coming to France. (Although I like to think I live without the venom of the last six lines!) And you know that it's a very personal poem for Catullus as well—how could anything published "ad se ipsum" not be?

The metre may be choliambic, which generally denotes a satirical tone, but as is so often the case in Latin poetry, the meter is used in deliberate counterpoint to the stress and content of the poem: Catullus is putting on a strong face, but we don't believe him. (This is something we can't do in English where stress and cæsura are bound to the metre; in Greek and Latin they are freed since the metre is quantitative and unrelated to stress, and this allows the poet to arrange harmonies and counterpoints that would not be possible otherwise. To say nothing of that distilled pith that is only possible in an inflected language.) Also, of course, as an English speaker, I am required to show partiality to iambs :-)

I've said before that it bothers me somewhat when a lyric poem uses proper names in the vocative, even though this is extremely common in Latin poetry. (I mean when they are specific individuals—I don't mean gods and muses and the like.) But that's because the poet is addressing someone whom he knows personally and the reader does not, so you can't help feeling a bit lost or left out. That is not the case here, though: here I love it! The difference being that we do feel like we know Catullus personally, because we know him through his poems.

Moreover structurally, he uses his name here in a way that ties the whole poem together: in the vocative in the first and last lines, and then in the nominative in the middle, a sudden surprising shift from the second into the third person that harmonises perfectly with the poet's own shift from self-pity to vengeful resolve. It's so impactful that if you're reading the poem out loud sitting down, at that point you almost feel the need to stand up! This poem is the perfect salve for anyone who has ever had his heart broken.

My own composition, as it were...

Docta Thalia jubet, chartæ perfringere ceram,
Non ex Odrysiis partibus illa venit,
Non tibi terrificos narrabit epistola casus.
Lætitias mentis deperit ipsa tuas.
Cognita nostra domus gratus, qui metra paravit
Semper eras Ductor, quod mea Musa canit.
Justitiam observas, famæ mendacia rides,
Magnus in adversis cor patientis habes.
Tot dotes ornant, vigilant quot in æthere stellæ,
Quot Mars tella vibrat, fulmina quoque Jovi.
Quis te status habet? Non læso ego corpore vivo,
Accedant meritis sæcla beata tuis.
Sed quæ causa subest? Modulis tu absistere cæptis?
Aonios superans per metra docta sonos.