From www.news-journal.com - October 2, 2023 11:16 PM
  • By Frank T. Pool
    •  
  • Oct 2, 2023 
 

Nowadays there seems to be an upswell of attention to ancient Rome, especially among men. I am less interested in emperors and wars than in Stoic philosophy, the rise of Christianity in Late Antiquity, and the Latin language.

Thus I recently ordered a copy of “Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin and the World It Created” by Nicholas Ostler, who also wrote “Empires of the Word,” an outstanding book on several important languages.

He’s a good writer, though not an easy one; he frequently illustrates his points in great detail by quoting from very old texts in the original languages. Remarkably, he can make this interesting, if challenging.

 

Latin is one of the Indo-European family of languages. These languages are all related and stretch historically from Ireland through Iran and into India and Central Asia. Most European languages are from this group.

Modern genetic science has taught us a great deal about the expansion of the Indo-European peoples and languages beginning six thousand years ago, proving some theories and disproving others. It’s a fascinating topic, one deserving detailed treatment some other time.

What makes Latin different from other languages descended from their common, unwritten ancestor? Ostler gives us some ideas in two chapters of his rich book.

Many languages evolve quickly when their speakers interact with people using other languages. In the case of the Indo-European expansion, sometimes there was little interaction because the invaders simply destroyed other societies, killed the men, and had children with the women. But this is not what happened to Latin.

Instead of overwhelming their neighbors, the people who ended up speaking Latin lived beside them. One of these peoples were the Etruscans, who dominated much of the Italian peninsula in the sixth century B.C.E., when Rome was a collection of poor villages. Indeed, three of the last kings of Rome were of Etruscan origin.

Apparently the Etruscans were highly valued for their abilities to read omens through the flight of birds, something the ancients took very seriously. They also influenced the emerging Latin language.

The Etruscan language was non-Indo-European. Although no extensive works of their literature remain, despite historical accounts of Romans reading their books, thousands of shorter inscriptions on objects, tombs, and stone markers allow scholars to read it.

 

Sometimes when two peoples live close together, their languages affect each other’s grammar. This seems to have happened with Danish and Anglo-Saxon English, and led to a simplification of what started turning into Middle English. Most of the time, though, it’s words that get adopted. So it was with Etruscan and Latin.

 

Oster points out that the great majority of borrowings from Etruscan are nouns. This shows how the early Latin speakers appropriated new words for things that a richer, more cosmopolitan culture possessed. Centuries later, the same thing happened with Greek; indeed, some Etruscan borrowings themselves had a Greek origin.

Many of the words dealt with urban life, such as “atrium,” meaning forecourt, “fenestra” for window, “grunda” for gutter, “turris” for tower, “columna” for columns, and “lanterna” was the word for lantern.

They gave Latin “caseus” for cheese and “crāpula” for hangover, both of which could be acquired at a “taberna” or tavern.

Words for shipping also were borrowed from Etruscan. “Ancora” was an anchor, “guberna” were the steering oars used before the invention of a proper rudder, and a “guberniō” was the helmsman. The “prōra” was the prow of a boat.

The Romans were very successful militarily, not specifically for their technology, but for their organization. Yet they borrowed some words from their neighbors, such as “mīles” for soldiers, and thus our “military.” A “tīrō” was a raw recruit, and we still sometimes use the word “tyro” to denote a beginner in something. “Triumphus” sounds like the English equivalent today, but “vāgīna” referred to a sheath, presumably for a “lāmina” or blade.

Ostler’s appendix of Etruscan borrowings tells us that the Romans appropriated three different words for penis, and other words for wrinkles, knees, teats, and elbows. One might assume they already had those words; perhaps it just showed taste and elegance to use the foreign term, as we still do sometimes with French.

“Ad Infinitum” covers many more fascinating facts about Latin through the centuries. It became the language of Western Christianity, and after the invention of the printing press there was an international class of readers literate in Latin, which greatly increased the market for books. Indeed, many of the theological disputes of the Protestant Reformation were conducted in Latin texts.

Most of our Founding Fathers had a passing acquaintance with Latin, and it remained a requirement of elite colleges until the last holdout, Yale, made the language optional in 1931.

Yet there is much Ostler has to say before he concludes with a chapter on Latin today. I sometimes pick up Cicero or Seneca in a bilingual edition and piece out a paragraph or two. Although I have few regrets about my life, I sometimes wish I had studied the language when I was younger.

Who knows where that would have led? I guess I would have turned into my own “alter ego.” Pardon my Latin, y’all.

 
— Frank T. Pool is an award-winning columnist and poet who grew up on Maple Street in Longview and graduated from Longview High School. He is a semi-retired teacher living in Austin. FrankT.Pool@gmail.com .