Hi there!

Welcome to my personal website. My name is Simon Aerts and I’m a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Latin Linguistics at the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) and Ghent University (UGent).

Latin is often called a ‘dead’ language, which refers to the fact that there are no native speakers left who can tell us precisely what something means or what you can’t say in Latin. Still, Latin used to be a language with the same functions and status of modern-day languages: it was used by people as a tool to establish successful communication. Of course, the Romans in the streets, including the more educated ones, did not speak in Ciceronian sentences, even if only to keep their groceries from turning bad before they reached the verb. That ‘Classical’ Latin was probably already quite artificial in the late Republic, but it remained the standard in literary practices for centuries after. And yet, it was the people’s Latin, or ‘Vulgar’ Latin (< vulgus, ‘the (common) people’), that contained the roots for the Romance languages that would become the ‘daughters’ of Latin.

That makes non-classical Latin an interesting topic of study. Some of its aspects can be studied without going into the meaning, or ‘semantics‘, of linguistic elements, thus avoiding to some extent the problematic lack of native speakers. But that meaning is what I find the most interesting aspect of language evolution. In many cases, the language contains subtle pointers or ‘cues’ that can lead researchers to a specific interpretation. In other cases, we must admit that we do not have enough evidence to go on. That is one of the benefits of working with corpus data: even if a few data points do not deliver results, those results still properly represent the overall population quite closely.

Applying such modern theoretical and sound methodological principles in our attempts to answer these old questions is one of the reasons why research in Latin linguistics is still relevant today. In addition, Latin is just one of the languages – and a very rich one! – that can be examined to deduce cross-linguistic principles that tell us more about the evolutionary paths languages (or Language) can follow.

All these reasons make me happy and grateful to be a researcher in the field of Latin linguistics. If you’re interested in my work, have a look around or contact me to learn more!