If you click on the link at the bottom of this podcast episode, you will find the Amazon best-sellers list, i.e. – the best-selling books from amazon.uk, the on-line bookstore. We English buy some strange books. Today (30 November) in the top 20, there are three – yes three – books about “everything a boy should know” – things like how to light a fire with no matches, and what exactly are the rules of cricket. (These three books are not really for boys, of course, they are for their fathers!) There are books by television chefs, and television comedians1 and other people on television. There are no books that I would call “proper books” – novels, biographies etc – until number 16. And what is this at number 12? “Amo, Amas, Amat – and all that: how I became a Latin lover” by Harry2 Mount.
It is a book about Latin. Latin was the language of the Romans, who conquered and ruled all the countries around the
Mediterranean3 and much of Western Europe between about the first century BC and the 5th century AD. Long after the Roman Empire disappeared, Latin remained the language of the western
Christian4 Church. The Roman Catholic Church still uses Latin for some purposes today. For hundreds of years, educated people in Western Europe learnt Latin, and wrote books in Latin. Many Latin words came into English, either directly or through French. Indeed, over half of all English words come from Latin.
When I was at school, many years ago, we studied Latin. I did not enjoy it much. We had to learn endless verb tables and grammar rules and read how Julius Caesar conquered Gaul (modern France). My fellow pupils and I did not think that Latin was either interesting or useful. Today, very few schools and Universities in England teach Latin. So why is a book about Latin at number 12 in the Amazon best-sellers list?
Perhaps people again want to learn to read and write this long-dead language? I don’t think so. We English are very bad about learning other languages. If English people do not want to learn e.g. French or German, why should they be interested in Latin? Or perhaps the reason is
nostalgia5. Nostalgia means looking back at the past, perhaps to your childhood, with pleasure; and feeling how much better things were then than they are now. When I was young, we older people think, there were steam trains and
trolley6 buses, we could play football in the street because there were few cars,probably we could light a fire with no matches and we certainly knew all the rules of cricket, we listened to the radio because we had no television, and we learnt Latin at school. For myself, I would love to go back to the days of steam trains and trolley buses and no cars. But if I had to study Latin as well? No way!
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