Ad Infinitum: a Biography of Latin

by Nicholas Ostler

A detailed and in-depth biography of the Latin language from its very beginnings to the present day from the widely acclaimed author of 'Empires of the Word'. The Latin language has been a constant in the cultural history of the West for over two millennia. It has shaped the way we think of ourselves and of our (central) place in the world. It has formed and united us as Europeans, has been the foundation of our education for centuries and defined the way in which we express our thoughts, our faith and our knowledge of the workings of the world. And yet, Latin began life as the cumbersome dialect of a small southern Italian city-state. Its active use lasted three times as long as Rome's Empire and its use echoes on in the law codes of half the world, in terminologies of biology and medicine, and until forty years ago in the litany of the Catholic Church, the most populous form of Christianity. In 'Ad Infinitum', Nicholas Ostler examines the reasons why Latin made such a long-lasting impact on language, and how it managed to stay alive for two millennia despite the cultural superiority of Greek.He will look at how Latin's sturdy roots remained untouched while empires rose and fell, the influence of religion and war, and the ways it has progressed through medieval times right up until the present day. The Latin language has proved more far reaching than its creators. Today it continues to define the way our societies have developed technologically and scientifically and the way we practise law and worship our Christian God.

Genres: History, Language, Nonfiction, Linguistics, Classics, Ancient History, Biography

Hardcover

First published November 5, 2007

About the author

Nicholas Ostler is a British scholar and author. Ostler studied at Balliol College, Oxford, where he received degrees in Greek, Latin, philosophy, and economics. He later studied under Noam Chomsky at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned his Ph.D. in linguistics and Sanskrit.

His 2005 book Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World documents the spread of language throughout recorded human history.

His 2007 book Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin looks specifically at the language of the Romans, both before and after the existence of their Empire. The story focuses on the rise, spread, and dominance of Latin, both among other languages of the Italian peninsula in the early part of the 1st millennium BC and among the languages of Western Europe in the Dark Ages and beyond, presenting the life of Latin as any biographer would present the life of his subject. With this book, Ostler provides a strong argument against the label 'dead language' so often assigned to Latin. However, the title, 'Ad Infinitum,' refers not to this, but to his thesis that the Latin-speaking world was unconscious of its own limits, looking always back to its centre, rather than outwards.

He is currently the chairman of the Foundation for Endangered Languages, and lives in Bath, England.

Reviews

[Jamie Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nicholas Ostler has written several well received books on ancient languages, including the excellent Empires of the Word, which traces the rise and fall of dominant tongues such as Akkadian, Aramaic, and yes, Latin, along with those which once held key places in conquest or diplomacy, such as Spanish and French. In Ad Infinitum he traces the development of Latin from its origins as one of a number of Italic languages to its place as the common tongue of the world’s greatest empire, and then its second life in religion and education.

On its long journey it incorporated changes, but in its educated forms it nevertheless remained remarkably consistent over the centuries. Using examples from the opposite ends of the Latin timeline, the author notes that works from Naevius (c. 270-201 BC) and Francis Bacon (1561-1621) are mutually intelligible, because “stable rules were transmitted intact through eighty generations of grammar school classes: contrast English, which has only existed at all for sixty generations, and which in its modern form has only lasted for twenty.” (p. xiv)

Those who studied the language remember working through all the different forms and inflections, but I had never counted them up (there are 106), and reading this book brought back to me nights spent parsing sentences:

[S]ix tenses (present, imperfect, future, perfect, past perfect, future perfect), two voices (active and passive), and three moods (indicative, subjunctive, imperative), altogether a large set of combinations. Each of these combinations has up to six forms, to express person and number (I, you, one, he/she/it, we, you all, they). There are also infinitives (to do, to have done), participles (doing, done, about to do) a supine (in order to do), and a gerundive (which is to be done). (p. 24)

As with all languages the form spoken by the elite differed significantly from the Latin of the streets and the army, if they were using Latin at all; for several centuries Attic Greek was the sign of an educated person. In most cases literature, poetry, and official records preserve only the official forms of the language, but in Latin enough of the informal expressions found voice in comedies, letters, collections of epigrams, and even graffiti that we have sense of how the man in the street actually spoke. “Colloquial Latin was also full of Greek-sounding interjections: BABAE or PAPAE ‘wow’, PHY ‘ugh’, VAE ‘oh no’, ATATAE ‘ah’, AGE ‘be reasonable’, APAGE ‘get outta here’, EIA ‘come on’, EVGE ‘hurrah’, all have identical equivalents in Greek. Cicero had been embarrassed to use the seemingly innocuous BINI ‘two each’, since it sounded the same as the Greek imperative bínei ‘fuck!’” (p. 94)

Eventually outside forces began to change the language, with Christianity having a significant impact. In its early centuries Christianity was not the language of Rome’s rulers, but of working people, slaves, and immigrants. “Christian Latin overall, then, was the Latin of the street, and perhaps especially the Latin of recent-generation speakers, who had never gained perfect command of the language.” (p. 118)

The common form of classical Latin was starting to change. All those word ending inflections were hard to learn, not to mention there were also many special grammatical constructions such as the use of the accusative to express not only a sentence’s direct object, but also ideas of extent and distance. Previously the inflections showed the function of a word in a sentence, so word order was not important, and many speakers put the verb at the end in order to maintain a sense of suspense about the action involved. As an example: “Fas est et ab hoste doceri (It is lawful to be taught even by an enemy).” The verb is at the end in the Latin, and the speaker could have used a number of different ones to make different points, such as ‘hated,’ ‘praised,’ or ‘ignored.’

[I am now going to interject a comment which does not refer to anything in the book, and is being added only because I find it interesting: In most Indo-European languages the accusative case is indicated with a terminal -m or -n. English retains a ghostly trace of this in its inflection of he/him and who/whom. When you say him or whom you are calling on a grammatical construction that goes back at least 6500 years, an echo from the ancient past.]

Back to the book. In the fourth century AD “Latin word-order began to change and became more rigid, with the verb in particular moving up from the end of the sentence into second position: sentence structure was becoming more like what is typical in a modern European language.” (p. 119) Without the Roman government to provide continuity, the local versions of Latin began to elide into the Romance languages we know today: French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian, along with a host of sub-dialects.

Latin would have vanished altogether like so many other ancient languages had it not been for the Church, which used it internally and taught it to the scholars and scribes it educated. As more of the ancient texts were discovered, a concerted effort was made to pull Latin back into the grammatical form it had had during the late Roman Republic, using Cicero’s letters and speeches as standards.

Latin maintained its pre-eminence for centuries more, but eventually the modern world started catching up to it. The invention of the printing press spurred a great demand for reading material. More books, pamphlets, and devotional material gave a reason for people to learn to read, and few of them had time or interest in learning to read in anything other than their native language. There were other changes in the air as well:

the constant political theme all over Europe in the centuries after the sixteenth was the declining influence of the elite before the rising aspirations and, ultimately, rising power of the masses. More egalitarian distribution, though it came only fitfully, might have meant a wider provision of Latin; but in practice it tended not to. When the Bolsheviks seized power in Russian, an almost immediate reform (in 1920) was to eliminate Latin in schools. (p. 293)

Nevertheless, Latin still held out for a time in odd corners and special circumstance. “In Hungary, Latin was necessary as the neutral lingua franca among speakers of five languages, Hungarian, German, Czech, Rumanian, and Croatian; it was hence used at higher levels of government. Although the government tried, it proved impossible to replace Latin with German even in 1790.” (p. 294) In addition, if you are ever visiting the Vatican and need some cash, their ATMs offer the option to show instructions in Latin.

And now it exists only as a scholarly pursuit. Most American high schools graduates today are barely literate, and according to the U.S. Department of Education 54% of adults 16-74 read below the sixth grade level. Latin is not likely to make a comeback, but even if it has a limited future, it had a mighty past, holding together an empire, and then forming the sinews of civilization when the Dark Ages got really dark in the tenth century, when European civilization teetered on the edge of collapse with Vikings invading from the north and west, Magyars from the east, and Saracens from the south. It was, as Wellington said of Waterloo, “a near-run thing,” but Latin bound the secular and religious leaders and reminded them of what they stood to loose if the forces of barbarism overwhelmed the West. Somehow they found a way to hold things together until better times arrived.

[Forrest · Rating 4 out of 5]

Six months it took me to read this book. Six months. Not because of it's length, not because it was boring (though there were moments), but because it just took that long to slowly absorb the contents, which are expansive. Nicholas Ostler tackles a sweeping overview of how Latin was a force that shaped history, and how history shaped Latin.

I started "studying" Latin a few years ago, I think it was during Covid, but I was really only dabbling. I've covered my reasons for doing so and my plans for the future elsewhere, so I won't belabor that here. If you have any recommendations, by the way, I'm listening.

My reason for reading Ad Infinitum specifically was this: I stumbled on the book at an estate sale where an older professor for the University of Wisconsin-Madison had collected a very, very large book collection. If it hasn't been made clear yet, I am very picky about what I read and buy. There are only so many pages one can read in life, so I will remain choosy until I die, I suppose. I've wasted too much time reading works that I felt were a waste of my time (to be fair, you don't really know until you've at least begun reading the book), so I don't often take in orphaned books. This was an exception, largely driven by the fact that I happened to have dipped my toe in the language and had, at about that time, begun listening to the excellent History of Rome podcast. Here, then, was a book that bridged the gap between the two.

And the book acts as that bridge, and more. It's not a book primarily about linguistics, though there is a skeleton of the more academic issues of evolving phonemes. It is about culture and the influence that language has on culture and vice versa. It is about the evolution of a spoken and written tongue bending to the will of those who use (and abuse) it. It is more of a convoluted map of how we got to where we are today in regards to this seemingly mystic language and its uses.

Being in no way a Classicist, I do realize that there are some problems with the book, which have been pointed out in other reviews. But overall, I strongly recommend it to the lay reader who wants to understand the context of a language that we read and hear almost every day, but know next to nothing about.

If you're interested in more Latin language and history books, try I, Claudius or SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

[Ushan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Latin was an IE language spoken in a small area in Central Italy in mid-first millennium BCE. It shared certain features with other IE languages of Italy; for example, the proto-IE consonant bh became f: "bhrater" became "frater", similar to how in Cockney English "things" turn into "fings"; the sound f was also common in the principal non-IE language of Italy, Etruscan. Latin was about as far from the principal Italic IE language of South Italy, Oscan, as Spanish is from Portuguese. The Etruscans dominated Rome for centuries; in an attempt to prevent the falsification of history to the detriment of Rome, Livy claims that Etruscan king Lars Porsena was so impressed by the bravery of Romans that he decided not to take Rome, but Pliny the Elder and Tacitus take it for granted that he conquered the city. Ostler lists about 200 nouns borrowed into Latin from the Etruscan and from the Greek via Etruscan, but I have seen proposed Indo-European etymologies for a few of these words, such as caelum and vagina.

As the Romans conquered the Apennine Peninsula, they spread colonists and the language; it took centuries for the other languages of Italy to die, and after the languages died, local customs such as funeral customs persisted for a few more generations (there are a few Greek-speaking villages in Apulia and Calabria even now, but if you believe Wikipedia, philologists aren't sure if their language is a survivor from ancient times or from Byzantine times). As the Romans conquered the rest of their empire, few local languages could put up resistance to Latin; in the Western half of the Roman Empire sans Africa, 30 languages were spoken in 100 BCE and 5 in 400 CE; other than Latin, they were Welsh, Basque, Albanian and moribund Gaulish; for the empire as a whole, the number dropped from 60 to 12. In the Eastern half of the empire, Greek was the language of inter-ethnic communication, but Latin had its own domains of law and the military.

After the Roman conquest of Greece, Latin absorbed a large Greek vocabulary; the Roman upper classes were bilingual; Latin literature first imitated Greek originals, but later developed on its own to the point where both Latin and Greek were languages of high culture. The sacred writings of the Christian Church were in Greek and Hebrew, but Latin was the language of the common people, so the Western church started to use it, as it still does (less so after the Second Vatican Council of 1962-1965), with some peculiar vocabulary (Christians who died for their faith were not called heroes because of this word's association with pagan goddess Hera).

After the Western Roman Empire fell, all provinces except Britain continued to speak a form of Latin, but because economies became simplified and localized and travel became dangerous, people from different parts of the former empire hardly ever spoke to each other, and Latin gradually split into several languages, which lost much morphology and became early forms of Castilian, French, Occitan, Italian and so on. By the Late Middle Ages it was realized that these languages are suitable for literature (epic poems, love poems); around the time of Columbus's voyage, a Spanish scholar produced the first grammar of Spanish and the first Spanish-Latin dictionary. This is different from the Arabic-speaking world, where classical Arabic is still the standard written language, and vernacular varieties are unwritten (the Ethnologue database lists 35 varieties of Arabic and 41 varieties of Romance). However, Latin remained the language of philosophy and science until the times of Newton, Linnaeus and Euler, though it was no longer anybody's native language; in order to make it suitable for translation from the Greek and Arabic, the language had to be enriched with calques from these languages. In order to spread the Word of Christ to speakers of Nahuatl, Quechua and other languages of the conquered peoples of New Spain, missionaries produced grammars of these languages and translated the gospels from the Latin into them; an unknown author translated Aesop's fables from the Latin into Nahuatl, replacing lions with jaguars and foxes with coyotes.

With the coming of modernity in the 17th-18th century, knowledge of Latin and the classical world lost much of its importance. In 1960, University of Oxford dropped knowledge of Latin as an entrance requirement. When the Soviet Union annexed eastern provinces of Poland in 1939 and set them up as western provinces of Soviet Ukraine and Soviet Belarus, Catholic children no longer studied Latin, and Jewish children no longer studied Hebrew. Latin is still studied as a foreign language, and books like Winnie Ille Pu and Harrius Potter et Philosophi Lapis are published, but the language and its literature are no longer the sine qua non of Western education that they were 200 years ago.

[Andrew Fish · Rating 4 out of 5]

How do you tell the story of a language? For this book, the answer is to tell the story of the events which gave it rise, propagated it, caused it to evolve and ultimately killed it. From the way you can tell the unrecorded history of ancient migrations and early conflicts through the relationships between languages, through to the popularisation of the nation state and its vernacular, this is a broad-reaching story.

Along the way there are some surprising twists on what we are usually told. So the decline of Roman Britain, evidenced in the much smaller imprint left on the country by Latin, is shown to be based on an early attack of Black Death delivered along the trade routes to the Roman communities, leaving the isolated enclaves of Germanic peoples to make their linguistic mark. Newton's Principia Mathematica was not written in Latin to keep it obscure, but rather because he was at the end of a tradition where all such works were written so. And Latin America gains its name because the language had its final success amongst the natives there, with histories of the Aztec peoples being written not in the Spanish of their conquerors but the Latin of their conquerors' conquerors. Even the cause of Latin's ultimate decline - a humanistic obsession with preserving the language of Cicero in aspic - is unexpected.

Not unnaturally, such a dense and complicated story is difficult to pot into a few hundred pages - something I suspect would be equally the case in Latin itself - so the book does sometimes seem to operate at a breathless pace. This means that the fine detail of how the language evolved, of the exact process by which the romance languages rose from it, these things are kept to a minimum. This is a shame, since it was more what I was hoping to learn, but it is not a failing of this book so much as a reason to find another for later. When I find it, I suspect the background provided by this accessible volume will help tremendously. And for those who don't really care when and why gracias parted company with obrigado or au revior said goodbye to ciao, Ad Infinitum will still provide an immensely enjoyable and entertaining read.

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 1 out of 5]

Bookreads


Too dry for a popular history, too lacking in rigor for an academic one. He also has a particular thesis, which makes the book rather awkward to read for anyone just looking for a historical narrative that isn't going out of its way to "prove" things.

The earlier chapters are perhaps the best, and the quality of the text just gradually decays once he moves pass the late antiquity.

E.

---

definately some peculiar views in places....


He's got this conviction that English will just eventually wither and die, though he can't really formulate 'how' since the political or economic arguments lead to a dead end, but he grasps onto a highly optimistic view of machine translation.

And English, like Latin, won't be needed anymore, because we'll all have this flawless bablefish, even the airline pilots i suppose.....

or odd barbs that if the European Union, adopted latin, just think of the savings in translation costs....

and being from the cult of Chomsky isn't exactly the most reassuring either.

it's a strange mix of cultural studies and language, and where opinions and facts merge, nobody knows.....

Not many reviewers have been bold enough to call this book out as 'mediocre pop-science' but i'm don't think it's all that far off the mark.

and I think there is some sloppy history going on within these pages. It might be his 'pet theory' that hundreds/dozens of uncertain Latin words are from the Etruscian, but it doesn't make it true, or true to the extent he hints at sometimes...

it is possible from the Etruscan/proto-Tuscans we have:

voltur - vulture
tuba - trumpet
vagina - sheath
populus - people

yet you have some words that seem to be Latin to Etruscan

nepos/nepotis (nephew) - nefts (also German neffe - Old Norse nefi)

And the Etruscan word for girl, talitha, comes from either Phoenecian or Greek

.........
.........
.........

insightful is the thesis

STUDIES IN THE ETRUSCAN LOANWORDS IN LATIN
Margaret Mary Therese Watmough

ABSTRACT

In the political and cultural relations between archaic Rome and Etruria the Etruscans were not the speakers of a 'dominant language'. Since Rome was not under Etruscan domination nor was there any prestige associated with the Etruscan language, the conditions under which large scale lexical borrowing takes place were absent.

A recent survey of the whole field is reviewed and its results are found to be uncertain or ill-supported; in it the constraints of space preclude the detailed treatment of individual words which is necessary if the nature of the influence of Etruscan on the Latin lexicon is to be fully understood.

This thesis deals with some specific problems in Etrusco-Latin interaction and in the Etruscan loanwords in Latin; a small number of words is treated in detail. It is established that each word is on phonological and morphological grounds unlikely to be Indo-European.

Concrete reasons for suspecting Etruscan origin leads to an examination of morphological, phonological and semantic factors in the light of the Etruscan lexicon, word-formation and phonology.

Emphasis is placed on explaining the structure of the Etruscan source and the way in which it is naturalized in Latin.

In some cases the Etruscan source word is identified; in others it is shown that an Etruscan source is probable. Data from the literary sources and archaeology are combined with linguistic and onomastic arguments,

The extent of Etrusco-Latin interaction in terms of the number of bilingual speakers was small; it is likely that the number of Etruscan loanwords in Latin is also small.

Hence a proposed Etruscan etymology for a Latin word of dubious origin must be examined critically. The detailed analysis of individual words brings new results.


Problems and aims

Anyone researching Etruscan words in Latin must meet the same obstacles which faced Ernout, namely the lack of attention paid to Etruscan by the Roman grammarians
In the face of these difficulties and in view of the uncertain results obtained by Breyer, it is clear that the only way to make progress in the study of Etruscan loanwords in Latin is to research individual lexemes in the fullest detail; data from the fields of literature and archaeology and art must be combined with those of linguistics and onomastics. The assumption of an Etruscan origin for a Latin word is worth little when it is not supported by strong evidence.

I intend, therefore, to concentrate on a small number of loanwords, which have the advantage not only of demonstrating various areas of contact between early Rome and Etruria, but also of exemplifying the existence of various types of Etruscan influence on the Latin lexicon.

Since the Etruscan lexicon is poorly known and semantic questions will rarely receive completely satisfactory answers, it is particularly important that a proposed Etruscan etymology for a Latin
word conforms to the known word-formation rules of Etruscan. The proposed borrowing must also be culturally and historically plausible.

The goal of this work then is to show that detailed analysis of individual words can bring new results.


The identification of Latin/Sabel1ic loans in Etruscan is problematic, not least because our knowledge of the Etruscan vocabulary is limited. There are two further difficulties.

Firstly, it is very difficult, and in many cases impossible, to demonstrate from which Italic language a loanword in Etruscan was borrowed.

Secondly, Latin/Sabel1ic origin must not be inferred for an Etruscan word on the basis of homophony; there should be clear semantic and phonological connections between the words in Etruscan and the donor language.

.......

This difficulty has already been intimated in connection with Etr. capra 'vessel name' beside Lat. capra 'she-goat'.

It is better exemplified by Etr. tular "Grenze, Gebiet" beside Umb. nom./acc. sg. tuder 'boundary' (discussed in detail by Meiser 1986:#70, cf. also Olzscha 1961:488-90).

Umb. tuder might go back to a form *tuler, which could have been the source of Etr. tular 'boundary'.

Etr. tul 'stone'(?) is also attested, which could be

a) a native Etruscan word, to which the plural tular '(boundary) stones' > 'boundary' was formed, in which case there would be no connection with the Umbrian word, or

b) a back formation from Etr. tular (< Umb. sg. *tuler-, which was interpreted as a plural form).

......

The Etruscan origin of fenestra

Since the structure of fenestra is not understandable as IE, it can neither have been formed in Latin nor borrowed from another IE language.

The likelihood, therefore, is that Lat. fenestra is a borrowing from a non-IE language.

An Etruscan etymology has recently been rejected both by Peruzzi 1980:73 <: "recourse to Etruscan is unwarranted"; he gives no account of the Etruscan evidence) and by Breyer 1984:392-393; 1052.

It is shown below that the root, the suffix and the structure of fenestra can in fact be explained as Etruscan. One may begin by considering the evidence for fen(e)s- in Etruscan.

In Etruscan there is no attested form in *fen-/*fin-.

An Etruscan proper name in fnes-/ fni£- is attested thrice: Vs 1.140 (rec.) dania: fnesci: ar; Cl 1.2644
Gustav Herbig 1916-17:172-177 does not give a proper analysis of the Etruscan names.

He overstrains the evidence when on the basis of these Etruscan names in fnes-/fniS- he derives from Etruscan not only Lat. fenestra < *fnes-tra, but also fenestella 'a small aperture in the wall of a building, vent, slit' and the cognomina Fenestella (name of a Roman historian of Augustan times; CIL XI 2144, XII 259)

< *fnes-tla and Fenestellius
Herbig also considers it possible (but unlikely) that fenestella is a Latin derivative of fenestra (< *fenestt-la, cf. agellus < *agf-los'>; this is certainly the case.

A connection need not be made with Etruscan in order to explain the origin of the Roman names; in Fenestella and the variant Fenestellius as in Fenesta (CIL X 2541) we see the cognominal use of fenestra and its derivative. fenestra may not seem appropriate as a personal name; we may compare, however, the cognomina Ianua, Murus (see Kajanto 1965:347)

Laughable cognomina were not unknown among the Romans; another example is Sulla 'little calf'.

Hence in considering here the possibility of Etruscan influence on Latin we need concentrate only on the base noun fenestra.

It is, however, worth pausing over the term fenestella. Ov.Fast.6.578 records a story that Fortuna was wont to enter the house of Servius Tullius by a small window and hence a gate (location unknown) bears the name of 'little window': Fortuna ... nocte domum parva solita est intrare fenestra, unde Fenestellae noniina Porta tenet. PIut.quaest.Rom.36 records the same story and the
alternative explanation that on the death of Tarquinius Priscus his wife Tanaquil, in addressing the people to persuade them to appoint Servius Tullius as king, put her head out of a window.

The importance of the story is twofold.

Firstly, it indicates the existence of Lat. fenestella and, therefore, fenestra in the regal period.

Secondly, as Herbig 1916-17 argues, since the Portae Capena and Ratumenna have Etruscan names, the name of the Porta Fenestella is likely to have an Etruscan origin too, cf. De Simone 1987:30: "La presenza a Roma ha lasciata anche tracce nella toponomastica. Sicuramente etrusco 6 il nome della porta Ratumena i-nna) (cfr. Ritumena, *Tarxumena, Tetumina ecc.>, che aveva per i Romani una connotazione culturale decisamente etrusca, in particolare veiente."

We must now return to the attested Etruscan names in fnes- /fniS-. fnesci is, as the female praenomen Qania in Vs 1.140 shows, a female gentilicium; the genitive form fnescial/ fniScial is a metronymic (see Rix 1985a:##31, 55).

Our three inscriptions may be translated as follows: Vs 1.140 'Oania Fnesci (daughter of) Ar(n0)'; Cl 1.2644 '0ana Xeritnei (daughter of) Fnesci'; 'Au(le) VelOuri (son of) Fnesci'....

Since Etruscan has other individual names (both praenomina and cognomina) in -ce such as thepraenomina rec. lar-ce (< arc. lare-ce/lari-ce'), arc. feluske- (attested as a 'Vornamengenti 1icium' in Vn 1.1 feluskeS), we may analyse *fnesce as *fnes + the suffix -ce.

Since praenomina are in origin appellatives, we may assume that *fnesce is in origin an appellative derived fromthe verbal(?)/ nominal (?) form #fnes.

The suggestion thenof Alessio 1941:545 that an Etruscan base form fnes- was amplified by two different suffixes to give on the one hand the personal name fnes-ci and on the other the substantive *fnes-tra requires a small qualification: fnesci is the feminine form of m.*fnes-ce\ the suffix -tra is discussed below.

Since the Etruscan (and Roman) letters were vocalized in /e/, the letter n could stand for /en/, the letter p for /pe/, the letter r for /er/ and so on; hence we find the abbreviated spellings hrcle for hercle, mnrva for menerva, ptrsa for petrsa, cf. Lat. DCUMIUS for Decumius, PTRONIO for Petronio (see Bonfante 1988)i*.

The possibility exists, therefore, that the n of fnes- stands for /en/, in which case we could reconstruct Etr. *fenes-

The possibility is slight because it requires that each of our three names is an abbreviated form.

The ending -estra of an Etr. *f(e)nestra finds parallels in the vase inscriptions uneStra (AH 3.1; late VII) and mi ceidestra (Cr 3.22; 525-500); unestra and celdestra are hapaxes of unknown meaning (: vase names?).

Another parallel is probably *maiestra 'mirror' (> *malstra), which is reconstructed on the basis of attested malstria (AH 3.3; 350-325).

We must turn now to the Etruscan ending -tra. It can no longer be maintained that "ganz gewohnlich ist die Erweiterung des -st- Formans mit dem etruskischen -r- Suffix" (Gustav Herbig 1916-17:167).

We will see that Breyer 1984:198 is incorrect in stating that "es gebe keine Beweise fur die Herkunft der Endung -(s)tra aus dem Etr.".

We can account easily for the ending -tra in two groups of Etruscan words:

1. Greek names in -Spa, which are written in Etruscan with -tra, e.g. EtidvSpa (Evandra) (greek doesn't paste well) > evantra, (Kassandra) caantra, castra, Kkeon&xpa (Kleopatra) > clepatra (see De Simone 1970);

2. Etruscan gentilicia in -ra formed from individual names in -t(V>, e.g. vetra-1 (gen.), dactra,
detra (see Rix 1972:#3.254).

Otherwise Etr. -tra is, as Rix 1985a:#35 remarks, "ein ungelostes Ratsel....Fur eine Bedeutungsbestimmung reicht das Material nicht aus......

Pfiffig 1969:#169 maintains that -tra is a collective suffix, which is added to the genitive of names, pronouns and substantives, e.g. vipinal-tra "Gesamtheit derer von Vipinei = die Kinder der Vipinei".

Rix demonstrates, however, that -tra "kann nicht nur an verschiedene Kasusformen treten.....

*males-tra (cf. supra) has the same meaning as malena (Urn 2.3 (V), nom.)/ malna <01 3.2 (400-350), base form) 'mirror', malena is formed from a noun male- (base form) and
the possessive suffix -na, cf. Sudi 'tomb1, (suthina) 'belonging to the tomb, tomb gift'. One may consider then whether the meanind of -tra, which is added to the genitive *males, is not similar to that of -na (: ?'pertaining to' or similar).

Helmut Rix (: personal communication) is now of the opinion that -tra is the plural of -ta, as -cla is the plural of -ca (on the demonstrative pronouns ta < ita and ca < ika see Rix 1985a:i§38-40) . Hence..... (lots of german).....

If this theory is correct, it is not able to explain all instances of -tra in Etruscan; one thinks, for instance, of *malestra, a singular form.

The precise function of -tra, which perhaps varies in accordance with the case of the base word, cannot be determined. Important for an Etruscan etymology of Lat. fenestra is the fact that an ending -tra existed in Etruscan.

If we review the possibilities considered above (: 1. collective suffix, 2. possessive (or sim.) suffix, 3. plural of ta), then we may note as working hypotheses:

*f(e)nestra <? gen. *f(e)nes + -tra>= 1. (unlikely) 'the totality of the +f(e)ne'-, 2. 'belonging/ pertaining/ relating to the *f(e)ne' ; 3. plural of *f(e)nesta 'das, das bei *f(e)ne ist'.

A propos hypothesis 3. it is interesting to note i) that Lat. genesta and lanista show the same final sequence e/ista and ii) the possibility that Lat. fenestella is a derivative of *f(e)nesta, while sg. fenestrais from Etr. pi. *f(e)nestra.

Another possible interpretation of an Etr. *f(e)nestra is that it is a derivative in -ra to a nominal base *f(e)nest, cf. cap-ra, malehv-ra, neQo-ra-, *spur-ra\ *f(e)nestra would then be 'that which belongs to the *f(e)nest'.

This interpretation is less satisfactory because we do not have evidence for an Etruscan suffix or enlargement -t- and cannot, therefore, analyse *f(e)nest.ra as **f(e)nes-t-ra; this means that we cannot easily connect *f(e)nest-ra with fnesci.

The advantage of an Etruscan etymology is thatit may provide an account not only of Lat. f&nestra. but also of other attested forms.

As to the chronology of the forms, the presence of n in f&nestra/fenstra rules out the possibility that festra is the original Latin form: festra > f£nestra/fenst.ra is not possible.

urther, a development *fSnestra > f&nstra (> fenstra) > festra cannot be assumed.

The second stage fenstra > festra is regular with the reduction of n in the sound group nst accompanied perhaps by lengthening of the preceding vowel, cf. semenstris > semestris (see Sommer- Pfister 1977:#143,2b).

The first stage *f&nestra > fenstra, however, is problematic since in Latin only short vowels in open syllables (i.e. before a single consonant) are syncopated (see Rix 1967:esp. 156-157).

There is only one exception to this rule, namely syncope before s plus tenuis, e.g. *semistertius > sestertius, *minuscellus > mlscellus, ministerium > misterium.

All the words so affected begin with semi- or mini/u- and it may be that abbreviation rather than syncope has taken place.

Certainly there is no syncope in cases such as *sc£lestos > scelestus. Hence there is no sound precedent in Latin for *f£nestra > fenstra.

If then f&nestra was the original Latin form, no satisfactory internal account can be given for fenstra or, therefore, festra.

In Etruscan the development *finestra > *f&nstra would be phonologica1ly possible, but not *f&nstra > *festra.

In Etruscan syncope takes place in medial and final syllables, both open and closed (see Rix 1985a:#10), e.g. arc. danaxvil > rec. danxvil, Gr. 'HpaxXffQ> Etr. hercle; hence arc. *f&nestra > rec. *f&nstra would be possible in Etruscan.

A further loss of n in the Etruscan word is also unproblematic....

The possibility that Latin borrowed from Etruscan the one form *f&nstra, which gave rise to f&nestra by anaptyxis (cf. saeclum > saeculum, rixvq >techina, Spcxxpff > drachuma (PI.), nv& > mina) is uncertain since anaptyxis is limited to the environment of particular consonants and no direct parallel can be given for fenstra > f&n-e-stra (see Leumann 1977:75,102-103; Szemer6nyi 1989:113).

We must then start out from Etr. *fenestra or *fnestra, which gave Lat. fenestra by anaptyxis (: Latin does not tolerate initial fn- ) and fenstra (> festra) by metathesis (cf. Alessio 1941:545).

.....one can hypothesize a development Etr. *fnestra > *frestra > Lat. frestra.

The Romans would then have known two forms of the Etruscan word: *fnestra and *frestra (> Lat. frestra), the knowledge of the existence of which in the early language has somehow come down to Placidus. f&nestra will have been established in the Latin vocabulary before *fn&stra developed to *fr&stra in Etruscan.

Latin frestra could, therefore, lend support to the hypothesis of an Etr. *fnestra.

The possibility must also be mentioned that Lat. festra may have developed from frestra by dissimi1ation.

.....
The Latin and (hypothesized) Etruscan forms can be connected in a number of different ways, as the examples below illustrate.

The Latin forms, for which there is no IE etymology available, can be explained by recourse to
Etruscan.

It is possible that one, two or three Etruscan forms were borrowed into Latin:

....

In conclusion

[see below]

[Bryant · Rating 3 out of 5]

Better on tidbits than on the big picture, this book tries to cover too much in too little space and ends up reading at times like a textbook: superficial summaries of vast swathes of history about which you'd rather know more--or just nothing at all.

All the same, several of the tidbits are interesting:

1. in the Middle Ages, a classroom text colorfully depicted the Seven Liberal Arts as having distinct personalities. I particularly like the description of Grammar:

"Grammatica is an old lady with highly polished manners, and various surgical appliances, such as a scalpel to excise the vices in children's tongues, an inky powder that could heal the same, and an extremely sharp medicine ... to be applied to the throat in case of fetid burps brought on by unschooled boorishness."

2. When the Bolsheviks took over Russia, they abolished Latin from the school curriculum, evidence of the extent to which the language was (and still is) perceived as the preserve of an elite.

3. "In 1903 the Italian mathematician Giuseppe Peano, having once received with dismay a letter from another mathematician written in Japanese, made a sustained attempt to rehabilitate a form of Latin as a universal language."

4. As recently as 2006 Finland proposed re-instating Latin as the language of international diplomacy, citing the use of French as an unfair privileging of a contemporary culture. Latin, the Finnish minister argued, does not give special status to any current political dispensation.

Ostler is also very strong on the ways in which the specifically Roman way of conquering places assisted the spread of Latin. But as this book goes on, one senses that Ostler has undertaken a subject that's simply too big.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nicholas Ostler traces the development of Latin from its emergence in the first century BC as one of a number of competing languages in what is now Italy, to its position as the dominant language of the western world, a status that it maintained right up until the end of the seventeenth century.

Some of this is well-trodden ground but there are also some fascinating insights. For example, I was surprised to learn just how much new vocabulary was introduced by the scholastic writers of the late middle ages and I had not realised that the reverence with which the luminaries of the Renaissance treated the Classical Latin of Cicero had the effect of petrifying the language rather than invigorating it.

I had a few reservations: I would have liked much more detail on the gradual metamorphosis of Vulgar Latin into the Romance languages and I found the chapter on Latin America a bit rushed. However, this is a huge endeavour and, on the whole, the author makes a very good job of it.

[Seumas Macdonald · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fine overview of the history of Latin. Well-written, non-specialist. Opens up whole fields of reflection for classical latin enthusiasts to contemplate, and a few intriguing observations about language dominance, survival, diffusion, and decay.

[Jackson Cyril · Rating 4 out of 5]

An intriguing look at the language that dominated the last 2000 years of European life-- we forget that until the 19th century, fluency in Latin was THE mark of an educated European. Ostler discusses the rise of Latin-- in the face of stiff linguistic competition, it's remarkable ability to absorb words and concepts from other languages, and ultimately the manner in which the adoption of Latin by the Church changed it linguistically but kept it alive long after Rome 'fell'. The chapters on the intersection between Latin and other languages-- Etruscan, Arabic, Hebrew etc-- and the slow evolution of modern European vernaculars are also fascinating.

[Koen Crolla · Rating 1 out of 5]

What do you get when you cross an Englishman's view of the classical world with the immense sloppiness of mediocre pop-sci? Not a biography of Latin, that's for sure.

I've already spent too much time recently complaining about the state of British classical studies and the many myths that are unique to it that are in equal part due to imperialist statecraft and just bad academics, and while all of that applies here retreading that ground too often is bad for my disposition and for my ability to muster up the patience to interact with English classicists, which I do have to do from time to time, so instead I'm going to focus on the linguistic aspects of the book. Those range from unconscionably sloppy (e.g. the claim that in the European part of the Western empire in 400 CE just five languages were spoken: Latin, "Welsh" (by which he means Common Brittonic, of which Welsh is just one of three surviving descendants), "Basque" (meaning Aquitanian, of which Basque probably is the only living descendant), "Albanian" (presumably Illyrian, whose identity is famously contentious and definitely too controversial to be equated without so much as a footnote), and Gaulish) to outright bullshit, and by way of example I'd like to focus on the chapter about Etruscan influence on Latin.
Ascribing Latin words of uncertain provenance to Etruscan is a common theme among hack and/or crank etymologists, and Ostler does this for about a hundred of them. I'm not doing anything this morning, so I'm going to go through all of them (minus a few duplicates/derivatives) and find the most respectable current etymology; for funsies, I'll boldface the words most people would agree are Etruscan: (Translations mine rather than wrong.)

idūs [sic, actually īdūs] ('Ides'; Varro already claims an Etruscan etymology for this, and there's no real reason to doubt him), lanius ('butcher'; < OLat lacnius < PIE *lek- 'to tear'), fascinus ('hex, dildo'; uncertain, but probably cognate with Gk. βάσκανος 'sorceror', βάσκειν 'to slander', which has a few proposed etymologies, none Etruscan), ātrium ('atrium'; from L āter 'matte black, gloomy' < PIE *h₂eh₁ter- 'fire'), columna ('column'; < L columen < PIt *kelamen- < PIE kelH-men- 'top, summit'), fenestra ('window'; some connect it to Gk φαίνειν 'to reveal' instead), fornix ('arch, vault; brothel'), grunda ('roof'; < PIt *ɣronda- < PIE *gʰrondʰ-h₂ 'beam, bar, bolt'), turris ('tower'; < Gk τύρρις, from an unknown substrate; the claim that it's directly from Etruscan is due to a 19th-century Frenchman), mundus ('crypt'), favisa (not a real word), cisterna ('cistern'; < L cista 'chest, casket' < Gk κίστη < PIE *kisteh₂ 'woven container'), lanterna ('lantern'; < Gk λαμπτήρ < λάμπω 'to shine' < PIE *leh₂p- 'to shine'), catena ('chain'; uncertain, but it's shaped like a IE word), verna ('homeborn slave'; uncertain, some IE cognates have been suggested), taberna ('inn, shop'; < L *traberna < trabs 'tree trunk, beam'), as ('as (a coin)'), caupō ('shopkeeper, innkeeper'; borrowed from the same unknown source as Gk κᾰ́πηλος 'huckster, innkeeper', not likely to be Etruscan), cociō [sic, actually cōciō] ('broker'; identified as Etruscan faute de mieux, but not commonly challenged), mangō ('dealer'; unknown, but Etruscan doesn't have voiced consonants), palla/pallium ('mantle'; uncertain, likely from a form of PIE *pel- 'to cover; hide, cloth'), lacerna ('lacerna'), balteus ('belt'; assumed to be Etruscan because Varro claimed it was; that Etruscan doesn't have a /b/ is, uh, ...), cappa ('cape'; related to caput, not attested until centuries after Etruscan's extinction), cimussis [sic, actually cimussa] ('cord'; unknown!), calceus ('shoe'; from calx 'heel' < PIE *(s)kel- 'to bend'), tebenna (this is supposedly an Etruscan cloak, but I can't actually find the word in any dictionary I own), fullō ('fuller'; typically related to PIE *bʰleh₃-, but /u/ rather than /o/ is problematic), nacca ('fuller'; < Gk νᾰ́κη 'fleece', "according to Beekes, of Pre-Greek origin"), cērussa ('white lead'; connected to cēra, which is cognate with Gk κηρός, from an unknown source), purpurissum ('purple pigment'; < Gk πορφῠ́ρᾱ, ultimately from a Semitic language; might have passed through Etruscan, which is one way to explain the /o/ turning into /u/), mundus ('toiletries'; < PIE *mh₂nd- 'to adorn'; not the same word as the other mundus), pulcher ('beautiful'; uncertain, possibly < PIE *perk- 'variegated'), scurra ('dandy'; a PIE etymology has been suggested but it's tenuous), barginna ('man from a poor family', Ostler's claim that it means 'idiot' notwithstanding; unknown, but containing two consonants Etruscan did not), bargus (another fake word), buccō ('fool'; < L bucca 'cheek', from Celtic (cf. Gaulish *bekkos 'beak')), barō [sic, actually bārō] ('simpleton'; related to vār(r)ō 'boor' and hence to vārus 'bow-legged' < PIE *weh₂- 'separate'; Ostler confuses this word with Medieval Latin barō < Frankish barō 'servant' when he calls it the origin of English baron), āleō ('gambler'; transparently from ālea 'die', likely from āla 'armpit, wing' < axis 'axle' < PIE *h₂eḱs-i-s 'axis, axle'), gāneō ('glutton'; from gānea 'tavern', which is a Semitic loan), helluo ('glutton'; unknown!), lurchō ('glutton'; uncertain, may have cognates in Gmc), levenna ('absent-minded person'; from levis 'light' < PIE *h₁lengʰ-u-; the -enna suffix is Etruscish), lēnō/lēna ('pimp'/'madam'; unknown!), carīsa ('artful woman'; certainly from cārus 'dear' < PIE *kéh₂-ro-s), paelex ('mistress; male prostitute'; commonly related to Gk παλλακίς 'concubine'), lustra ('debauchery'; L *dustrum < Gk *δύστρον < δύω 'to plunge'), calumnia ('chicanery'; same root as calvi 'to deceive' < PIE *ḱel- 'to cover'), rabula ('pettifogger'; from rabere 'to rave' < *rebʰ- 'violent'), madulsa ('drunkard' (not 'binge'); unknown!), crāpula ('intoxication' (not 'hangover'); < Gk κραιπᾰ́λη 'binge; intoxication; hangover', "according to Beekes of Pre-Greek origin"), culīna ('kitchen'; < L coquere < PIt *kʷekʷe/o- 'to cook' < PIE *pekʷ-e/o-), arvīna ('fat'; related to Gk ὀρύα 'kind of sausage'), botulus ('sausage'; < PIE *gʷet- 'swelling' through a Sabellic language), sagīna ('feasting'; uncertain, likely < PIE *seh₂- 'to satisfy'), mantīsa ('gain'; unknown; the claim of Etruscan provenance is due to Festus, but it may be Celtic instead), calpar ('wine pitcher'; unknown, likely cognate with Gk κᾰ́λπῐς, Breton kelorn), clarnus ('table with fruits as a gift to Venus'; unknown actually), cortīna ('cauldron'; connected to curvus 'curved' < PIE *kur-wo- (somewhat dubious)), crēterra ('mixing bowl'; < Gk κρᾱτήρ < PIE *ḱerh₂-), lagēna ('flask'; < Gk λᾰ́γηνος, from a Semitic language), lepista ('goblet'; < Gk λεπᾰστή 'goblet'), orca ('barrel'; either from Gk ὕρχη or from a common source, possibly filtered through Etruscan), situlus ('bucket'; unknown, possible cognate in Lithuanian siẽtas 'sieve'), sporta ('basket'; < PIE *sper- 'to twist'), tīna ('wine vessel'; Etruscan θina), urna [sic, actually ūrna] ('urn'; < ūrere 'to burn' < PIE *h₁ews- 'to burn'), saburra ('grit, sand'; variant of sabulum < PIt *(p)saþlo- < PIE *sem- 'to pour', cognates all over), sentīna ('bilgewater'; < PIE *semH- 'to scoop'), carīna ('keel'; < PIE *ḱerh₂- 'head, horn'), mīles ('soldier'; convincingly analysed as mīlia 'thousands' + it- 'to go' ≈ 'one who goes by the thousands' remodelled on pedes 'pedestrian' and eques 'rider', but every textbook has this word as Etruscan in origin), vēles ('skirmisher'; obviously vēlōx 'fast' < PIE *weǵʰ- 'to bring', remodelled on mīles or similar), satelles ('attendant, bodyguard'; convincing IE origins have been posited, but this is another "famously Etruscan" word, canonically from satnl), clipeus ('shield'; unknown!), tīrō ('recruit'; Etr tiro), cacula ('batman'; uncertain, seems to have a Sanskrit cognate), lixa ('camp follower'; < PIE *leykʷ- 'to leave'), scaena ('stage'; < Gk σκηνή 'tent; stage', from Semitic), arēna ('sand'; < *hasēna, another "could be" that has become "is" in textbooks), dossennus (Ostler claims this means 'hunchback', in which case he's presumably connecting it to dorsus 'back', which however is dē + versus < PIE *wert-e/o- 'to turn'), miriō [sic, actually mīriō] ('singularly deformed man'; < mīrus 'wonderful' < PIE *sméyros 'laughing'), mōriō ('absolute fool'; < Gk μωρός 'slow' < PIE *muHrós), murmillō ('fish-crested gladiator'; < Gk μόρμυλος 'striped seabream'), subulō [sic, actually sūbulō] ('flute player').

(Ostler additionally lists a bunch of words that he admits are Greek in origin but claims were passed through Etruscan, for which his track record isn't much better. There's more words in an appendix but I'll leave those as an exercise for the reader.)

My point in all of this isn't necessarily that Ostler faked his degrees or that MIT should rescind his doctorate, if it exists; it's that we know very little about Etruscan and that ascribing any Latin word whose etymology confuses us to it is academically bankrupt—"according Beekes, of Pre-Greek origin" may be a punchline, but in practice it's a thousand times more respectable than "may be Etruscan", which is obviously still much preferable to Ostler's "is Etruscan"—and this level of scholarship is carried through the remainder of the book as well, including the bits that are about history instead of language.

There are, of course, things in this book that are true, and there are even things that are kind of interesting; if you're already capable of separating the good from the bad, none of them will be new to you.

[Christopher Poncelet · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ad Infinitum tells the fascinating life story of Latin: a language that began as one of many Italic tribal languages and grew to be so universal that it spanned from Caesar to the Incas.

The book does slow down at times when Ostler delves into the minutiae of Latin etymology and morphology, but it is still engaging and he does a great job illustrating how the culture shaped the language and vise versa.

Even though Latin never became the universal language that the Romans had dreamed it would be, the effects of Latin can still be felt in every corner of the world and it is certainly worthwhile to study its history.

[Kevin de Ataíde · Rating 2 out of 5]

Agreeable little history of the Latin language, especially interesting in the period of the decline of the Empire in the early medieval period. I did have a feeling that the the book crawled along at the beginning, probably for lack of information about the early history and the desire of the author to demonstrate the colonial origins of Latin (dominating minority languages on the Italian peninsula like Oscan and greater competitors like Etruscan). The fascination of the Romans with Greek is very interesting, long centuries after Latin acquired greater renown and geographical spread, but the inheritance from Greek is unmistakable, and the greater success of the Western Church in propagating its message through language begins here, and demonstrates the Latin Church's increasing flexibility, when compared to the Greek church. Only the liturgy seems to have remained in Latin, while the West began to develop local variations of the Germanic languages that came to dominate. What the author never demonstrates fully is the overarching unity of religion that Latin provided, and that the disunity that was gradually introduced in the latter medieval period and the successes of the later protestant movement was accomplished through the gradual shaking-off of the old language; religion is apparently not his great concern in this work. It was the Church that held Europe together, with an impersonal language that was no nation's particular belonging, and did so far better than a half-baked, economy-based organisation that chooses the language of one of its member states. Shake off the Church and her language, and the latter history of Europe is endless fratricidal war. It does seem as if Latin was cultivated by the Church, rather than by the secular State or the universities on their own, so the eventual rejection of Latin in general cannot be separated from the rejection by governments and people of the Church herself, and her moral code. Of which the author is a part, and this is seen in the generally cynical description of the churchmen and the schoolmen of the high-medieval and early-Renascence periods, who sought constantly but ultimately failed in the twentieth century to rejuvenate the old language. The last part of the book is a rather tedious summary of the decline of Latin, from the establishment of grammars of European and other vernaculars in the period of the Discoveries, assisted by the printing press, the establishment of Latin syllabi for the Spanish colonies in a vain attempt at latinising the locals there, and the continued use of Latin in epithets, mottos, etc. from the eighteenth century until the present - that is, in an elitist demonstration of culture. I first opened this book in 2018 and it has taken this long to finish it and for that reason and several others I've mentioned above it gets two stars - it's okay, but gives me the impression that it has been written not by a lover of the language, but by a historian of it. I would have preferred the former.

[Dichotomy Girl · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am not a linguist, and I have little to no knowledge of Latin, so I am just about as far away from the intended audience for this book that one can be. I checked out the e-book, on a whim, because it sounded interesting. And it was, in parts, unfortunately the other parts usually made my eyes bleed. I do not necessarily blame the author for this, it was just too much for my poor little ignorant brain.

Nevertheless, the sections on the influence of Christianity was particularly interesting.

But if you are like me, and not a linguist, and don't know Latin, I do not recommend that you read this.

[Charlie · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's not easy to write a popular history of a niche topic. Ostler does decently well. The central thesis, that Latin is the real cultural unifying factor of what we call Europe, is interesting. Unfortunately, it also leads Ostler to think he needs to summarize all of European history. Then for some reason we hear all about Latin in the New World. I think the author just never really knew what story he wanted to tell. There were enough sparkling Latin tidbits strewn throughout to satisfy Latinists, but not enough to really serve as a guide to understanding the technical changes Latin underwent over time.

[E. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Too dry for a popular history, too lacking in rigor for an academic one. He also has a particular thesis, which makes the book rather awkward to read for anyone just looking for a historical narrative that isn't going out of its way to "prove" things. The earlier chapters are perhaps the best, and the quality of the text just gradually decays once he moves pass the late antiquity.

[Arnaud Hamelin-Lachapelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

It contains a wealth of knowledge about Latin and European history, most of which was interesting. It was dense at times, and lacked a bit of finesse, but overall I'm glad to have read it.

[Karel · Rating 5 out of 5]

With Ad Infinitum Nicholas Ostler has achieved a magisterial overview of the history of the Latin language. The work covers the full breadth of the language's history, which spans almost 3000 years, and it predominantly approaches this topic from a historical perspective. That is to say, while Ostler is a trained Linguist and Classicist, it is possible to read this book without any expert knowledge in these disciplines, and, for the more complex or less directly relevant matters, the author has chosen to use footnotes or taken the time to explain the necessary technical details. An academic bibliography has been included at the back of the book to provide readers with a guide to the academic literature on which Ostler has based his argument.

The chronologically structured chapters brim with erudition and provide insightful, entertaining and expert information from the first to the last paragraph. The book has been written by an exceptionally qualified and intelligent author, and the structure of the argument, the general approach to historiographical writing, the selection of citations from primary sources, and the writer's awareness of societal differences and developments from widely divergent periods all point this out. In one sentence, Ostler has written a singularly smart book for linguistically oriented, historically interested readers.

A point of criticism is that while Ostler's work is both gripping and informative, it is likely that some readers will find his nonchalant writing style somewhat offputting. The work reads as if the author wrote it at a fast pace, and Ostler seems to have prioritised content over stylistic finesse. One occasionally gets the feeling that a more thorough editing job would have benefited the works' overall legibility and intelligibility. Given the quality of Ostler's intellect and historical insights, however, the stylistic infelicities are excusable and should not deter readers from picking up this marvellous work of popular scholarship.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lector intende: Laetaberis Reader, pay attention. You will enjoy yourself.” Apuleius, Metamorphoseon, i.I. This was a fantastic book filled with fascinating insights that gave me a new perspective on European history. I found it very well-written, thoroughly researched, and scholarly without being dry. While there is a lot of Latin in it and even more in the endnotes, you don’t have to know Latin to read and enjoy this book (although I am sure it is even better if you do). Translations into modern English are provided alongside every Latin quote. To give an idea of what the book explores, here is a quote I found especially memorable: “Languages create worlds to live in, not just in the minds of their speakers, but in their lives, and their descendants’ lives, where those ideas become real. The world that Latin created is today called Europe. And as Latin formed Europe, it also inspired the Americas. Latin in fact has been the constant in the cultural history of the West, extending over two millennia.” (page 20). Another comes from the same page, “it was the [Roman] Empire that gave Latin its overarching status. But, like the Roman arches put up with the support of a wooden scaffold, the language was to prove far more enduring than its creator. As the common language of Europe, spoken and written unchanged by courtiers, clerics, and international merchants, its active use lasted three times as long as Rome’s dominion. Even now, it echoes on in the law codes of half the world, in the terminologies of biology and medicine, and until forty years ago in the liturgy of the Catholic Church, the most populous form of Christianity on earth.”

[Riley G. · Rating 4 out of 5]

*3.5 stars

This book is one of my sources for my final school project, and though I won’t be using the entire thing for source material, I decided to read it all the way through just to say I’ve read it.

I learned a lot from reading this—about Latin, about Greek, about the impact Latin had on everything around it. It was truly an interesting read. And it goes well with what I’m reading about in my history book too, so that’s cool. It’s a very thorough view of Latin, and I recommend that any Latin student (or not, 😉) read this book.

I will mention, however, that there were one or two statements that made me slightly uncomfortable, which made me almost bring it down to 3 stars. One statement mentioned how violent the Catholics were during the Inquisition, basically wondering why God would let them be that way.

All in all, though, a truly interesting read. I learned quite a bit.

[Regina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Let me start by saying that I do NOT know Latin, cannot speak it and cannot read it, so there were the occasional moments when I felt like the author presumed that I did. That little vent aside, this was a truly interesting 'life story' of the language of Latin. I'd never thought of languages having a biography before, so I'm glad I persevered and returned to re-start this book earlier this year. Yes, it is too dense to be a bedside, night-time book but it was worth reading. As the title suggests, it is a biography, only of a language not a person. Along the way, I learned a great deal about the ancient world, other languages and cultures that once existed but I'd not heard much of before, and actually picked up a couple of Latin words here and there too.

[satej soman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent overview of the influence of Greek and Etruscan on early Latin, how Latin interacted with other prestige languages (like Arabic or Nahuatl), and how Latin is a useful testing ground for modern studies of semantics. The entire section on medieval Latin was pretty boring; the period of European rediscovery of Greek and Arabic texts is literally a list of authors, titles, and locations.

Also a great source of trivia - did you know that Denmark and the Ottoman Empire signed a treaty in Latin?

[Diana Sandberg · Rating 1 out of 5]

Oh my god, I am such a fool. This is actually the third of Ostler's books I've tried to read, lured by my own love of language, and, in this case, Latin in particular.

Made it nearly half way through, but no.

Here is my review of another of his: "I have always been fascinated by history and by language, and a combination of the two ought to have riveted me, but in fact I spent several weeks attempting to slog through this thing and just couldn't do it. Dry as dust."

Ditto for this one. Gah.

[Anson Cassel Mills · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book wears its learning lightly. Ostler is fine stylist as well as an able scholar, an author who knows his craft and is able to coax an educated general reader through a variety of abstruse and potentially deadly topics. I will admit to skipping pages here and there where the author’s muse seemed to fail him; but in compensation, I read all the footnotes, most of them fascinating, and a goodly number, amusing.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have learned the term “microhistory” and I think this genre and I are going to be friends.

I studied Latin for years and am Catholic, so this was an easy win for me. I found it fun to learn things like how we know which skills the early Romans learned from the Oscans based on which words they borrowed, and understanding why spoken Latin fractured into the Romance languages when spoken Arabic did not.

A dense and academic book, but I loved it.

[Connie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really heavy and slow reading, but there were some really interesting tidbits here and there. I really enjoyed learning about how the Renaissance in a way ensured Latin's survival but did so by putting it up on a pedestal and turning it into the dead language we know it as today.

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really excellent journey of the history of Latin. Ostler traces the journey of the language, how it changed and how it transformed the world. I would recommend to classics students but also anyone interested in western history and linguistics.

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Informative history, if a bit ponderous at times. Gets weaker the further along he goes, but the chapters of Greek, the development of Romance and Latin in colonial Spanish America are interesting and informative enough to be worth the price of admission.

[rixx]

Nonfiction: history of the Latin language, extremely well-informed.

[Mark A.]

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[Rossdavidh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Subtitle: A biography of Latin. There are books, there are books for nerds, and then there are books for nerds which eschew such topics as physics or history (way too mainstream), and instead are entirely about the language Latin. We have hit a new level of geekiness here. I feel right at home.

Not that I know much about Latin. But I liked the author's previous book, "Empires of the World", which was about how languages and political empires went together (or failed to), so I was willing to follow him as he wallowed in this particular empire/language pairing for over 300 pages, not counting appendices.

The first thing he pointed out which surprised me (although in some sense I must already have known it), was that most of Latin's "life" occurs AFTER the fall of Rome. Here we take "life" to mean from the time the first recognizable form of it appeared, until the end of its common usage as a means of communication by people who were not language devotees, just using what was most convenient. Republic and Empire together, Rome lasted for over half a millenium, but it was well over a millenium after that before it ceased to be a common means of communication.

Ostler covers all of these periods with more or less equal emphasis, from the early tussles between Latin and Etruscan, to the later superiority/inferiority complex with Greek, to the reasons why it was not supplanted by German even though the Germans took over the Empire, and then on through the various Medieval phases of simplification and reaction against the same (going back to Cicero again and again for their role model).

There is a tolerable amount of actual Latin in all of this. If you can't tolerate any, well, this is probably not the book for you, but you don't have to actually know any Latin to find it interesting. You do probably have to be a bit of a linguiphile, but in truth there is more history than vocabulary. The attitude towards Latin of the people who spoke or read it changed with the culture of the time; for example the early Christian church was a great advocate of using simpler and more plebeian Latin, to help spread its message, but centuries later we find it preaching (pun intended) for the preservation of what had been the language of the proverbial "street", well past the time when it was any such thing. It says more about the history of the Church than it does about Latin.

While I shed no tears for the Roman Empire, I do have to say that the idea of all the world's learned folk exchanging letters and books in a common, neutral language is still a tempting one. Any student in high school physics discussing the technical meaning of the word "work" can imagine how it might be useful to use different languages for deep thinking and for ordinary conversation.

It also seems to have helped to convey a sense of solidarity between scholars across national borders, to be able to communicate freely within their community without hindrance, and to a certain degree without a public spotlight. If in Darwin's time Latin were still the language to publish a book such as "On the Origin of Species", might the theory of natural selection have been better able to ascend from new hypothesis to established theory without so much counterproductive brewhaha? Galileo published in Italian rather than Latin, and appears to have done so as a more or less deliberate provocation of the Vatican. Bully for him, but there is something to be said for the idea that Latin provided a low-censorship space for the exchange of ideas across Europe.

Ostler's account of all this is enjoyable, but there is in any tale of Rome or classical culture an air of melancholy. Latin's persistence past the end of the Empire seems somewhat analogous to a Warner Brother's cartoon character, running of the edge of a cliff for half a dozen steps before they (and gravity) finally notice and plummet ignominiously. Latin today hangs on in odd niches (botany, legal terms, university insignia), not much more significant than Roman numerals.

It's a helpful perspective, however, on the current state of languages such as English, French, Modern Standard Arabic, or Spanish, which today span large parts of the world but which are ultimately dependent on a conflux of politics, religion, and economics for their continued existence as living languages. Language is a reflection of how people view themselves, who they want to include and exclude in the conversation, and how they wish to be perceived. Seeing controversies on topics such as what is "proper" Latin (the way people speak, or the way our ancestors wrote) gives some perspective when modern commentators lament the state of written or spoken English. Moreover, the tale of Latin takes in the fall of Rome and the Enlightenment, two topics which are not only important but full of life and death struggle. I have no expectation that a passing knowledge of Latin's history will ever be useful at cocktail parties, even if one assumed I were to attend any, but I make no apologies. I liked this book.