POLITICS AND POETICS

THE QUIET TONGUES: ON DEAD LANGUAGES

ADA LAGARDE

June 10, 2025

Why learn dead languages? Because the present speaks in bullet points. Because Latin waits like stone, and Greek burns like a riddle. Because Aramaic still whispers behind curtains. This essay explores what it means to drift into languages that no longer expect to be heard.

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I did not begin with an ambition. I began with fatigue.

Latin arrived in my life the way dust settles on an unused shelf: quietly, insistently, without apology. It was not taught to me. I sought it out. I had grown tired of the kind of language that passes for language now—the bullet points, the tweets, the pleas for clarity masquerading as thought. The present had begun to feel claustrophobic. Latin offered a syntax without urgency. Its verbs did not rush. Its nouns were already in their graves.

I do not remember the first sentence I translated. I only remember that it had the shape of something solid. “Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres.” Three parts. An empire divided. A world made measurable. There was something intoxicating about that. I bought a used textbook from the early 1960s. Its margins had been scribbled in by someone named James, or perhaps Judith—someone who liked to underline verbs in red. I began to spend my evenings with the dead.

Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid, ca. 450–500 CE. Ink on vellum, dimensions unrecorded. Corrected in Rome by Turcius Rufius Apronianus Asterius. Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, MS. Plut. 3.1

Known as the Codex Mediceus of Virgil or Laurenziana Virgil, this manuscript preserves the most complete surviving text of Virgil’s major works. It was later emended in the 5th or 6th century and again in the 15th century by the humanist Giulio Pomponio Leto.

It was not about understanding the Romans. It was not about their roads or their wars or their marble ideals. It was about their words. The strange precision of hic haec hoc. The melancholy roll of mortuus est. I would trace the declensions out by hand as if they were prayers. Puella puellae puellae puellam puella. A girl in every case. A girl in every position. I began to imagine the language as a room, one with cold stone walls and no mirrors. A room you entered not to find yourself, but to lose something. Noise, mostly.

The comfort of Latin was its finality. It had stopped moving. It had no new speakers. What remained were relics: inscriptions, fragments, laws, letters. To speak it was to reenact the funeral of meaning. I liked that. I liked the discipline of it. I liked conjugating verbs that no longer applied to anyone. I liked the feeling that I had joined something old and exhausted.

Unknown Roman sculptor, Sarcophagus of Lucius Cornelius Scipio Barbatus, ca. 298 BCE. Carved tuff, 215 × 70 × 50 cm. Found in the Tomb of the Scipios, Rome. Vatican Museums, Rome

This early Latin inscription honors the consul Lucius Cornelius Scipio Barbatus and is one of the most important examples of Republican-era epigraphy, offering insight into Roman identity, lineage, and public memory.

Eventually, Latin led me to Greek. It always does.

Greek was not a room. Greek was a labyrinth. I began with the alphabet, tracing the letters over and over in a notebook I had once used for grocery lists. I made mistakes. I pronounced things wrong. The breathing marks confused me. The particles laughed at me. But I kept going. I was in search of something I could not name. Or perhaps I was only in search of naming itself.

Greek was not peaceful. It shimmered. It argued. It danced. If Latin was the language of death, Greek was the language of desire. I read a few lines of Sappho and felt my face burn. I read the opening of the Iliad and heard the rage in the words. Μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεά... The goddess was not asking. She was commanding. Sing the rage.

I did not sing. But I did begin to hear things differently. English, for all its utility, started to feel like it had been scrubbed too clean, whereas Greek was still sticky with meaning. Its words were worn, but not flattened. They carried their ghosts in plain sight. To translate them was to trespass.

Homer, Iliad, Book I, ca. 3rd century CE. Ink on papyrus, 15 × 25 cm. Found in Oxyrhynchus, Egypt. British Library, Papyrus 136

This fragment, containing verses from the opening lines of the Iliad, is a rare surviving example of early Greek literary transmission in uncial script, preserved thanks to the unique climatic conditions of Roman Egypt. Such manuscripts are exceptionally scarce.

I grew obsessed with Heraclitus. I copied down his fragments and let them sit on my desk like little coiled riddles. “You cannot step into the same river twice.” No one writes like that anymore. No one dares to mean and un-mean something in the same breath.

Greek was not a comfort. It was a fever. A kind of exquisite confusion. And I allowed myself to live in it. Some days I spent hours on a single clause, trying to make it work in English without losing its blood. I never succeeded. But that was not the point. Translation, like memory, is a form of failure.

It was around this time that I found myself drawn to Aramaic.

There is no clear reason why. By then, I had already developed a taste for impossible languages. Aramaic was barely there—its speakers scattered, its records faint. But it beckoned in a different voice, a softer one. Less stately than Latin. Less dazzling than Greek. Aramaic felt personal. It whispered. It prayed. It stammered.

Unknown author, Aramaic inscription from Hatra, 1st–3rd century CE. Carved limestone, dimensions unrecorded. Discovered at Temple XI, Hatra, Iraq. Iraq Museum, Baghdad

This dedicatory text, written in Aramaic, reflects the administrative and civic use of the language during the Parthian period and attests to Hatra’s role as a major cultural and religious center on the eastern frontier of the Roman world.

I began with the alphabet, again. Right to left this time. My hand resisted it. My eye followed reluctantly. There were few resources, even fewer teachers. I cobbled together what I could: old liturgical texts, marginal notes in theological commentaries, bits and pieces of the Targum. And of course, the phrases attributed to Jesus, preserved like pressed flowers in the folds of the Gospels. Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

It was not religious hunger that drew me to Aramaic. It was the idea that this was a language that still moved underground. Still murmured in back rooms and behind curtains. That a tongue could survive by becoming invisible—I liked that very much. It made sense to me.

Once, during a conference I did not belong at, I met a man who spoke Latin. Not fluently—no one really does—but fluidly, like someone who had spent too much time alone. We sat on folding chairs during a coffee break. He asked what declension I’d started with, and I told him the first, because I hadn’t known better. He laughed and recited a line from Ovid—something about love and time, I forget the Latin but not the meaning—and then, in English, said: “It’s always the first declension that gets you. That’s where they hide the girls and the gods.” He left without saying goodbye. I never got his name.

By then, I had stopped trying to speak any of these languages aloud. I had stopped explaining to people what I was doing. It wasn’t about fluency. It wasn’t about performance. It was about shelter. I read without expecting to be read in return. I translated as if preserving something just for the act of preservation.

People asked me why. I rarely had an answer. Sometimes I said I liked old things. Sometimes I said I was studying history. But the truth is, I was escaping—not into the past, exactly, but into a version of the world where words still mattered. Where a sentence could be a spell. Where the act of learning was a form of refusal.

I do not claim to know these languages. I claim only to sit with them. I do not speak with authority. I speak with longing. There is a difference.

Now and then I dream in strange alphabets. Not full sentences—never full sentences—but flashes. A declension chart on a chalkboard. A fragment of a Greek verb. A single Aramaic character burning faintly at the corner of my vision. It does not comfort me, exactly. But it reminds me that there are still places in language untouched by commerce, by trend, by the tyranny of meaning.

Unknown author, Trilingual Palmyrene Inscription, 1st–3rd century CE. Carved limestone, dimensions unrecorded. Palmyra (ancient Tadmor), Syria. Iraq Museum, Baghdad

This rare inscription presents a commemorative text in Latin, Greek, and Palmyrene Aramaic, offering a vivid example of Palmyra’s multilingual civic culture under Roman rule.

All our metaphors now are financial. We invest in relationships. We leverage our time. We quantify everything until nothing remains that cannot be converted into content. I wanted a language with no economy. A tongue that made no promises. A phrase that just ended.

This is not nostalgia. This is something else. A kind of quiet. A kind of cold. A refusal to move on.

There are other dead languages I have not even started looking at. Coptic, Akkadian, Old Church Slavonic. Gothic, Sanskrit, Hittite. Languages that once held entire worlds together—laws, lullabies, curses, cosmologies—and now wait in footnotes and carved stone for someone, anyone, to care. I imagine them like locked rooms in a burned-out library. I walk past them. Sometimes I press my ear to the door. I haven’t opened them. Not yet.

It’s not ambition. It’s not even discipline. It’s a kind of hunger. The kind you get when the present feels too thin, too shrill. When the self you are expected to be online, in public, in conversation, feels increasingly fictional. So you begin to drift—not backward exactly, but down. Into strata. Into sediment. You trace roots not to understand the tree, but to remember that roots exist at all.

I do not know where this leads. Perhaps nowhere. Perhaps only deeper. But I have come to prefer the company of ghosts. They do not interrupt. They do not ask you to comment or react. They only leave you fragments and trust that you will listen.

And sometimes—rarely—you do.

Ada Lagarde (b. 1973, near Cape Town) is a writer and former lexicographer who collects fragments of extinct alphabets and once attempted to reconstruct a Mesopotamian lullaby from memory. Her work explores the archaeology of language, the theology of syntax, and the emotional lives of forgotten scripts.

Cover image: Unknown Roman artist, Portrait of a Young Woman with a Stylus and Wax Tablets (commonly known as Sappho), ca. 50–70 CE. Fresco, 37 × 30 cm. Discovered in Pompeii, Italy. National Archaeological Museum, Naples

This iconic portrait shows a young woman in contemplative pose, stylus to lips and wax tablets in hand, evoking ideals of literacy and female intellect in Roman society.