Thursday,
November 29, 2007
"A Biography of Latin" The Soul
of
The
ANNOTICO Report
A
fascinating recounting of how Latin became the language of Italy, and how Latin
was embraced with the expansion of the Roman Empire, and how the Catholic
Church perpetuated Latin after the Fall of the Roman Empire, and how Latin
became the base of Romance Languages, Italian, French, and Spanish, and Latin's
effect on the Renaissance.
Part
of the Latin Language endurance can be attributed to its robust adaptability. This
adaptability was a Roman trademark in that the Romans preferred to imitate good
things rather than envy them.
What
is fascinating to me is the current resurgence of the study of Latin, and as I
have always maintained, the interest of many students on any subject, it
is the "manner" in which it is taught. In this case it is not
the teacher, but the "contemporized" textbook!!!!!
BOOK REVIEW
Tracing the rise and fall of a tremendously successful
language.
By
Tim Rutten
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
November 28, 2007
I spent a bit of Sunday night helping my 14-year-old son study for an upcoming
quiz in his Latin class.
He's a freshman at a large and well-regarded school for boys. As a native Angeleno, he grew up speaking both English and Spanish, and
I was interested and a little surprised that he and so many of his
classmates elected Latin as their foreign language. I was still more
surprised by how far Latin instruction has come from the days when it all began
with a Cassell's dictionary and a copy of Caesar's
"Gallic Wars" --
Today's beginning Latinist gets a thoroughly modern, handsomely illustrated textbook
built around the lives of teenage Romans living in adjacent country villas.
Students translate incidents from their protagonists' daily lives and
study vocabulary and grammar lists drawn from each chapter's main anecdote -- sort
of a classical soap opera. It's all very up-to-date and thoroughly
engaging, which probably is why my son and many of his classmates devote
a couple of after-school hours each week to their high school's Latin club
and recently spent a Saturday hosting similar groups for a day's worth of
Latinate activities.
I recount this bit of homey personal experience only because the spontaneity
and vibrancy with which my son and his friends are pursuing their Latin stands
in such contrast to the elegiac tone of Nicholas Ostler's
"Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin." One supposes that after
you've been the lingua franca of the entire Western world, anything less
is a comedown, but this account of Latin's rise and fall
definitely ends with a whimper that does not seem entirely deserved.
Educated in Latin, Greek and philosophy at
Nonspecialists may find Ostler's
exploration of Latin's linguistic origins, particularly its
relationship to Etruscan, overly detailed -- but Ostler
is particularly good on why Latin was the one language among many on the
Italian peninsula that ultimately spread as it did.
The author argues that Latin triumphed over the other languages spoken in what
is now
Together,
these gave it the victory." The Romans, moreover, "had some
winning ways that were all their own: After a victory they demanded not tribute, but land,
which they would sooner or later settle with their own farmers; and they levied soldiers too from the defeated
powers, who would add their strength to the Roman army. The Roman army, too, with its compulsive
program of road building, cumulatively and permanently improved ease of communication.
. . . All these policies
benefited not just the long-term strength of
As Ostler points out, the Romans were secure
enough to attribute their military successes to a willingness to learn from
their antagonists. The historian Sallust, for example, attributed these
observations to Julius Caesar himsel f: "Our
ancestors were never lacking in strategy or boldness . . . nor were they
prevented by pride from imitating others' institutions, if they were sound. . .
. [W]henever anything apt was recognized among allies
or enemies, they followed it up at home with the utmost zeal; they preferred
to imitate good things rather than envy them."
(It may have been that the Romans' unshakable self-regard made them impervious
to envy.)
It also seems true that their language benefited from a similarly robust
adaptability. And, though Ostler seems to feel a
rather irritating compulsion to apologize for the Roman's militarism and
imperialism -- we get it already, their -- Latin ultimately spread because
the people
Clearly Latin's claim to functional universality also benefited when
Catholic Christianity adopted it as its official language rather than the Greek
in which the Gospels had been written.< /U> (Say what you will about
those early church fathers, but when Constantine offered them a link to state
power, they recognized the main chance when they saw it.) For its part,
Christianity also gave to Latin two things that promoted its utility and its
centrality to our own culture. One was the "codex" or book, which
gradually replaced the "volumen," or scroll
as the preferred literary and informational medium. The other was silent
reading, which Ostler correctly characterizes as
"closer to thought itself." Neither the ancient Greeks nor Romans
read silently. Indeed, the first Western reference to the practice occurs in
Augustine's "Confessions." When the young North African rhetorician,
newly arrived in
Ostler's treatment of Latin as a mother to the supple
vernacular tongues we call Romance languages is particularly good, and his
evaluation of the Renaissance humanists and the way in which they may have
loved Latin to death is provocative. But his evaluation of Latin's critical
contribution to the revolutionary scientific culture so central to Western
progress is sketchy, and it's here that his "biography" trails off
into a dreary sequence of retreats and retrenchments, ending in irrelevance.
According to his biography, Ostler now lives in what
once was a part of Roman Bath -- Aquae Sullis, as it then was known. It's one among a handful of
places, found more often on the empire's periphery than at its center, where
you still can feel intensely not only the Roman presence, but also what it must
have meant to others to live alongside that magnetic imperialism. It's a pity
that something more of that sense didn't find its way into t his book.
Early on in "Ad Infinitum," Ostler shrewdly
and -- to this reader's eye, at least -- rather movingly asserts that,
"The history of Latin is the history of the development of
One wishes, too, that the author had evinced a bit more of the courage that
ought to flow from those sentences' implication. A simple adherence to
timothy.rutten@latimes.com
"Ad Infinitum" A Biography of Latin By Nicholas Ostler Walker & Co.: 400 pp., $27.95
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-et-rutten28nov28,1,6139909.story?coll=la-headlines-calendar&ctrack=4&cset=true
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