THE SECRET MECHANISMS OF ANCIENT LANGUAGES

Althea Sovani (Oxford Qatar Thatcher Scholar, 2018, BA Classics and Oriental Studies, MPhil Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics) is an aspiring philologist. As an undergraduate, she won the Chancellor’s Latin Prose Prize and the Gaisford Greek Verse Prize for her translations into Latin and ancient Greek, the Boden Prize for her Sanskrit exams, the Gaisford Essay Prize for her dissertation, the Faculty’s Comparative Philology Prize, and the Proxime Accessit award for the second-highest overall mark in Classics, and Classics and Joint Schools. She is President of the OALS and Academic Director of Oxford Latinitas Ltd.

Languages require hard work and dedication. In my years at Somerville, I have been working strenuously for my aspirations to become a philologist. I have always loved delving into the secret mechanisms of languages. Language changes in various ways at once, diachronically, across registers and social classes. Ancient languages are fascinating because they preserve only some glimpses of a much larger dimension, which is the philologist’s task to recover.

While learning Greek and Latin in high school, I already knew that I wanted to broaden my studies. This is why I came to Oxford to read for a BA in Classics with Sanskrit. Sanskrit has changed my perspective in countless ways, enhancing my understanding of the vast Indo-European language family and charming me with its productive morphology, poetic styles and compound structures.

The ancient Indian tradition of grammar, vyākarana, especially fascinated me. I made my first steps into this wonderfully complex system in my undergraduate thesis, where I explored the ways in which two ancient grammarians, the Greek Theodosius and the Indian Pānini, interpreted the linguistic phenomenon of ‘suppletion’ (i.e. when two etymologically unrelated words belong to the same paradigm — e.g. ‘go’ and ‘went’).

For my MPhil thesis, I want to study the infinitive. This is an enigmatic category, insofar as it is a verb, but it develops from certain nouns. While keeping a philological focus on Vedic Sanskrit, I will address the larger questions of what an infinitive is. What does the infinitive express that nothing else can express? Why should a language ever develop one? And why do some languages have it while others don’t?

My background in philology has given me an intriguing starting point from which to approach the challenge of theoretical Linguistics. Surprisingly, Philology and Linguistics are often thought of as very different fields and kept distinct. My ambition is to use my knowledge to bring them together more than has been and is usually done.