Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin

"It’s by Nicholas Ostler. It’s a more obscure book called Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin. It’s just a brilliant, brilliant book explaining how and why Latin became the European language and the ultimate world language, in a way. It explains that until about the 3rd century BC, Latin was spoken in a tiny area of Italy in Latium, the modern province of Lazio, near Rome. There were all sorts of other dialects with wonderful names like ‘Oscan’ spoken very nearby. But because this small group of Romans beat the neighbouring tribes, Latin became the language of the Roman Empire. Who learns Oscan now at school? No one. Because Latin was the language spoken by this brilliant tribe who defeated the other Italian tribes, it became the dominant language of the Roman Empire, and then, later, the spark for all Romance languages. There’s also brilliant stuff on how Latin mutated into Italian. It’s extremely close, and like any language that’s spoken regularly, it’s spoken more quickly, and the more difficult bits were dropped. So consonants at the end of words were dropped. So here’s a perfect example — in Latin, to say a good person sings a song, you’d say ‘Bonus cantat canticum.’ The Italian is ‘Buono canta cantico.’ Almost identical, but they’ve dropped the consonants from the end of all those words, so you get that more fluid Italian. It’s very consoling to anyone who does Latin and finds it a bit difficult that Romans got it wrong too. There’s another straightforward bit of graffiti from Pompeii which says ‘Marcus Spedusa amat,’ which means ‘Marcus loves Spedusa.’ Anyone knows that should be Spedusam. It’s comforting that Pompeiians also had problems with the accusative. Because it’s been treated as this grand language, we have this crazy idea that the Romans were always talking in very high-minded ways, but of course they used Latin to swear, to say how much they loved their girlfriends, or to bet on Ben Hur in the 3.30 at Circus Maximus. And the graffiti at Pompeii is fantastically obscene, a lot of it. Very, very funny too."