Ducentesimum Vicesimum Latinum Verbum Diei: September 12, 2010

[Christina Wallin]

Theme for this month: Glimpses of Language Shift

declino, declinare, declinavi, declinatus

Definition: to change the direction of, deflect, divert, bend; to
deviate, swerve; to turn one's attention; to give a downwards tilt or
slope to; to sink down, descend; to dodge, avoid; to lean away from;
to change the form of (a word, phrase), modify; to change the
inflection of, decline or conjugate

Sententia: Quintilian Institutio Oratoria 1.4.22

nomina declinare et verba in primis pueri sciant, neque enim aliter
pervenire ad intellectum sequentium possunt;

Let boys first of all learn how to decline nouns and conjugate verbs,
for not otherwise can they proceed to the understanding of subsequent
topics;

Marcus Fabius Quintilianus lived in the 1st century CE. His only
existing work is the “Institutio Oratoria,” a twelve book textbook on
oratory, ranging from elementary education for orators to technical
advice as to style. This work is an excellent view into Latin
oratory, grammar, and even parts of it can be used to determine some
of how Latin was actually pronounced. Book 1 details elementary
education, and this section is stating the importance of the need to
learn grammar, directly after learning how to read and write.

Declinare was chosen by grammarians even before Quintilian to mean
declining because they viewed the other cases as “leaning away from”
the nominative case. Thus, in the arc of existence of the Latin
language, this word is also towards the beginning, since these cases
to be declined come from Indo-European, though Latin lost a few of the
eight or nine cases which Indo-European is posited to have had.