THE PREHISTORY OF LATIN: INDO-EUROPEAN

The subtitle of a recent book identifies Latin as “the world's most successful language,” a claim it substantiates admirably (the book is Tore Janson's A Natural History of Latin, from 2004). The explanation for Latin's success lies partly in the nature of the language itself, to be sure, but far more in the achievements of those who spoke it – their conscious shaping of the language, the uses they made of it, and especially their success in imposing it upon vast numbers of people. The story of Latin is inextricably bound up with the history of the Romans, who spread their language from a small coastal region in central Italy to the greater part of the world that was known to them. It is the story of how a world empire was created and how, in the end, that empire broke apart, its fragmentation foreshadowing and furthering the process by which Latin dissolved into the variety of modern Romance languages we find today.

Roman history begins with the city's founding, in the eighth century b.c.e. For later periods of that history much of our information comes from written sources. For the earliest periods, before writing, we have to rely heavily on archaeology, the science that uses material remains to reconstruct the lives of societies. Our interest here being language, we may wonder whether something similar is possible for the earliest phases of an immaterial matter like language. The answer, surprising perhaps, is yes.