The ancient Roman world and our modern world are very different indeed. The Romans had words for things, actions, institutions, and customs that existed and were important to them back then. Our society is different, so we, too, have peculiar words. What's Latin for “keyboard”? Keyboards didn't exist back then — of course the Romans had no word for them!

The Romans also saw their world differently. A good example of this phenomenon can be found in something as simple as words for color. (Think of everyday color words, not the strange made-up terms you can find when looking at samples at the paint store.) You may take color for granted, but look around the room and imagine what it would look like without Red Dye No. 87! The Romans did have dyes, of course, but they were all organic. Our loud synthetic colors tend to overwhelm those more natural tones. Without the distraction of neon yellow, Roman eyes could see distinctions between shades and found them important enough to have specific words for them. For example, Latin has two everyday words for “white”: candidus (bright, shiny white) and albus (dull, flat white).

There is something else you should be aware of for learning Latin vocabulary. When you look words up in the dictionary, the meanings given really aren't this or that, they're this and that. Here is another color example that will demonstrate. Consider the Latin word caeruleus. If you look it up in the dictionary you will see it means “blue, green, gray.” Though it may seem that the Romans were all colorblind, the fact is that we don't have a regular word for that color. Caeruleus is really something akin to the color of the sea. We are accustomed to thinking that the ocean is blue, but look again. It's more gray than it is blue, but it's too green to be gray, and it's too blue to be green … actually, it's all of them at the same time. It's caeruleus!

There are no exact one-to-one equivalents between English and Latin words. Languages draw arbitrary lines and have words that reflect how their speakers see the world. As you learn your Latin vocabulary, you will notice that almost all Latin words have a range of possibilities to pick from for translation. As with caeruleus, a Latin word really means the intersection of all the possibilities you find in the dictionary. In order to translate Latin into English, you have to pick one possibility, but any single one you pick is wrong since there are no one-to-one equivalents. If that's true, translations are nothing more than interpretations of the original. By learning Latin you are letting the Romans speak directly to you for themselves.