9 Books Like Latin

There was probably never a language documentary as compelling as The Story of English, and the companion book The Story of English was an inspiration for my own book – and my title.

How could the language of a small out-of-the-way island go global and become the entire world’s second language? Conquest? (that’s a plus and a minus) Dysfunctional spelling and crazy grammar? (joke) Political and cultural good fortune? (Definitely.) But what else? And to what ends?

And this language ‘game’ has had so many players besides the English – the Scots, the Irish, the Americans, Africa, and Asia. And of course, 35 years ago no one could have imagined how many more global roles English would be playing.

Many language stories have sad endings. I don’t like to over-personalize a language; it’s primarily the users that put the spice into a language or let it ‘die’. Or in the case of Yiddish, murdered in their millions.

Dovid Katz’s title evokes the extraordinary vitality of Yiddish – for centuries the language of Europe’s Jews and one of the major literary languages of the 20th century, until Nazism and Stalinism consumed all. Many survivors reached Israel, where Hebrew has taken its place. But Yiddish lives on. To me that matters.

For tens of thousands (and thriving) survivors’ descendants in the US and Europe, Yiddish is still a first language, preserving a traditional religious lifestyle  Many more, whose grandparents (like mine) migrated and raised children in other tongues, still cherish Yiddish for its songs and jokes. As do I. Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Larry David – scratch the surface and… show more.

Some of the best language stories lie dissected in the work of social scientists. Not an easy read. But once in a while, someone brings it to life, enjoyably. 

One such is John Edwards, whose ‘Multilingualism’ is required reading for my course on language and politics.  Most countries are host to several languages – often a source (or a product) of ethnic pride, and why not? Sometimes, however, full-scale political and economic interventions may occur. And then, a language conflict is on the cards.

Nationalism often enflames such situations but sometimes wisdom and fortune prevail. Not long ago, Catalan and Quebecois French faced a bleak future, but have now seen political and cultural rejuvenation. But other vectors can change the story: Take the Southern Irish: The occupation over, they saw little cultural or economic value in Gaelic, which is now severely endangered.

You can piece together another trove of language stories here, this time from 20 modern Asian countries – each profiled by a different scholar. Once again, I adopted this for a course and the students were engrossed.

To take just one story: for 2000 years the vast Chinese empire had a centralized administrative tongue against a chatter of spoken dialects. But then, in the early 20th century, a sea change: the ripple of Western nationalism and liberalism that carried away the empire also produced a movement for wholesale language reform – creating one standard spoken language to unite the masses, simplifying the daunting Chinese script, even introducing Roman script.

In the end, the Communist Party settled on a Roman script just as a learning tool for children. They couldn’t erase 3000 years of history. And as I was writing my story, the parallels with China kept coming at me:… show more.

An oldie (first published in 1932) but a goodie. Hamilton's short essays on the classic Latin writers--from the first writers of Latin comedy through to the epic poets and historians who did so much to shape the language--aren't just a crash course on the Roman literary canon. They're an accessible introduction to Roman culture from the ground up.

‘Caecilius est in horto!’ For slightly older children the Cambridge Latin Course has now become such a part of pop culture that some of its characters have been referenced in Dr Who. And what other language textbook can reduce pupils to tears – the good kind! – in the final chapters?

As someone who spent part of the pandemic trying to keep sane by translating ancient Roman poems, I’m definitely part of this book’s target audience.

But Long Live Latin is much more than a spirited ode to the pricelessness of a useless language. In swift and insightful chapters, the Italian writer Nicola Gardini takes us—regardless of how much or little we know about Latin—on a tour of the greatest ancient Roman poets and philosophers—Catullus, Cicero, Lucretius, Virgil, and Seneca, among others.

Like la bella figura, so characteristic of Romans throughout history, these essays are a celebration of how style is inseparable from the good life. 

The Dawn Patrol is the first in Winslow’s Boone Daniels detective series. It has many hallmarks of a Winslow novel: a Southern California backdrop (San Diego), a host of morally ambiguous characters, a generally good guy trying to do what’s right, snappy writing, and surfing. This book also presents a surf culture we’ve come to recognize from television and movies, with a language, that while not universally shared by all surfers, is understood as the sport’s lingua franca—dude, gnarly, epic, wipeout. Where this book excels, however, is in capturing surfing’s dualistic nature as both a solitary pursuit and a place of a tight-knit community. Main character Boone Daniels is both the lone wolf and a member of a pack, one that can both have his back in the lineup and turn on him on dry land.

John Dominis Holt grew up in a wealthy chiefly family, with Hawaiian, Tahitian, and white ancestors. His memoirs give a detailed, colorful account of the wealthy Honolulu neighborhood around Fort and Beretania Streets, where he grew up in the 1920s and 30s and where “Hawaiian-ness was strongly mixed with British, American, and Asian influences.” Unforgettable are Holt’s accounts of learning about the worship of sharks from an old Hawaiian fisherman and living in the lively working-class district of Kalihi, where his religious mother moved the family to escape the decadence of Fort and Beretania Streets. Holt describes the experience as “a protracted hula ‘auwana” (modern hula), where a multiracial group of several thousand people “lived in comparative harmony,” speaking Hawaiian, Asian languages, and pidgin English, the lingua franca of plantation communities.