16.965, Review: Socioling/Lang Description: Janson (2004)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-965. Wed Mar 30 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.965, Review: Socioling/Lang Description: Janson (2004)

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1)
Date: 30-Mar-2005
From: Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy < andrew.carstairs-mccarthy at canterbury.ac.nz >
Subject: A Natural History of Latin 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Wed, 30 Mar 2005 21:33:59
From: Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy < andrew.carstairs-mccarthy at canterbury.ac.nz >
Subject: A Natural History of Latin 
 

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AUTHOR: Janson, Tore
TRANSLATORS: Vincent, Nigel; Sørensen, Merethe Damsgård
TITLE: A Natural History of Latin
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2004
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-229.html


Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy, Department of Linguistics, University of 
Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand

OVERVIEW

This is a book 'for everyone who wants to know more about Latin', as 
the Foreword puts it.  It consists of four parts.  Part I is an outline 
history of the Latin language and its speakers up to the adoption of 
Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire under 
Constantine in the fourth century CE.  Part II carries on the story 
through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to the present day, 
emphasizing the extent to which Latin has been a source of loans for 
technical vocabulary and still retains an aura of prestige and (on 
occasion) mystery, as exemplified in the Harry Potter books by J. K. 
Rowling.  Part III is a summary of Latin grammar, in terms designed to 
be intelligible to linguistically unsophisticated readers.  Part IV is a list 
of basic vocabulary, including all words used in examples throughout 
the book.  Part V lists Latin phrases and expressions still in common 
use.  At the end are suggestions for readers who want to carry their 
inquiries further.

The book was originally published in Swedish.  It has been translated 
and adapted for English-speaking readers by the well-known linguist 
Nigel Vincent (University of Manchester) and his Danish wife Merethe 
Damsgård Sørensen.

CRITICAL EVALUATION

It is hard to imagine how this book could be improved.  I am not a 
member of its target readership, because I have many years' 
acquaintance with Latin and a first degree in Greek and Latin 
language and literature.  But from now on, if anyone who has never 
studied Latin asks me to recommend a short, readable book in which 
they can find out about the history of Latin and get a feel for the 
grammar, I will be able to answer unhesitatingly.

Janson's central theme is the importance of Latin in the development 
of European civilization.  He points out that Latin is not just as the 
ancestor of the Romance languages but is also the vehicle of a huge 
mass of written material (bureaucratic records, legal texts, histories, 
poetry, and literary and scientific works) extending way beyond the 
point when Romance vernaculars had diverged from a more or less 
uniform 'Vulgar Latin'.  Many readers may feel, as I did, that they know 
sufficiently well how Latin survived as a language of education and 
scholarship in western Europe long after it had ceased to be spoken.  
Janson reminds us, however, that the use of Latin has waxed and 
waned enormously at different times and places since the collapse of 
the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century CE.  He reminds us, for 
example, that the ability to read (much less speak) classical 
Ciceronian Latin disappeared almost entirely in continental Europe 
during the turmoil of the early Middle Ages, surviving mainly among 
monks in Ireland, where the Romans had never penetrated.  In a 
strange way that situation is paralleled today: Janson could have 
added that the only country (apart from the Vatican) where Latin 
thrives to the extent that regular news bulletins are broadcast in it is 
Finland, whose main language is of course not only (like Irish) not 
Latin-derived, but is not even Indo-European.

One would expect any author of a book such as this to try to whet his 
or her readers' appetites for the writers of the classical Golden Age, 
such as the poets Virgil and Horace, the historian Livy, and the orator 
Cicero.  But Janson does the same also for post-classical writers such 
as the philosopher Boethius, who wrote his 'The Consolation of 
Philosophy' while imprisoned under Ostrogothic rule in Italy, and the 
theologian and philosopher Peter Abelard, whose correspondence 
with his beloved Héloïse (in perfect Ciceronian Latin) survives.  
Janson makes the point that the Renaissance, though often thought of 
as a revival of learning, hastened the eclipse of Latin as a language of 
science and scholarship because it gave new respectability to the use 
of the vernaculars.  Sir Isaac Newton, the founder of modern physics 
but in other respects conservative and much occupied with old-
fashioned pursuits such as alchemy, still wrote in Latin -- but already 
Galileo had used Italian when publishing his heliocentric account of 
the solar system.

The precarious survival of some Latin authors through the Middle 
Ages can be illustrated by another point that Janson might have 
made. Dante in his Divine Comedy encounters the 'Silver Age' poets 
Lucan and Statius.  Neither of these, reasonably enough, is deemed  
by Janson sufficiently important to mention.  But he does mention 
Catullus and Lucretius, who are ignored by Dante.  Their works 
survived in just a handful of manuscript copies that in Dante's time still 
awaited rediscovery.  It would be nice to think that unknown works of 
major Latin writers might yet be unearthed, but the classical scholars 
of the sixteenth century and since have ransacked monastery libraries 
too thoroughly for that to be likely.

So far as the outline presentation of the grammar goes, my only 
complaint is small.  Although Janson tells us that vowel length is 
phonologically significant in Latin, he ignores it when discussing Latin 
morphology, so a reader who begins to learn nominal and verbal 
paradigms from Janson's book may later have to unlearn the bad 
habit of neglecting vowel length.  For example, the -is ending of the 
dative plural of _amicus_ 'friend' is not homophonous with the -is of 
the genitive singular of _urbs_ 'city', despite what the table on page 
189 seems to suggest.  Perhaps Janson (or Vincent and Sørensen) 
could consider remedying this in a later printing. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy is a professor at the University of 
Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand.  He works mainly on 
inflectional morphology and language evolution.  His most recent 
books are _The Origins of Complex Language_ (1999) and _An 
Introduction to English Morphology_ (2002).





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