Latin

Jürgen Leonhardt, Kenneth Kronenberg, Kenneth Kronenberg

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780674727380
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Sociolinguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

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.

1

Latin as a World Language

A Systematic Approach

OF ALL THE TRACES left by the Romans, the Latin language is probably the most ubiquitous. Latin continued to be the language of record even as the last remnants of the Roman Empire dissolved into new forms of statehood. In this respect it was as if nothing in Europe had changed. Even when, during the early Middle Ages, the various European vernaculars began replacing Latin, for a good thousand years it would have been unthinkable to practice one of the higher professions without a thorough grounding in Latin. In addition, Latin continued to play a crucial role even after the vernacular languages had become well established throughout Europe. Long after people no longer wrote or spoke Latin as a matter of course, learning it was a must because, even during the age of science, Latin continued to be a core subject not only in the schools of central Europe but also in Russia, Scandinavia, North and South America, and Australia. Although Latin ceased to be a core subject in higher education during the twentieth century, it still had a presence. And against all expectations, it has never become a merely exotic subject but continues to be taught in many schools.

No other “dead” language continues to exert such influence throughout the world. Latin word stems form the basis of new scientific terminology. Some of the more sophisticated magazines still allow Latin terms or brief quotations to appear on their pages untranslated. Surprisingly, the active use of Latin has even seen something of a resurgence recently. Latin circles have sprung up in Europe and the United States, as have Latin journals and radio programs. When Finland held the presidency of the Council of the European Union (in 1999 and 2006), it regularly published reports in the Latin language. In the fall of 2008, a German television station even broadcast a two-hour program about the Roman Empire in Latin, with German subtitles. In addition, in the Catholic Church, the Latin Mass, which had been banned after the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), underwent a measured restoration. It seems that Latin is still different from other historical languages. So although ancient Babylonian is the province of Orientalists and hieroglyphics of Egyptologists, Latin remains what it has been for the past two thousand years: a world language.

What is key to understanding the history of Latin as a world language is that it was never restricted to the Latin classroom or to Cicero and classical literature. Rather, like English today, it was a globally accessible language that was required for communications and not merely for educational purposes. Nothing demonstrates the dimensions of this world language more clearly than the sheer quantity of writings in Latin. The mere fact that more Latin texts have been created and archived in libraries around the world since the end of the Roman Empire than were written in Roman antiquity is significant. But an extrapolation—which can be little more than an approximation, given the state of the sources—testifies to the continuing significance of Latin as a world language: the quantity of post-Roman texts is so extensive that it exceeds the total of all extant classical Latin texts by a factor of ten thousand.¹ This means that all of the writings that have come down to us from ancient Rome, including all inscriptions, constitute at most 0.01 percent of the total output. Of this miniscule percentage, Christian texts from late antiquity represent approximately 80 percent. What is generally known as the literature of the Romans, as it is taught in school, the works of authors like Plautus, Cicero, and Tacitus, forms little more than an infinitesimal point in the universe that is Latin, albeit one that shines brightly.

The sheer numbers must be illustrated to be fully appreciated. If we assume that the sum total of Latin texts from antiquity may be snugly accommodated in five hundred volumes running an estimated five hundred pages each, we would need about ten thousand times that number, that is, at least five million additional volumes of the same size, to house the total output in Latin texts. A brief overview of the use of Latin shows that our estimates are, if anything, on the conservative side.

Without a doubt, archived manuscripts and documents constitute the largest proportion of these texts. The documents of all cities and seats of government, residences of princes, and private archives throughout Europe were written in Latin well into the high or even late Middle Ages. In some cases, Latin continued to be used for official purposes much later, as in Hungary, where it remained the language of administration into the mid-nineteenth century. To this we must add the Latin documents of the Vatican and of all the dioceses and archdioceses throughout the world up to the present; international diplomatic correspondence into the early modern era (the documents of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, for example, are in Latin); many of the minutes of European university administrations into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; as well as hundreds of thousands of inscriptions on buildings, paintings, and gravestones. The number of Latin certificates—certifications, doctorates, conferrals of title, and the like—stored in and out of archives is in the millions and continues to grow.

The second largest group involves expository or functional and scientific texts of all kinds. Until the end of the Middle Ages, almost all scholarly literature was written in Latin (the majority into the seventeenth century and a considerable proportion into the early nineteenth century). Theologians, jurists, and physicians used Latin exclusively in their communications; whether these involved the tracts of astronomers and philosophers or theoretical writings about music, rhetoric, and poetry, all were in Latin. We do not yet have a precise overview. Nonetheless, the raw numbers available for a few areas permit a rough estimate of the scope of its use. For example, an older and surely incomplete bibliography of modern astronomical literature contains several thousand Latin titles. An extrapolation from a collection of law dissertations housed in Frankfurt, which is assumed to contain only a small portion of the actual number of such dissertations, suggests that between 1650 and 1750 at least fifty thousand dissertations, perhaps as many as a hundred thousand, were written at universities in Germany and Austria, that is, in the “First German Reich,” which came to an end in 1806. Even if each dissertation comprised about twenty-five pages, the total comes to well over one million text pages—and this, it should be noted, is counting only legal dissertations in the German-speaking world between 1650 and 1750, not other European countries. In some subjects, Latin was a common scientific language into the nineteenth century, as is evident from philological and theological dissertations; so-called Schulschriften, academic annuals that were published by German high schools (Gymnasien); and scientific journals. Nonacademic expository and functional texts include hundreds of thousands of sermons from the Middle Ages, as well as speeches and poetry for all imaginable occasions such as weddings, baptisms, burials, conferrals of doctoral degrees, jubilee celebrations, which probably run into the millions. The quantity of letters written in Latin is also incalculable. The more than three thousand letters written by Erasmus of Rotterdam alone equal almost half of the total number of letters still extant from classical antiquity. Moreover, Erasmus was only one of several thousand persons from the Middle Ages and early modern period whose Latin letters we still have.

In comparison to Latin scientific and functional texts, which include a high proportion of works of great stylistic sophistication, the quantity of what might be termed “art literature” is surely much smaller. But even here, the preponderance of works written after the end of the Roman Imperium is considerable. It may come as a surprise, but a mere forty Latin dramas have come down to us from antiquity—the number of plays staged in Latin between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries is between five thousand and ten thousand. Only about a dozen Latin-language didactic poems have survived from antiquity; more than four hundred are known from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Even the number of medieval and modern epics exceeds the few classical representatives of that genre by more than a hundredfold. Only about a dozen dialogues, a genre invented by Plato, remain from Roman antiquity; the number of such works from the early modern period runs to four digits.

The public has little appreciation of either the history of Latin as a world language in the modern era or its omnipresence. When people think of Latin, they think of ancient Rome. The Latin taught at universities and in high schools that even have Latin programs deal generally, though not exclusively, with classical Latin literature from its beginnings around 250 BCE to late antiquity. True, people have some awareness that Latin was the sole means of communication for the church and in science in the western half of Europe during the Middle Ages and that it was very important in secular affairs. A solid grounding in Latin is an absolute necessity for any historian whose purview is the Middle Ages.

In reality, however, only the first half of the Middle Ages is ever really researched. For example, there has not been a complete accounting of Latin texts written in the High Middle Ages, and only the most important texts are available in copies or electronic form. Those researching the medieval Latin literature are all too often forced to travel to European libraries and read the actual medieval manuscripts. We have only an inadequate knowledge of Latin text production in the Late Middle Ages. There are relatively few professorships in medieval Latin. The discrepancy is even greater for the modern era. Here, attention is almost exclusively on the burgeoning literatures of modern European languages. All but forgotten is the fact that a considerable percentage of communications within Europe took place in Latin well into the eighteenth century and that most Latin texts stem from the modern era. In neither the nineteenth nor the twenty-first century has an academic discipline developed for Latin literature from this period. At best, with very few exceptions, these writings are the sidelines of specialists in the Germanic or Romance languages, classical philologists, philosophers, or students in other disciplines. Beyond that they might as well not exist.

Although a considerable upswing in neo-Latin studies has occurred in the past several decades, no real paradigm shift has taken place. Except for a few overviews of essay length and several regionally oriented works, no history of neo-Latin literature has as yet been written. What is more, even if some ambitious soul set out to write such a history, it would of necessity be the culmination of decades of preliminary research. Even then, the resulting work would hardly approach the level attained by studies of the European vernacular literatures. The smallest and most marginal European national literatures have been more thoroughly researched than the neo-Latin; this, even though up to 1600 and in some countries as late as 1700 and beyond, more literature was produced in Latin than in each of the national languages. In the Americas there was even a neo-Latin literature, which remains largely unplumbed. As a result, the views offered by literary and linguistic histories and, to a lesser extent by the histories of philosophy and the sciences and of European and premodern literature influenced by Europe, remain unbalanced because the Latin portion is either neglected or completely missing. The situation is paradoxical. Although Latin was part and parcel of a good education in the entire Western world well into the twentieth century, Latin literature of the modern era is by far the least known body of literature.

Europe’s Disremembered Latin History

How is such collective amnesia possible? Superficially, the explanation is rather simple. The exclusion of Latin does not relate to its entire history but rather to the centuries in which Latin was still used alongside the newly developing written languages of Europe, that is, from the High Middle Ages up to about 1800. This was when the newer languages for the first time ceased to be merely marginal in the European written tradition. Although Latin still had a presence during this period, the future belonged to the new national languages, and the proportion of Latin texts went into steady decline. It is understandable that scholars would be more interested in the waxing of literatures in the vernacular than in the waning of Latin. The invention of the automobile in the late nineteenth century provides us with a similar development in that the horse and buggy continued to play an important role alongside the car for more than fifty years. Nonetheless, the wider public tends to be more interested in early cars than late horse-drawn carriages.

However, replacement alone cannot adequately explain the disappearance of neo-Latin literature from modern consciousness. Rather, the neglect of Europe’s Latin tradition is more the result of ideology. After the Romans, Latin lived on mainly as a language taught in schools according to the grammatical rules of an age long gone. It was no longer the language of a people, and so it came to be viewed as a “dead” language. And dead languages can hardly be expected to give birth to anything live. Even today, they are viewed as something artificial, as a learned cultural superstructure incapable of unfolding in real life. Even Latin scholars, who should by all rights have been the champions of Latin, adopted this prejudice and took a critical stance toward the “dead” Latin of the post-Roman era. The view expressed a hundred years ago about neo-Latin literature by the classical philologist Franz Skutsch continues to be echoed by some of his colleagues today: “All of these descendents of the Latin muse are of only secondary interest and will, overall, attract only philologists and literary amateurs.”²

The model undergirding this verdict is the notion of a “natural” language as one that develops randomly. Its core is not in the scholarly literature but in orality: spontaneous usage unencumbered by schooling or even grammar. Modern linguistics as a whole, including comparative philology, which sprang up around 1800, and the subsequent “neogrammarian” school uncritically adopted the primacy of orality and passed it down. Spoken language was viewed, and to a certain extent still is, as the only legitimate object of linguistic analysis. Written norms and all forms of external influence on language were interpreted as cultural epiphenomena not to be identified with the essence of the language as such. As a result, languages like Latin, which are learned exclusively from books, are no longer a medium of exchange in the real world and are not viewed as languages in the strict sense of the word. Linguists were interested in Latin only insofar as it was a living language that was developing organically. As a result, they carefully studied the development of Latin as reflected in literary texts from its reconstructed Indo-European roots up to its grammatical calcification in the first century BCE. There was thereafter an almost seamless transition from “Vulgar Latin” to the study of the Romance languages. Virtually nothing is to be found in the linguistic literature about textual Latin after the first century CE. The field of sociolinguistics, which has come into prominence over the past several decades, might have been expected to have academic language standards in its sights. Unfortunately, it has to date barely engaged with the role of Latin in European history, in all probability because the field is almost exclusively oriented to the present, and the historical dimension is only now being discovered.

Beginning in the sixteenth century and then more intensively since the eighteenth, the primacy of “natural” language was joined by a second notion, namely, that one’s individuality and one’s inclusion in a national or social community (Volksgemeinschaft) can develop only from within the mother tongue and that the mother tongue alone enables individuals to express their deepest thoughts and yearnings. This basically Romantic notion of the vernacular as the soul of a people and the sole medium of artistic inspiration made Latin look like a stiff corset and the vernacular like a liberating return to nature. The notion of a national language, which developed out of this concept in the nineteenth century, combined an almost mystical primevalism with the modern political concept of the nation. In this view, the national language as mother tongue, safely unfolding from within its living source in the unfettered unconscious, yet secondarily cultivated by literary models and the act of communication, became the exclusive linguistic model for the development of personality. For the first time in European history, it was assumed that the language one had learned as a child would remain the most important. Although cultivated people were expected to master several languages, this in no way called into question the primacy of the mother tongue. Nonetheless, in the nationalistic nineteenth century, a person who could not be unambiguously assigned to a particular linguistic community became suspect. And because Latin was nobody’s mother tongue, it was suspect for that reason alone.

Our alienation from Latin over the past two centuries increased further because of its lack of active use such that today it is encountered almost exclusively in works from the past. Latin is now viewed almost entirely as a historical language, whereas it was largely perceived as a timeless phenomenon during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Until very recently, the usual didactic methods of teaching Latin, which emphasized intellectual analysis of grammatical rules over actual language acquisition, drove home the final nail, relegating it to the status of a research tool for decoding historical texts or a sort of mental gymnastics. Teaching or learning Latin seems to be very different from teaching or learning modern languages. Latin, it seems, is not really a language at all but rather a piece of our cultural heritage. What is more, wherever things are inherited, as a rule death may be presumed.

The End of National Languages and the Rise of English as a World Language

This is where the present book commences. Its goal is not to recall the importance of Europe’s Latin tradition or to review the treasures of classical, postclassical, and modern Latin literature. A whole series of books that do just that have been published quite recently. These include works by Joseph Farrell (Latin Language and Latin Culture from Ancient to Modern Times, 2001), Françoise Waquet (Latin, or the Empire of a Sign, 2001), Tore Janson (A Natural History of Latin, 2004), Nicholas Ostler (Ad infinitum: A Biography of Latin, 2007), and Wim Verbaal, Yanick Maes, and Jan Papy (Latinitas perennis, vol. 1, The Continuity of Latin Literature, 2007; vol. 2, Appropriation and Latin Literature, 2009). In Germany, Wilfried Stroh’s Latein ist tot, es lebe Latein! (Latin is dead, long live Latin!) (2007) even became a bestseller in that country. Each of these books in its own way illuminates the history of the Latin language and culture in Europe and brings to the attention of specialists in other disciplines and to the broader public facts and unders...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface to the German Edition
• Preface to the English Edition
• 1. Latin as a World Language
• 2. The Language of the Empire
• 3. Europe’s Latin Millennium
• 4. World Language without a World
• 5. Latin Today
• Notes
• References
• Index