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October 1, 2008
Latin through the ages
Speaking of languages (see previous entry), I just finished Nicholas Ostler's Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin. In our usual way, I bought this for my father for Christmas and got it back from him to read this August. (I had actually read Ostler's Empires of the Word: a Language History of the World before giving it to him for Christmas, so he can pass that along to someone else. What did he get for his recent birthday? A box of lightly read books. Why give someone something you wouldn't read yourself?)
Ad Infinitum is not one of those books of a little Latin for the unfortunate like Amo, Amas, Amat and More, nor is it a book for linguists. Ostler manages a deeply informed and well-written look at a language across time. He's certainly read with genuine specialist ability about things from the Etruscan influence on Latin (perhaps where I learned the most) to the current debates about the shift from Late Latin to Proto-Romance languages (here's some of my blogging on the topic; Ostler's discussion around pages 160-170 is great - I may xerox it and hand it out to a class). He is suitably skeptical about the Humanists to keep me happy, and he does a great job with the Iberian and Latin American traditions. I really didn't know much about the Mexican Latinists.
The final chapter is pretty weak - he's a little scattered there. But then, so is Latin in the modern world. He misses the next Renovatio that I fantasize about when I want to run away from it all - the explosion of Latin being taught in seminaries in Africa. Pray for the wild popularity of the Benedictine Revival in Africa and Asia, and maybe we'll see something like the wacky Latin of the Hibernians of the 7th and 8th Century flourish anew.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at October 1, 2008 1:38 PM