Why am I passionate about this?
I have been a Professor of Middle Eastern Studies and Linguistics at Dartmouth College since 1997. Previously: Professor of Hebrew at London University. BA Oxford, Ph.D. London. Author/co-author of seven books, including The Story of Hebrew (Princeton, 2017) – one of CHOICE Magazine’s 'Outstanding Academic Titles for 2017', a Princeton University Press nomination for the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction – and (co-author Jon Schommer) A Screenful of Sugar? Prescription Drug Websites Investigated. Over 80 papers on language and its social and political impact, in particular in pharmaceutical and financial literacy.
Lewis' book list on the story of a language
Why did Lewis love this book?
I never considered myself a nerd, so why do I love Latin? (which I hated in school) It’s because I Iove seeing, and love teaching, what languages can do – culturally, socially, politically.
Leonhardt’s Latin: Story of a World Language gives us sweeping new perspectives. For 1000 years after the Romans, Latin was the intellectual glue of Europe, and a key to the sciences and humanities down through the 19th century. The new prestige of French, Italian, English, and the other European vernaculars in some ways threw up huge barriers.
If only Latin grammar and syntax weren’t, aargh, so challenging (though some do call this a cognitive plus). Teaser: Is English as today’s ‘world language’ actually acting as a latter-day Latin?
1 author picked Latin as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
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. Jurgen 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…
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