The Blackwell History of the Latin Language

The Blackwell History of the Latin Language, by James Clackson and Geoffrey Horrocks, was published November 2007 and is 336 pages long.

I have always had an interest in languages and philology. I studied Latin in high school and college, but more than fifty years later I have lost most of my ability to read the language. I intend to resume studying Latin now that I’m retired.

This scholarly book requires more background in linguistics and philology than I possess, but it was still interesting. For a reader such as myself, I felt the book quickly dived into too many detailed examples without providing sufficient context.

Chapter I discusses Latin as a member of the Indo-European language family and provides many examples of Latin words descended from Proto-Indo-European. (I find wiktionary.org a valuable resource for looking up the etymology of words from Latin and other languages.)

Chapter II presents an overview of the languages of Italy, including Greek, the languages of the Sabellian family (which are closely related to Latin), and Etruscan, a non-Indo-European language. Robert Graves, in his books I, Claudius and Claudius the God, makes Claudius an expert in the Etruscan language. Sadly, very little is now known about this language.

Chapter III provides a background for how the Latin language was standardized as Rome grew from a small republic to an empire. Most of the Latin we read these days is a polished, almost artificial literary language. (Consider the English we are taught to write in school compared to the English we speak.)

Chapter IV describes “Old Latin” from 400-150 BCE. Evidence for Old Latin comes from inscriptions and also from existing texts from writers of the period (where scholars must be cautious about the possibility of later revisions to make the copied texts conform to current standards).

Chapter V resumes the discussion of the standardization of written Latin in the third and second centuries BCE as Latin was developed as an official language of government and as a literary language.

Chapter VI discusses the highly polished and standardized Latin produced by writers of the Late Roman Republic and early Roman Empire, with Marcus Tullius Cicero widely acknowledged by scholars as the chief driver of the standardization of written Latin during this period. Cicero’s writings provided the model followed by writers in subsequent centuries.

Chapter VII takes up the issue of sub-elite Latin in the Roman Empire. Terms such as “substandard,” “sub-elite,” or “vulgar” when referring to the Latin spoken by the common people now carry negative and judgmental connotations that many linguists reject. The language used by the common people is not well documented; it seems that a big source of knowledge comes from graffiti scrawled on the walls of Pompeii.

Chapter VIII, the final chapter, covers Latin of late antiquity and beyond. During this time, Latin was preserved as an artificial language, no longer spoken by the common people. It is interesting for me to read Latin from this period and see the influences of the Romance languages creeping in.

Rating: Four stars, very good.