Latin without limits

Some thoughts on

Ad Infinitum – A biography of Latin
by Nicholas Ostler
Harper Press 2007

The remarkable thing about Latin is how little it changed in 2,500 years, so its CV could be told very quickly, as indeed the author does in the last two pages of the book. The exciting story in the rest of the book, however, is mostly about all the other languages that it touched upon or that developed interestingly different trajectories.

So, for instance:

* Etruscan – why don’t we know much about it? The author offers some explanations, and in the appendix a list of presumed Etruscan words that survived in Latin.

* Greek – it is intriguing how the two languages each claiming to represent civilisation co-existed for many centuries and divided the Mediterranean world between them.

* Arabic – fascinating how after the Norman conquest of Sicily from the Arabs and the gradual rollback of Arabic power in Iberia learned texts (including those originally in Greek) were translated from Arabic into Latin and thereby came to lay the foundations of the Renaissance in Europe. Mathematical terms like algorithm and algebra show their Arabic roots.

* Romance languages – by the late 8th century, Latin was a written elite language, coexisting with the local spoken vernaculars drifting away from it. In a similar situation, Arabic and Chinese maintained their unity through the shared written language even though speakers of distant dialects may fail to understand each other. Why did the dialects of Latin crystallise into new languages, even while the elite version was still widely used eg in church and legal texts? According to Ostler, it was kind of an own goal for Alcuin from York, who in 781 was appointed director of Charlemagne’s Palace School in Aachen. He drew up strict rules for standard Latin pronunciation. At the stroke of a pen, those versions spoken in France and Spain were no longer accepted as Latin, so they were free to become their own languages. An immediate practical problem: priests using the standard pronunciation prescribed by Alcuin were harder to understand for their flock, so had to cultivate both Latin and their local Romance language as bilinguals. Using Alcuin's pronunciation rules in the reverse direction, they could easily produce written versions of their local vernaculars. “Romance” interestingly became a word for the type of text typically written in these new languages (hence “roman” in French and German for novel), before being recruited to describe both the language family and the romantic entanglements.

* English – virtually all of the Western Roman Empire now speaks Romance languages, with the interesting exception of Britannia. There isn’t a simple explanation really, and quite a few open questions feed into this, so I can’t answer this here, but the author spends a few pages on this.

* Romanian – in the Eastern Roman Empire, the competition with old rival Greek meant that Latin didn’t stick, even though Roman rule persisted for many centuries longer. The one exception on that side of the map is Romanian.

* Native American languages - it was surprising to me to learn that the Spanish conquest of what we now call Latin America (coined in 1856!) brought quite a few interactions between Latin and the major indigenous languages such as Quechua and Nahuatl. The idea being that to get the approval of the Catholic Church the conquistadores had to create the impression that their endeavour was all about saving more souls for the Lord, which at one stage also required training native people to become Catholic priests, and learn Latin. It was at that stage, in the 16th century, that Latin had a truly global spread that the Romans could not have dreamed about.

* Spanish – in a shocking coincidence, the year 1492, when Columbus reached the Caribbean and the fall of Granada completed the reconquista, also saw the publication of the first grammar of a language that wasn’t Latin or Greek. It described Spanish and with remarkable foresight aimed to provide the language manual for a new empire, following after Rome. Scholars had long written about the classical languages as if they were the only ones worth bothering with. It is shocking in a way that it took until 1492 for people to realise that every language has its own grammar. (Related to this, the infinity of the title alludes to the Roman habit of mistaking their Latin-speaking bubble for the whole world.)

* Science – these days the binomial names introduced by Linnaeus are the kind of Latin I use most regularly. Although the Industrial Revolution coincided with the loss of Latin as a lingua franca across Europe, it has pervaded most of science and technology, often with pseudo-Latin neologisms. The author points out that it took until the mid-20th century before physicists started to call new elementary things by English names like quark, charm.

All in all fascinating stuff, and I am particularly pleased to have learned of a coherent explanation for the origin of Romance languages (even if the author refers to medieval Galician as “Portuguese” – long before Portugal even existed). A minor moan is his unquestioning support for the Christian church – expressions like “heroic missionaries” make me shiver. That aside, this is a compelling history not just of Latin but of Western Europe and its languages.

Cover of the hardback edition I found at a charity shop.

PS the author's Wikipedia entry in Latin is still a stub, you can help to expand it...

Now made another slow-moving thread: books read in 2022.