Latin: Story of a World Language

Leonhardt, Jrgen

ISBN 10: 0674058070 / ISBN 13: 9780674058071

Editore: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press, 2013

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The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Codice articolo GOR005747955

Dati bibliografici

• Titolo: Latin: Story of a World Language
• Editore: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press
• Data di pubblicazione: 2013
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0674058070
• ISBN 13: 9780674058071
• Rilegatura: Paperback
• Condizione: Very Good
• Peso: 699 grammi

Descrizione articolo

Riassunto

The mother tongue of the Roman Empire and the lingua franca of the West for centuries after Rome’s fall, Latin survives today primarily in classrooms and texts. Yet this “dead language” is unique in the influence it has exerted across centuries and continents. Jürgen Leonhardt has written a full history of Latin from antiquity to the present, uncovering how this once parochial dialect developed into a vehicle of global communication that remained vital long after its spoken form was supplanted by modern languages.

Latin originated in the Italian region of Latium, around Rome, and became widespread as that city’s imperial might grew. By the first century BCE, Latin was already transitioning from a living vernacular, as writers and grammarians like Cicero and Varro fixed Latin’s status as a “classical” language with a codified rhetoric and rules. As Romance languages spun off from their Latin origins following the empire’s collapse—shedding cases and genders along the way—the ancient language retained its currency as a world language in ways that anticipated English and Spanish, but it ceased to evolve.

Leonhardt charts the vicissitudes of Latin in the post-Roman world: its ninth-century revival under Charlemagne and its flourishing among Renaissance writers who, more than their medieval predecessors, were interested in questions of literary style and expression. Ultimately, the rise of historicism in the eighteenth century turned Latin from a practical tongue to an academic subject. Nevertheless, of all the traces left by the Romans, their language remains the most ubiquitous artifact of a once peerless empire.

Recensione

"This book, which traces the vicissitudes of Latin over 26 centuries asks two central questions: When do languages die? And who owns them while they are alive? Leonhardt pursues the answers as if on the trail of time-travelling serial killers... Latin might be classified as a long-dead language but this work reminds us that no one has informed Latin of that fact." --Bettany Hughes, Prospect

One of the many achievements of Leonhardt s book is to give readers, for the first time, a sense of what Latin has meant, and what is has been most useful for, in every period of Western history. (...) Leonhardt s informative and useful book ends with a plea to teach Latin as a living language, but the bulk of his work is historical: a lucid, erudite account of the history of Latin, from its origins as a literary language in the third century BCE up to the present. It s a pioneering enterprise (...) -- London Review of Books

His book is a highly readable tour of the language, from antiquity, through the Renaissance, to its use in reports for the Council of the European Union in 2006. -- Standpoint