Customer Reviews

Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin

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Nicholas Ostler's Ad Infinitum is a thorough, illuminating history of the Latin language, following it from its birth among the other pre-Christian languages of the Mediterranean; to its adolescent contention with Etruscan and Greek on the Italian peninsula; to its maturity with Cicero, Horace, Ovid, and others; to its middle age as the progenitor of the Romance languages of continental Europe; and finally to its respected senescence as the language (now largely abandoned) of the Catholic church. Along the way, Latin became the backbone, some would say, of modern English (along with powerful Germanic and Greek influences, of course). This very paragraph is full of words drawn directly from Latin, in fact: can you find some of them? :)

The book is well written and full of fascinating tidbits I haven't encountered elsewhere. Practically every page offers some interesting insight or connection to the present day. Just a few examples: Ostler explains the origins of such taken-for-granted words as "classic", "quality", "romance", "volume", "sacrament", "bishop", and many others. Even "Latin" istelf (why isn't it Roman?). Ostler also explains how the complex grammar of Latin emerged, as well as how isolation following the collapse of the Roman Empire led to the disippation of much of that grammar, helping to give birth to modern Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and other Romance languages -- all comparatively simpler in structure.

Ad Infinitum is buttressed by useful appendices on all the known Etruscan borrowings in Latin and on sound changes apparent in Latin nouns and verbs. There's also a Latin tag for each chapter, and Ostler takes an appendix to comment on them in detail. Finally, he provides very detailed footnotes (always citing the original Latin -- or other languages) and an exhaustive bibliography for further research.

Recommended highly for anyone interested in Latin, Romance linguistics, linguistics in general, and European history. Perhaps the book will spark renewed interest in the language, now that it is finally beginning a decline into obscurity. Time was when Latin was compulsory in any respectable education, but no more. Today, though Latin still available in most universities, students are opting for more "useful" languages, like Japanese, Arabic, or German. And you're hard-pressed to find it in high school curricula any longer (as it was when I went to school). If Ostler's book can stem the decline, even a little, his meticulous work will have been more than justified.

For those who like to embellish their sentences with Latin words or phrases this book will definitely help you improve your game. For years I've used Eugene Ehrlich's AMO AMAS AMAT & MORE (Hudson Group Books), but it is only a quick reference book. Now, however, with Nicholas Ostler's book I have a better understanding of the development of Latin. Ostler has already written possibly one of the best books on the history of language:Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World. In that book he wrote a history of the world with languages as the actors. In Ad Infinitum he has written a biography of one of those key players: namely, Latin.

Prior to the 3rd century BC, Latin co-existed with many other languages on the Italian peninsula: Ligurian, Umbrian, Etruscan, Oscan, to name a few. From Ostler's examples it looks as if those languages were very similar to Latin. So what happened in the life of Latin that caused it to emerge as the preeminent language, first on the peninsula, then ultimately throughout the known world?

Ostler offers three explanations as to why Latin prevailed. The first, of course, is that Rome was an imperial power. As the Roman army conquered new lands and peoples is left local cultures and languages undisturbed as long as they paid tribute to Rome. This is the modus operandi of successful empires. The administrators of the newly conquered regions spoke Latin, making it the language of power and prestige. This was a great incentive for locals to learn the language over time.

Secondly, the Roman army was always in need of new soldiers. All the young men conscripted from foreign lands were forced to learn Latin. Latin become a source of social mobility. And after a lifetime of service, soldiers were given land at the location of their last conquest, thus creating more Latin-speaking communities on the ever-expanding frontiers of the empire.

The third reason was that Romans were great engineers. They built roads, waterways, aquaducts and other types of infrastructure that greatly enhanced transportation and communication. All this building out of the empire solidified Latin's position as the universal language. Everyone from farmer, to soldier, to engineer, to administrator needed to learn Latin. The language itself became an empire.

Latin quickly became the language of Europe from England in the north to Romania in the east. It did not do so well in the Middle East and North Africa because Greek was still the language of culture in those areas. In fact early Latin writers still looked up to and borrowed from Greek literature. Ostler speaks of Latin's inferiority complex in relation to Greek in the early years. However, after the annexation of the Greek peninsula and the influx of Greek refugees, many Greek words started appearing in Latin. The Roman government even required that children's schooling begin with Greek. After several centuries of indoctrination and experimentation, Latin finally surpassed Greek as the language of culture and learning.

After the fall of Rome, Latin did not die. It remains to this day the language of the Catholic Church. It is the official language of Vatican City. After the dissolution of the empire, however, Latin devolved into a number of vernaculars such as French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian. The development of the vernaculars depended very much on the language of the conquering Germanic tribe. The language of the Franks, for example, was very influential in the development of French.

Not only is Latin not dead today, it is enjoying somewhat of a renaissance. Ostler tells us that there are now many websites in Latin and that there is a Latin version of Wikipedia. Latin lives on in other ways. One need only look at the etymologies English words to discover the Latin origins of a large percentage or to study the structure of great works of English literature to see the continuing influence of Latin. For those who are interested in learning Latin, this book is a good place to start.

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.

I also recommend AD INFINITUM very much. As a former Classics major, I enjoy history and languages, especially Latin. Ostler's summary of the history of Latin is absolutely fascinating and is well described by the previous two reviewers.
I would like to add that one of my favorite chapters was entitled SUB ROSA-Latin's Etruscan Stepmother. He shows how , using basic linguistic patterns, "Troas" became "Trus". He also fortifies this information with archaeological information from Veii and recently DNA analysis to show that Herodotus was indeed correct as to the middle eastern origins of the Etruscans, which is a question I had always wondered about since reading the AENEID many years ago. Since this book was written, even more DNA evidence, this time an analysis of mitochondrial DNA (maternal DNA) from Etruscan regions, has been published, which supports the truth behind the myths.

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.

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.

Ostler has yet again (I also highly recommend Empires of the Word) produced an amazing book on historical linguistics. This time, he writes a much more specialized book on the history of the Latin Language. He starts with a general discussion on early Latin and its interactions as one dialect of Italy, with close cousins Oscan and Umbrian, as well as its unrelated neighbor Etruscan. He then discusses the evolution of the tongue, its literature and grammar and uses. Then with the Roman Empire, comes the use of Latin as a language of administration and then its continued use by the Catholic Church and as a common language across Europe. Latin's subsequent development into the modern Romance languages is also well-discussed and explained.

He then shows the decline in Latin use and teaching after the Reformation and Enlightenment, and to our current era, where Latin is little used and studied. Yet, he shows that Latin is still used in certain scientific areas, and that Finland, for example, continues to publish a news program in it.

My only criticism of the book is that the first chapter on the "prehistory" of Latin could have been a little more detailed. While probably of little interest to the non-linguist reader, and maybe asking for too much in an introduction of this type, I think that at least a few pages on Latin's evolution from Proto Indo-European and later Italic would have been interesting and informative.

I highly recommend this book to all who are interested in Historical Linguistics, the Classics, Latin/Roman Empire, as well as those who are deeply interested in the history of any of the Romance languages.
Well done again Ostler!

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.

In this book, Nicholas Ostler, also author of _Empires of the Word_, traces the history of the Latin language from its origins in a melange of dead Italic languages and Greek influences through its heyday as language of Empire and Church and its decline and ghettoization in an ivory prison.

Though biased as a Hellenistic historian, I found the earlier chapters of the book on ancient Latin and its relationship to Greek language and culture to be the strongest. In these chapters, Ostler dazzles the reader with pages and pages of loan words, but organized in such a way so as not to become tedious or pedantic. His style throughout has this quality: you never feel lectured at, even when his discussion ranges to the driest of topics. These early chapters also chronicle the development of the idea of grammar itself, a fascinating subject.

The other strongest part of the book is actually his chapter on Latin America and the bringing of Latin to the New World through Spanish and Portugese universities. The training of local, indigenous priests and educated laymen was at a very high level very soon after the conquest of the Aztecs and Incas, and anecdotal accounts point to a level of linguistic knowledge among these American students that even surpassed that of the clerics back in the Old World.

This book is not just a book on history or culture or linguistics, but a very intelligent and thought-provoking synthesis of all three (and some other things besides). How the Latin language became what it was at various points in history, who used it and how and why, and the dynamic relationship between the speaker and the language he speaks all inform Ostler's analysis. Highly recommended for anyone interested in any of these fields.

the story wanders around a bit. As a "biography" of Latin, there is a general plot; but it's easily lost in the many details.

It seems to me that a little more focus on the main direction of events would have allowed inclusion of all these details without such a sense of losing the forest. It's really a matter of writing style.