“An absorbing, scholarly account of the history of the Latin language, from its origins in antiquity to its afterlife in our own time...Ad Infinitum treats its readers with the dignity of Roman citizens.”—TheWall Street Journal
The Latin language has been the one constant in the cultural history of the West for more than two millennia. It has defined the way in which we express our thoughts, our faith, and our knowledge of how the world functions, its use echoing on in the law codes of half the world, in the terminologies of modern science, and, until forty years ago, in the liturgy of the Catholic Church. In his erudite and entertaining “biography,” Nicholas Ostler shows how and why Latin survived and thrived even as its creators and other languages failed. Originally the dialect of Rome and its surrounds, Latin supplanted its neighbors to become, by conquest and settlement, the language of all Italy, and then of Western Europe and North Africa. After the empire collapsed, spoken Latin re-emerged as a host of new languages, from Portuguese and Spanish in the west to Romanian in the east, while a knowledge of Latin lived on as the common code of European thought, and inspired the founders of Europe’s New World in the Americas. E pluribus unum. Illuminating the extravaganza of its past, Nicholas Ostler makes clear that, in a thousand echoes, Latin lives on, ad infinitum.
Ab Ovo Usque Ab MalaOctober 10, 2008 1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This work is truly a soup-to-nuts tour of the language of the Romans. It is overflowing with linguistics and history. Ostler gives the reader an erudite review of Latin. Magister dixit.
The Life and Times of a Great LanguageApril 20, 2008 2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I came to Ostler's Ad Infitum from a perspective of fond memory for my four years of high school Latin and an abiding interest in Roman history. I recommend this book unequivocally for fans of classical history, the Latin language, or linguistics generally.
Calling the book a "biography" is not a misnomer. Ostler makes the Latin language the protagonist, and he brings us through the language's youth, rise by conquest, conflicted relationship with its elder Greek, its marriage with the Christian Church, its thriving success long after the empire had perished, and its slow decline. The last chapters were genuinely sad to read, as Ostler explains how Latin was supplanted as the prevailing language in all important areas and has become at best an honored relic today.
This book is not long and highly readable. Ostler left me wishing for more, especially in the early chapters in which Ostler describes, but could go into far more detail regarding, Latin's troubled youth in the shadow of Etruscan and Greek speakers and other Italian peoples whose languages might have become that of an empire in the stead of Latin. I wanted to know more about the Etruscan or Oscan languages and whether and to what extent they survived after Roman conquest. But these are quibbles with an excellent writer's decision to create a focused and engaging survey of an entire language's long history. Ostler's work is well noted for those who wish to pursue further any of the many interesting areas touched on by this book. My own Latin is not strong enough for me to take issue with Ostler's scholarship but as a casual student of the language I enjoyed this book immensely.
Love LatinApril 5, 2008 1 out of 3 found this review helpful
If you love Latin, I think this is the book for you. I purchased it for a friend who teaches Latin. I only wish it had been more humerous.
Caveat emptor!April 3, 2008 37 out of 46 found this review helpful
A quirky, idiosyncratic introduction to the history of the Latin language. What purports to be a history of the language begins with the author's assumption that the Romans were from the first political, military, cultural and linguistic imperialists (perhaps not all that surprising in a student of Chomsky?). That in turn requires him to rewrite the history of Rome in and outside of Italy in ways which can only provoke raised eyebrows, and snickers, among Roman historians. The result of that first misstep is a prolonged exercise in history rewritten to substantiate theory: badly rewritten, too, with bloopers which run the gamut from from ancient (that Gaius Marius created a standing army for Rome) to the modern (that the Catholic Church no longer uses Latin in its liturgy). The unfortunate result is that there really is little room for the history of the Latin language. There are, amidst the historical theorizing, some interesting nuggets of information about Latin, but they are buried in far too much sand and detritus to make the effort of digging them out worthwhile.
Companion of EmpireMarch 22, 2008 3 out of 3 found this review helpful
In 1492 Elio Antonio de Nebrija (the author of the Latin grammar most priests used to teach Latin in the "New" World) wrote that "always language was the companion of empire and followed it in such a way that jointly they began, grew, flourished; and afterward joint was the fall of both."
Ad Infinitum is a continuation of Ostler's work in Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World, in which he developed the field he called "language dynamics," or the comparision of the "careers" of different languages, such as Phoenician, Arabic, Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Chinese, English, and many others. Like Ad Infinitum, Empires of the Word is a great book - - I've read it through twice.
Ostler revealed ironies in Ad Infinitum that I had no idea of.
For instance, I didn't realize that Latin was first chosen by the Catholic Church as the liturgical language because it was the vernacular that people spoke every day, not because it was a language like Esperanto that could unite everyone who spoke different langauges.
In the fourth century A.D. Ambrosiaster ("pseudo-Ambrose") gave at least two reasons for using the common language: because the mind, as well as the emotions, should be engaged when praying, and also so the pagans can see that "nothing is done in obscurity."
Now the exact opposite argument is used for keeping Latin as the language of the Catholic Church - - because it ISN'T one of the languages different nationalities use every day, and therefore it can unite the Church.
I was struck by how modern some of the medieval Latin writers sounded. St. Augustine reminds me of linguists like David Crystal challenging the language mavens: " . . . [W]hat is called a solecism is nothing other than putting words together on a different rule than that followed by our authoritative predecessors."
John Colet in 1511 on prescriptivist rules that only sometimes reflected actual Latin grammar: "In the beginning men spake not Latin because such rules were made, but, contrariwise, because men spake such Latin the rules were made. That is to say, Latin speech was before the rules, and not the rules before the Latin speech."
The fourteenth-century scholar Ibn Khaldun (talking about Arabic dialects) could be describing Chomskyan Universal or Transformational Grammar: "These norms [of speaking] are of general applicability, like universals and basic principles."
Another irony was how the "Romantic movement," which even at its most Wagnerian descended from Provencal ideas of chivalry and knighthood, really only took hold in Germanic-speaking countries, not where Romance languages were spoken.
While the Empire still existed, it was the toga-wearing Romans who possessed "gravitas" and the barbarian Gauls who had "levitas." Now, American and English tourists to the Continent use the word "heavy" to describe aspects of German-speaking countries and it's the people in Mediterranean countries who are "light" and "easy-going."
The first half of the book (on classical Rome and medieval scholasticism) was fascinating and might even be described as a "heroic" story, but the second half, which tells about the transmission of Latin and the Romance languages to the "novus orbis" is a tragedy as much as anything else. "Rome's dream" was a nightmare for some.
Ostler describes Garcilaso de la Vega, son of an Inca princess and a conquistador father as "another highly articulate advertisement for the value of Spanish colonial education." How many indigenous languages disappeared after 1492? (I just read an estimate - - David Crystal again - - that 150,000 langauges have existed in human history. There are only 6,000 now.)
Ostler makes it clear that Quechua was doomed in the face of Spanish and Latin. But earlier we saw how Latin supplanted Greek in the Mediterranean without genocide on the same scale as happened in "Latin" America.
You can understand the past but you can't change it.
