 | This article has multiple issues. Please helpimprove it or discuss these issues on thetalk page.(Learn how and when to remove these messages) (Learn how and when to remove this message)
|
.jpg)
Andrew Dalby,FCIL (born 1947 inLiverpool) is an Englishlinguist, translator and historian who has written articles and several books on a wide range of topics includingfood history,language, andClassical texts.
Dalby studiedLatin, French andGreek at theBristol Grammar School andUniversity of Cambridge. Here he also studiedRomance languages andlinguistics, earning abachelor's degree in 1970.
Dalby worked for fifteen years atCambridge University Library, eventually specialising in Southern Asia. He gained familiarity with some other languages because of his work there, where he had to work with foreign serials and afterwards with South Asia and Southeast Asian materials. He also wrote articles onmultilingual topics linked with the library and its collections.
In 1982 and 1983, he collaborated withSao Saimong in cataloguing the Scott Collection ofmanuscripts and documents fromBurma (especially theShan States) andIndochina. Dalby later published a short biography of the colonial civil servant and explorerJ. G. Scott, who formed the collection.[1] To help him with this task, he took classes in Cambridge again inSanskrit,Hindi andPali and inLondon inBurmese andThai.
After his time at Cambridge, Dalby worked in London helping to start the library atRegent's College and on renovating another library at London House (Goodenough College). He also served as Honorary Librarian of theInstitute of Linguists, for whose journalThe Linguist he writes a regular column. He later did a part-time PhD atBirkbeck College, London in ancient history (in 1987–93), which improved his Latin and Greek. HisDictionary of Languages was published in 1998.Language in Danger, on theextinction of languages and the threatened monolingual future, followed in 2002.
Meanwhile, he began to work on food history and contributed toAlan Davidson's journalPetits Propos Culinaires; He was eventually one of Davidson's informal helpers on theOxford Companion to Food. Dalby's first food history book,Siren Feasts, appeared in 1995 and won aRunciman Award; it is also well known in Greece, where it was translated asSeireneia Deipna. At the same time he was working withSally Grainger onThe Classical Cookbook, the first historical cookbook to look beyondApicius to otherancient Greek andRoman sources in which recipes are found.
Dangerous Tastes, on the history of spices, was theGuild of Food Writers Food Book of the Year for 2001. Work on this also led to Dalby's first article forGastronomica magazine, in which he traced the disastrous exploration ofGonzalo Pizarro in search ofLa Canela in easternEcuador, showing how the myth of the "Valley of Cinnamon" first arose and identifying the real tree species which was at the root of the legend.[2] Dalby's light-hearted biography ofBacchus includes a retelling, rare in English, of the story ofProsymnus and the price he demanded for guiding Dionysus toHades. In an unfavorable review ofBacchus inThe Guardian,Ranjit Bolt argues that Dalby's "formidable learning" overwhelmed his ability to offer the reader an appealing narrative.[3] Hisepilogue to Petronius'Satyrica combines a gastronomic commentary on the "Feast of Trimalchio" with a fictionaldénouement inspired by the fate ofPetronius himself.[4]
Dalby'sRediscovering Homer developed out of two academic papers from the 1990s in which he argued that theIliad andOdyssey must be seen as belonging to the same world as that of the early Greek lyric poets but to a less aristocratic genre.[5] Returning to these themes, he spotlit the unknown poet who, long after the time of the traditionalHomer, at last saw theIliad andOdyssey recorded in writing. As he teasingly suggested, based on what we can judge of this poet's interests and on the circumstances in whichoral poetry has been recorded elsewhere, "it is possible, and even probable, that this poet was a woman."[6]
Dalby's bookLanguage in Danger: The Loss of Linguistic Diversity and the Threat to Our Future, focuses on the decline and extinction of languages from ancient times to the modern era. Dalby attributes the loss to the emergence of large centralised political groupings, the spread of communications technologies, and thehegemony of the English language.[7] According toMario Basini, Dalby argues that the loss of a language is a loss to all of humanity, because each language embodies a unique view of the world and contains unique information about the manner in which its speakers interact with a unique place, knowledge and perspectives that are lost when a language goes extinct.[8]
Dalby profiles endangered languages and discusses the significance of their disappearance, which he estimates occurs at a rate of one every two weeks. He states that the world is diminished by each language lost because they encapsulate "local knowledge and ways of looking at the human condition that die with the last speaker." He also discusses the way stronger languages "squeeze out" others, using the rise of Latin and the extinctions that occurred around theMediterranean in classical times as an example, and notes a similar pattern thatIrish,Welsh, and variousNative American languages andindigenous Australian languages have faced in the English-speaking world, where they "were banned in school to force minority groups to speak the language of the majority". Dalby writes that preferences have shifted toward encouraging minority languages and that many can be saved. His account was described as engrossing byThe Wall Street Journal.[9] The book disputes advocacy of a singlecommon language as a means to a happier, more peaceful, and improved world.[10]
