Languages and Empires
What: Nicholas Ostler, chairman of the Foundation for Endangered Languages in Bath, England and author of Empires of the Word: A Language History of The World and Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin, will speak about the relationship between language and empire. His lecture, from which he draws examples from both his books, will demonstrate that language empires and endangered languages are two sides of the same coin.
When: Monday, March 10 at 4:15 p.m.
Where: McCook Auditorium on the Trinity campus.
Background: Ostler is a scholar with a working knowledge of 26 languages. He is chairman of the Foundation for Endangered Languages, a charity that supports the efforts of small communities worldwide to know and make greater use their languages.
Empires of the Word is the first book to bring together the histories of languages in all their glorious variety. He writes about the innovations in education, culture and diplomacy devised by speakers of Sumerian and its successors in the Middle East, culminating in present-day Arabic. He also discusses the resilience of Chinese through 20 centuries of invasions; the progress of Sanskrit from north India to Java and Japan; the struggles that gave birth to the languages of modern-day Europe; and the global spread of English.
He plumbs the depths of other mysteries, as well. For example, why is Dutch unknown in modern Indonesia, even though the Netherlands had ruled the East Indies for as long as the British ruled India?
As Empires of the Word reveals, the language history of the world shows the real character of peoples and, for all the recent technical mastery of English, nothing guarantees the language’s long-term preeminence.
Ad Infinitum, Ostler’s “biography” of Latin, shows how and why Latin survived and thrived even as its creators and other languages faded into obscurity. Originally the dialect of Rome, Latin supplanted its neighbors to become, by conquest and settlement, the language of all of Italy, and then of Western Europe and North Africa. Its cultural creep toward Greek in the East led it to form an invincible combination. Greek theory and Roman practice, delivered through Latin, became the foundation of Western civilization.
Christianity, a latecomer, then joined the alliance and became vital to Latin’s survival when the empire collapsed. Spoken Latin re-emerged as new languages, such as Portuguese and Spanish in the West to Romanian in the East. But Latin lived on as the common code of European thought, and inspired the founders of Europe’s New World in the Americas. E pluribus unum.
This lecture, which is sponsored by the Department of Modern Languages and Literature, is free and open to the public. For more information, call 860-297-2543.