So, Donald Trump will take the oath of office today, and will be the 45th president of the United States. Out of good sportsmanship, respect for the office of the presidency and believing that Donald Trump legitimately won the election in November, I will hold my tongue this week and offer my sincere congratulations to President Trump and to the national Republican Party for an unassailable electoral and political triumph.
I’ll leave it at that, but rest assured that my tongue will be released soon.
I could not really settle on a theme for a unified essay this week, so I thought I’d do more eclectic takes on a variety of subjects.
Onward: According to the United States Drought.gov website, last week’s “Pacific storms slammed into most of the West, dumping precipitation on the northern two-thirds of the California and Sierra Nevada. This very wet week maintained the great start to the Water Year (since Oct. 1) across the West where average precipitation was above or much above normal at nearly every major basin, and average snow-water content was at or above normal in most Western basins. Most major reservoirs in California were at or above their Jan. 10 historical average; USGS-monitored streams were at near-record or record high flows. Accordingly, major drought improvements were made not only to California but in parts of Nevada, Utah, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado.”
Speaking of things meteorological: According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “With a boost from El Nino, 2016 began with a bang. For eight consecutive months, January to August, the globe experienced record warm heat. With this as a catalyst, the 2016 globally averaged surface temperature ended as the highest since record keeping began in 1880, according to scientists from NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI).
“The average temperature across global land and ocean surfaces in 2016 was 58.69 degrees F or 1.69 degrees F above the 20th century average. This surpassed last year’s record by 0.07 degrees F. Since the start of the 21st century, the annual global temperature record has been broken five times (2005, 2010, 2014, 2015, and 2016).
“Despite the cooling influence of a weak La Nina in the latter part of the year, the year ended with the third warmest December on record for the globe, with an average temperature 1.42 degrees F above the 20th century average.
“In a separate analysis of global temperature data released at the same time, scientists from NASA also found 2016 to be the warmest year on record.”
I haven’t written much about global warming – this year I may change that. Stay tuned.
Apropos of nothing much: In last week’s column, I mentioned that the Latium region in Italy gave its name to the standard language of the Roman empire, Latin. It actually gave its name to (roughly speaking) two separate dialects: the Classical form of Latin, spoken in the Senate, the Imperial Court, and by learned men and women in the upper reaches of Roman society; and vulgar (in the non-pejorative sense of “common”) Latin, spoken by practically everyone else throughout the empire.
Classical Latin was highly formalized and somewhat stilted, in a similar way that English spoken in formal settings, particularly in legal and court settings (“Be it known that…” “Whereas, the party of the first part attests that…” and so on), bears little resemblance to the English spoken by people in their everyday lives. This was the language used by Cicero, Virgil, Ovid and Marcus Aurelius.
Vulgar Latin would be the language one encountered in the marketplace, among soldiers, and in the stands at the Circus Maximus and was a much more practical and slangy (and thus, adaptable) form of the language. Virgil might use the classical word for horse, “equus”, but merchants actually selling horses in Trajan’s Market in Rome would be more likely to use the more everyday-speech word “caballus.”
The Romance languages are commonly described as descended from Latin, but a better description would be that they are descendants of vulgar Latin. The Spanish word for horse, “caballo” is from the (vulgar) Latin “caballus”, as is the Italian “cavallo”, the Portuguese “cavalo” and so on.
According to the Wikipedia article on the history of vulgar Latin, after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, “(a) blending of cultures was occurring between the former Roman citizens who were fluent in the proper Latin speech (which was already substantially different from Classical Latin), and the new Gothic rulers who, though largely Latinised, tended to speak Latin poorly, speaking what could be considered a creole of Latin and their Germanic mother tongue. What emerged in Western Europe was common form of Latin which, though mostly Latin in vocabulary (with many Germanic words introduced), was heavily influenced by Germanic grammar and represented a radical shift away from the original Roman language. For a few centuries this language remained relatively common across most of Western Europe (hence the fact that Italian, Spanish, French, etc. are far more similar to each other than to Classical Latin), though regional dialects were already developing.”
Anyway, I hope you all stay dry and warm.

Matt Talbot is a writer and poet, as well as an old Benicia hand.

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