Tuesday, September 30, 2014

The Interpreters of Foreign Languages Among the Ancients

Henry Snyder Gehman - The Interpreters of Foreign Languages Among the Ancients (1914)

Open Library direct link
Open Library main page

Before heading off to a month of Halloween posts here's something a bit more scholarly.  The topic is one that I'd never thought about but once heard seems so obvious.  It's a doctoral dissertation (the author later taught at Princeton) so a bit short but the advantage is that it doesn't meander instead getting right to the point - how Alexander spoke to his troops, Herodotus' use of an interpreter, translation in courts, sign communication and the ever-popular barbarian languages.