Compare that with the richer trove of words in Greek, with more made up (much more easily than in Latin) as poet, politico or philosopher needed. My Latin master at university once estimated that the core vocabulary for classical Latin as of 150 B.C. By comparison, Latin seems gruff, stiff, terse. But classical Attic Greek was a sensuous, lissome, bottomlessly resourceful tongue. Some of us grew up with the Latin Mass and may think of it with nostalgia. It is not a particularly beautiful or flexible language. Their thrusting ambition established Latin as a forthright, workable tongue of governors and despots. They may have been less poetic than the Greeks, but the Romans were geniuses of organization and bureaucracy. Rome did so not only by conquest but also by its system of settlement, which combined agriculture with the imposition of Roman law. Yet, a few centuries later, Rome, the center of the Latins, had surpassed the Etruscan cities, just as Latin surpassed its sibling languages. The Latins were overshadowed by the Etruscans, whose vital culture, in a loose confederation of city-states, held sway for three centuries over the Italian peninsula. As of the seventh century B.C., Latin was only one of a group of related Italic languages, some of which were far more widely spoken. It began, to echo Ostler, as a language of farmers and soldiers, spoken by people who called themselves Latins. Nicholas Ostler, prodigious linguist, sparkling, witty writer, is eminently suited to tell this tale. It’s told as well as any novel and is as gripping. Nicholas Ostler’s Ad Infinitum is the story of Latin, and like the story of language itself, it’s really the story of people - what they did, what they dreamed, how they lived and died. And it has found a book worthy to tell it.
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