Nicholas Ostler is the author of Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World. He is chairman of the Foundation for Endangered Languages (www.ogmios.org), a charity that supports the efforts of small communities worldwide to know and use their languages more. A scholar with a working knowledge of eighteen languages, Ostler holds an M.A. from Oxford University in Greek, Latin, philosophy, and economics, and a Ph.D in linguistics from MIT, where he studied under Noam Chomsky. He lives in England, in Roman Bath, on the hill where Ambrosius Aurelianus defeated the Saxons for a generation.
In this delightfully rich book, Ostler, an Oxford-educated classicist with a Ph.D. in linguistics from MIT, thoroughly tackles the deep and complex history of the Latin language. He delves into the matrix of antique languages (Greek, Etruscan, Oscan) to uncover the context and relationships that a nascent and burgeoning Latin had with the multiplicity of Mediterranean languages existing at that time. In four parts, Ostler covers the origins and development of Latin in the Roman world, Latin's "taking over the church," its medieval continuation and fracturing into vernaculars, and a nuanced rebirth in the Renaissance and its legacy in the contemporary world. Incredibly well documented, with examples from antiquity to the modern era (such as Giuseppe Peano's "Latino sine flexione"--uninflected Latin as a world language), this may overexpose non-Latinists to great quantities of Latin prose and linguistic explanations, but for interested students, teachers, and scholars, it is a fabulous text. Recommended for public and academic libraries.--Anthony J. Elia, JKM Theological Lib., Chicago Copyright 2008 Reed Business Information.
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