Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin by Nicholas Ostler
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This might be a hard book to appreciate if you don’t understand a little Latin, the way reading a book about the history of algebra might be frustrating if you don’t understand a little algebra. It also might help to know a little about European and world history because this “biography” recounts the development of Latin and how its use and misuse shaped the Roman Empire, then Europe and the world up to the present day. It gets into the details, with plenty of footnotes and appendices. That is, this book is a deep dive, but if you take the plunge, you’ll find pearls.

I was particularly intrigued by the way Latin as a language affected events after Rome fell, eventually giving rise to New Latin. Language shapes human communication, and for a time, it was Europe’s common language. But the rise and fall of Latin depended on who needed to communicate with whom about questions not only of intellectual importance but about political power. This book explains the ways in which the world and its need for Latin changed and keeps changing over the millennia. (Millennia itself is a word combining elements from both Latin and New Latin).

Latin is a language of the past, but we will hear its echoes for a long time to come. We still need it, just not very often.

By the way, I also know Spanish (as well as English, which seems obvious but needs to be said), and I can hear and speak Spanish every day here in Chicago. (And I can hear Chinese, Arabic, Russian, and more — Chicago is a big, wide city.) Latin … is hard to come by. Conversational Latin? Maybe at the Vatican, but not many people there, either. Latin doesn’t live where I do, so studying it takes me elsewhere. Sometimes this feels like a relief.


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