Latin Primer

I wish I had studied Latin at school; but I went to a bog-standard comprehensive - so this never an option. French and German, yes; holiday Spanish - possibly, but Latin - nee chance! We were lucky to have be taught the rudiments of the English language (commas and paragraphs, I think - nowt else). Anything more, e.g. 'alliteration', you had to study 'A' level English (which I didn't) - nowadays, they teach that at primary school!

But having had a bit of a dabble at learning foreign languages over the years, admittedly with not much success, you get to see the importance of the Latin influence on European languages - including English. Most words have Latin origins via old German, French or other routes - even if they are Latin versions of Greek words (or other sources).

At the weekend, I went to Finchale Priory near Durham. It is an English heritage site containing the ruins of a 13th century Benedictine priory on a picturesque site on a bend in the river Wear. 

In the ruins, in one of the 'rooms', there was a sign stating that we were looking at the Prior's  camera. We were puzzled as to what a camera meant in this context. I then remembered that there was a Russian word 'camera' meaning chamber (the Russian for photographic camera is  fotoapparat), so this was possibly the prior's chambers. 

I checked out the dictionary definition of camera when I got home and it does indeed mean chamber, coming from the Latin for vaulted chamber.  The modern photographic camera owes its name from a shortened version of the Latin camera obscura, literally dark chamber, which of course was an early device to project images on to a screen using the pinhole camera technique.