July-September 2008 |
Volume
13, Number 3 |
|---|
The
life of a language
Ad
Infinitum: A Biography of Latin, by Nicholas Ostler; Walker and Co., New York,
2007; pp. 382.
Reviewed by David Daintree*
The title says it all. Biographies recount
the lives of living beings. And though some such beings may be deceased when
their biographies are written, others may still be very much alive, and it is
apparently the view of Nicholas Ostler that his
subject, the Latin language, is living yet and will continue to be so, if not
for an infinity of time (that may be taken as hyperbole) but for long years to
come.
As one reads on one becomes aware that this
positive, optimistic initial approach is not tinged with the ebullient naïveté
of a Belloc. Ostler probably does not believe that he
could walk to Rome speaking only Latin to his native hosts and chance
acquaintances along the way, and being effortlessly understood by them. To him
Latin is alive certainly, but its life is attenuated into a kind of substratum
or matrix of our common culture, occasionally glimpsed by those whose eyes are
attuned to its presence, but more commonly undiscerned
by the undiscerning. Of those who learn to focus on that immense but largely
hidden bulk of latent Latinity, Ostler might well
say, with Keats, that they –
Look’d at
each other with a wild surmise –
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
And so Ostler sets
out to reveal the unseen portion of the iceberg (to mix our metaphors with
abandon) and to spread Latin out before our eyes.
The book has four principal parts – “A Latin
World”, “Latin Recruits”, “Worlds built on Latin”, and “Latin in a Vernacular
World” – titles that broadly illustrate his intended approach. He also offers us a bibliography and three
appendices, the first explaining the Latin tags at the beginning of each of his
chapters (this is a somewhat clumsy way of doing it – why not do it in situ?),
the second a list of Etruscan borrowings in Latin, and the third a summary of
the effects of sound changes on Latin nouns and verbs.
Learned indecision
The book is very learned, but in some
respects strangely unsatisfying: it is
as if the author cannot make up his own mind as to the usefulness and viability
of Latin. His concluding words are pessimistic –
“The choice of the language that is used
worldwide is a result of history; and like any creature of history, it is
susceptible to change. Even Latin, with twenty-five hundred years of dominance
behind it, found that. Sic transit Gloria mundi, ‘so the glory of the
world must pass’.”
Yet he has taken the trouble to compose a
work of great scholarship and sound learning, didactic and apologetic in tone,
with an implicit manifesto-like brief to justify the ways of Latin to man. Why?
It is not as if this had not been attempted many times before. Every anthology of Latin literature since
about 1960 has tried to do much the same thing, if on a less ambitious scale, as if their compilers saw the writing on the wall and
knew that they would have to fight for their place in the curriculum. The
rather strange work of Françoise Waquet, Latin or
the Empire of a Sign (as Gallic in its obscurity as its title suggests) is
a recent manifestation of the same urge.
Repetition
It is all a bit like preaching to the
converted. We always seem to derive immense satisfaction from every repetition
of a message that we have already decided to accept, for these repetitions
affirm the rightness of our own leap of faith, yet do they not also reveal a fragility, an underlying uncertainty? This is what the present reviewer suspects
about apologies for Latin, for he has himself engaged in that activity as a
teacher, and can recognise in others the sometimes
passionate longing for the good old days that he observes in himself. One
desires to promote and advance one’s subject, but one also has the intellectual
honesty to recognise that so much ground has been
lost that can never be recovered.
Detail-rich
These somewhat pessimistic remarks made, it
is right to give all credit to Ostler for his
marvelous and far-reaching scholarship.
His book is rich in detail and anecdote, all of it both fascinating and
attractively told, about the fate of Latin not only in Europe but throughout
the world. He tells us about the efforts of Giuseppe Peano
to promote a sort of pre-Esperanto tongue of his own devising called Latino
sine flexione, or Interlingua, which in
theory is simple and elegant enough to have swept the world, but of course it
never did stand a chance against English and the other almost equally rampant
vernaculars. He knows about the growth of the vocabulary of science and
philosophy, both in pure Latin and in its transmutation into vernacular forms.
He is expert on the development of the language in the Church, as well as in
the language of Protestant or secular letters.
He will even tell you how Latin fares on the Internet (2.5 million pages
in 2006 – but 10 billion pages in English). All in all, this is a lovely book
to read, a literary indulgence for those who love language, have a learned bent
and a nostalgia for lost worlds of erudition.
It is understandable that he chooses in his
wise discretion to conclude his long essay with those sadly fatalistic words
quoted above, but he was also right to set about the task of composing it. For we have surely lost as much as (dare one
say more than?) we have gained, and need to be reminded of that as our
multilingual future stretches before us.
Most of us assume that English will take over, but it won’t be that
simple: Finnish and Flemish may fade
away, but Spanish, Mandarin, French and Hindi (to name but a few) are in there for the long haul. It was argued for the old Latin Mass that it
was truly universal, that the faithful could go anywhere in the world and hear
the same words prayed in the same spirit. (The counter-argument of course was
that it was equally misunderstood by almost everyone.)
Alien tongues
But
how has the situation improved?
Effectively Anglophone Catholics abroad are compelled to hear their Mass
in languages at least as alien to them as Latin ever was, and international Church
events in Rome are nowadays multilingual affairs, opportunities for clever
clerics to show off their skill in the major languages of the world, a practice
that in fact subtly devalues those millions of people who speak minority
tongues. Fine, for those who like it, to hear lessons and intercessions read in
English, French, German and Polish; not at all complimentary to native speakers
of Estonian, Armenian or Basque. Readers of Oriens, and increasingly many others besides, will
be inclined to think that books like Ostler’s need to
be written, and that a recovery or just a safeguarding of the Latin past, at
least to some degree, looks as though it might be a necessary precaution in the
struggle against chaos.
Perhaps this review will be seen as too
pessimistic. It is true that to this reviewer Ostler’s
book was a little disappointing, for though its title seemed to hold out
promise for the future, in reality it turned out to be a study, albeit a most
comprehensive one, of the rôle of Latin in the past. This was enough to trigger a
certain glumness, a certain lack of fervour,
in one’s response.
But there is more that can be said, almost in
default of the author’s failure to take that last leap of confidence into a
rosy new dawn. The fact is that Latin
can never die, so long as learning is valued.
There will always be a need for Latin readers, so long as we need to
read primary sources in history, theology, philosophy or linguistics, for every
translation is by definition a secondary source. And apart from its scholarly value, Latin has
a wonderful and varied literature stretching over two millennia to delight us.
And apart from that, Benedict XVI’s recent motu
proprio will undoubtedly provide the impetus to
bring Latin back into its rightful place as the proper language of the Church.
* Dr David Daintree is Rector of St John’s College at the University
of Sydney.
