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" -- Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres.
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 Oxford, the British-born Ostler completed a doctorate in linguistics under Noam Chomsky at MIT. He now heads a foundation that encourages the persistence of small languages and is the author of a well-regarded work for lay readers, "Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World." In "Ad Infinitum," he has produced a book that's often informative and fascinating, sometimes wearyingly discursive and, occasionally, just plain frustrating.
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.
