Sasha Barish: Study of Languages in Contact with Latin

I attended the Leiden Summer School in Languages and Linguistics, where I learned about several languages spoken in the Ancient Roman world other than Latin. This is part of my exploration of possible dissertation topics related to my interests in multilingual texts, language as a part of identity, and literary inscriptions in antiquity. I also went to Germany and took an intensive course in German, which is necessary for reading a lot of secondary sources in classical philology.

This summer, between the first and second years of my PhD, thanks to the generous support of The Europe Center I travelled to the Netherlands and Germany to pick up language and linguistic skills that will be necessary for my research.

My research has to do with both literary and sociolinguistic aspects of the Latin language. I have a strong research interest in ancient multilingual texts and in the relationship between language contact and identity in the Roman world, and I went to Leiden in the Netherlands to explore potential dissertation topics related to this. In particular, I was interested in studying Punic (a dialect of Phoenician), a Semitic language spoken on the Mediterranean coast of Africa before and during the Roman empire. I had previously begun to research personal names in Roman Africa, which evolved distinctively in that region; I suspect that names carried much more variable meanings, and were much more loaded as cultural and multicultural signifiers, than scholars have previously assumed. They also point toward the possibility that pre-Roman Punic literary traditions, for which we have sadly little direct evidence, influenced that region’s literature.

For the first two weeks of my trip, I studying at the Leiden Summer School in Languages and Linguistics. There I took classes on several languages of the ancient world that are fragmentary in their attestation and not often taught, including Phoenician and various Italo-Celtic languages.

I encountered some unexpected challenges: for instance, almost all my Phoenician classmates were theology students specializing in Biblical Hebrew literature and the lectures heavily relied on their shared body of knowledge, which I lacked. Still, I learned an enormous amount, ranging from ancient Semitic morphology (relevant for my Punic project) to the tradition of erotic messages written on Gaulish spindle-whorls (relevant for my interest in epigraphic cultures and literary inscriptions). I also was able to bounce ideas off of fellow students and professional scholars from all over the world with different areas of expertise and explore the ways in which both our methodologies and our subject matter overlap; we had some productive discussions on the historical connections between Greco-Roman and Northwest Semitic poetry.

After the Leiden Summer School I spent two weeks in Berlin taking an intensive German class at the Goethe-Institut. As some people outside the humanities are surprised to find out, becoming a proficient researcher in classical literature requires being able to read not just ancient languages but also French and German, because so much academic work is written in these languages. Those two weeks haven’t been the end of my German-learning journey, but they got me started and made me feel a lot more comfortable making use of scholarship written in the language. Along the way I went to some museums in Berlin and saw a few of my favorite ancient inscriptions.