My local Catholic church uses occasional Latin phrases during the Masses leading up to Christmas and Easter. Our pastor reasoned that (a) Latin is the official language of the Church, (b) it makes a distinction between the different seasons, and (c) it “draws us deeper into the mystery of the liturgy”.

This inspired me, on seeing an old Latin grade school textbook at a library book sale, to attempt to learn basic Latin. The book I’m using is Jenney, Thompson, and Smith’s First Year Latin from 1953. This is a very dense book; I’m currently about 19% of the way through it after several years. Had I been one of the students it was meant for back in the fifties, this would have been a lot of work to complete in one year!

I’m not going to talk about pronunciation. Textbook Latin and Catholic Latin are pronounced differently, and Catholic Latin tends to be pronounced at least slightly differently in different churches. My experience solely in American churches is that Catholic Latin basically follows the rules of Italian pronunciation. If you know those rules, follow them but pay attention to how your church might be doing things a little differently. If you don’t know those rules, just pay attention and you’ll get it. The most obvious difference between Italian and American pronunciations is that the “ch” sound is a hard “k” in Italian; the soft “c” of American English (receive, decipher) is pronounced as the American English “ch” (church, for instance…) and with basically the same rule: when the “c” is followed by an “i” or an “e”.

With all that out of the way, one of the simplest prayers sung or spoken in Latin during Mass is the Agnus Dei. Many Catholic prayers are titled by their first words in the original Latin. So the prayer that begins, in English, as “Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary” is called “Memorare” because Memorare is the first word in the original Latin—it means “remember”. And the prayer that begins “Lamb of God” is called the “Agnus Dei” because those are its first words in the original:

• • Agnus Dei, Qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.
  • Agnus Dei, Qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.
  • Agnus Dei, Qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem.

I’m starting with the Agnus Dei because it is one of the most simple of the Latin phrases used at mass when it comes to translating into English. Latin is often difficult to translate into English because it can be both more specific than English can be, and more unspecific than English can be. Further, the order of words is often very different from the order in English. In this prayer, however, from the Latin to the English is almost a word-for-word linear translation.

Agnus Dei

You may have heard or read that Latin is difficult because its words have so many forms. This is very true. For nouns, these forms are called “declensions”, and there is one for when a noun is a subject, one for when it’s a direct object, and one each for various indirect object forms—and then all over again for the plural meanings.

For the phrase Agnus Dei, all we need to learn are two of them—because there are only two nouns, each in a different declension. “Agnus” is the nominative, that is, the subject, form of “lamb”. “Dei” is the genitive form of “God”. The genitive form means “of [the]” whatever the noun is. In this case, it means “of God”. The genitive is often used where we would use the possessive apostrophe in English, although we probably would not say “God’s Lamb” here.

Nouns are generally known by their nominative, and then converted to whatever declension is needed. Agnus is the nominative form of “lamb”, and Deus is the nominative form of “god”. The genitive form of Deus is Dei.

Thus, Agnus Dei is “Lamb… of God”.

Throughout, remember that just as in English, words in Latin can have multiple meanings. I’m going to keep things simple by providing the meaning that matters for what I’m writing about. You can find other meanings in any Latin dictionary or textbook.

As you can see, there are two forms of each declension, one for the singular (a lamb, the lamb) and one for the plural (lambs, the lambs). If you want to go full pagan, you could reverse this to a pastoral deity, deus agnorum, “god of lambs”. Instead of the nominative form of lamb and the genitive form of God, deus agnorum uses the nominative form of god and the genitive plural form of lamb.

You can also see that some forms get reused for different declensions. How do we know that in Agnus Dei the “Dei” refers to the genitive singular, rather than the nominative plural? From context: as the second word, it is almost always going to be the “of” form, or genitive, and not the subject, or nominative.

Qui tollis peccata mundi

This is also a direct and almost linear translation to English.

• Qui is “who”.
• Tollis is the second person singular of the verb tollere, to take away (very appropriately, in the sense of “to carry off”, as the sacrificial lamb does). Second person, if you remember from your high school English, is “you”. First person is “I”, second person is “you”, and third person is someone else.
• Peccata is the plural accusative, or direct object, form of peccatum, “sin”. If you were to diagram this sentence for high school, the direct object is what is being acted on by the subject; in this case, what is being taken by You Who.
• Mundi is the genitive form of mundus, “world”. So peccata mundi is “sins of the world” as a direct object.

The full translation, then, is “You who take away the sins of the world.” Except for the reversal of “who” and “you” it is, like agnus dei, a direct linear translation. English has its own set of implied words, so we just say “You take away the sins of the world.”¹

Verbs are conjugated similarly to English, although there are more forms for them. In English we still think in terms of first person, second person, and third person, and in terms of singular and plural even though for the most part we only have two forms for each verb. “Take” for example, is either “take” or “takes” depending on the conjugation.

In Latin, there is a different form for each conjugation; that might seem harder, but it also means that for the most part Latin doesn’t need a subject pronoun. Whether it’s I, you, he, we, you-plural², or they, the pronoun is implied by the form of the verb. So you pretty much never say Ego tollo or Tu tollis but rather just Tollo or Tollis.³

You’ve probably noticed that there is no word for “the” in the Latin version. One of the reasons the first two words, agnus dei, are an easy translation is, because they don’t have an article in the English version either. There’s no “a” or “the” or “this” or “that” to trip up on.

The reason it’s easy to trip up on these is that Latin doesn’t really have such articles. Whether the noun is an individual (God), a specific (the god) or a generic (a lamb) is inferred from context. For the most part you simply cut out “a” and “the” when going from English to Latin, and you infer them when going from Latin to English.

Miserere nobis

• Miserere is the passive imperative of “have mercy”. As in Italian, the imperative (often expressed as a command, but in this case it’s a request or a plea⁴) is (sometimes) the same as the infinitive. The infinitive, if you recall from high school, is the “to” form. “To run” or “to have” or “to sing” are the infinitive forms of those verbs in English. So miserere can mean “to have mercy” (infinitive) or it can mean, as in this case, “have mercy” (imperative).
• Nobis is the ablative form of nos, or “us”. The ablative is used where, in English, we would use the prepositions “from”, “with”, “by”, “in”, “on”, or “at” preceding an indirect object. In this context, it’s “on”. Like verbs not often needing a subject because each conjugation implies a subject, the ablative form of a noun often does not need the preposition.

So, again, this is a literal and linear translation to “have mercy on us”.

Dona nobis pacem

• Dona is the imperative of donare, to grant (in the meaning of “to give as a present” or “present with”).
• Nobis is the dative of nos, or “us”. The dative is used where, in English, we would use the prepositions “to” and “for” preceding an indirect object. In this case, it’s “to”. “Give to us…”. Like the ablative, we can often leave out the Latin prepositions because they’re implied by the pronoun’s declension.
• Pacem is the accusative, that is, the direct object form, of pax, “peace”. Pax is an irregular noun, but the only thing irregular about it is the nominative form. The other forms follow as if it were pacis, which I’m guessing it probably was at some point in Rome’s history.⁵

Thus, this translates to “Grant us peace”, or more specifically and less reverently, “Hey, you, grant peace to us.”

You might be thinking, hey, you said “nobis” is the ablative, and now it’s the dative. Yup. It has the same form in those two conjugations.

Words learned

I hope you enjoyed this. I’ve certainly enjoyed, as much work as it is, going through the book. It’s amazing how much knowing even rudimentary Latin opens up linguistic mysteries. With these few words and rules, you can probably already start seeing how Latin works in those nearly everyday phrases that pop up in newspapers and news reports. One of the most common is amicus curiae. You probably know, as I did, that this translates as “friend of the court”. What surprised me the first time I saw this after starting First Year Latin is that friend of the court is not a loose translation. It is its literal meaning.

Amicus is “friend”. Curia is “court”. So curiae is the genitive, the “of…” form of the nominative curia. Curiae literally means “of the court”, making amicus curiae translate word-for-word and linearly into “friend… of the court”.

Vale!

Nouns

Verbs