Ostler's effort to catalog the travels and metamorphosis of the Latin language throughout Europe and history are monumental. While there are times when he gets bogged down in the minutiae of word transformations and grammatical construction, his thesis is that the language survived through a combination of early Roman acculturation and the swift expansion of the Catholic Church. It changed in varying degrees based on the peoples it met on its journey, but the modern family of European languages all trace their roots back to a single language from a once-small area in Central Italy known as Latium. An interesting read.

This is an insightful volume, reviewing the history of the West from an unusual angle, the Latin language. Along the way the reader can discover many gems into language in general and the specific local languages of the Roman Empire, the Medieval Church, and continuing up to the present. It is a history of the West but from an unusual vantage point, the perspective of the study, importance, and dissemination of Latin.

Ostler traces Latin as it emerges, and parallels the emerging dominance of the city of Rome. He can supplement more standard histories as Latin gradually replaced Greek in parts of, and in particular situations, the former lingua franca. I do not have anything as detailed that chronicles the linguistic relationship between Etruscan and Latin. Ostler has less to say about other early military opponents of Rome. For example, it might have been worthwhile to consider Carthage and others as the Roman Empire grew. Ostler is stronger on the Latin interaction with Greek, a subject no doubt more readers are interested in knowing.

The discussion of Early Medieval Latin, after the fall of Rome, I found particularly interesting. The Germanic tribes found themselves as inheritors of an Empire yet in numerous respects were dependent on Latin to maintain regular order.

There are more works on modern history which address how Latin gradually lost out to vernacular languages and the newer predominant languages such as French or English although Ostler does cover this ground as well.

In Ad Infinitum, Nicholas Ostler has created a biography of Latin, giving the history of the language from "birth" to present day. Along the way, he treats the interaction between the language and changes in the societies that use the language, showing the feedback loop in which events and customs change language while language guides events and customs.

The discussion of the origin of Latin was the most interesting part of the history for me. I'm little more than a linguistic novice, but had very little difficulty understanding his comparisons of Latin with other concurrent languages such as Etruscan and the discussion of why Latin in particular won out over its competitors. I also really liked his description of the interplay between Greek and Latin, and correspondingly between Greek culture and Roman culture as well. Frankly, though, the second half of the book lagged for me. After the Medieval period, the world grew away from Latin, and in the process, the story of the language becomes much less interesting. My recommendation - pay attention to the first half of the book and treat the second half more lightly. ( )