Today there are over 7,000 living languages, but that number is expected to shrink dramatically in the next century.
These projects at Getty are a small part of a larger global effort to retain and strengthen the rich diversity of languages spoken today and over the past centuries.
Ge’ez
Canon Table Page, about 1504–1505. Tempera, 13 9/16 × 10 7/16 in. Getty Museum, Ms. 102 (2008.15), fol. 23v
In 2014 Dr. Getatchew Haile flew from his home in Minnesota to Los Angeles to get an in-person look at a manuscript in the Getty Museum’s collection. This Ethiopian Gospel book, made around 1480–1520, was illustrated in vibrant colors, with text written in the Ge’ez language.
Haile, who grew up in Ethiopia, was one of the world’s foremost scholars of Ge’ez (he passed away in 2021). This ancient Semitic language can be traced back to the 3rd or 4th century and is the ancestor to today’s Tigrinya and Tigré languages used throughout Ethiopia and Eritrea. By the 11th century it had become a primarily literary and liturgical language and is still used to read the liturgy in today’s Ethiopian Orthodox church.
As part of his visit to the Museum, Haile was invited to recite the words in the manuscript aloud for a recording. The manuscript curators knew the Gospel book was a version of the New Testament texts of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but until Haile’s visit, they didn’t have a direct translation of the annotations (additions) to the manuscript, nor a recording of its rhythms and inflections when spoken aloud in church, as it was at the turn of the 16th century.
Haile recited the opening words of Luke’s Gospel, a recording that is now preserved digitally and freely accessible. His recording joins other recitations of medieval manuscripts from the collection, read by experts in medieval versions of Arabic, Armenian, and French, among other languages. When Bryan C. Keene, former curator in the Manuscripts Department, launched this language series in 2014, he noted, “When the words of medieval manuscripts were read or sung aloud, the visual content of the accompanying illuminations came to life in rich and meaningful ways.”
There are many ancient languages—some dead, some endangered, and others still quite alive—found on objects studied at Getty. Ancient Greek and Latin are inscribed onto clay vases, sheets of metal, and marble funerary art; ninth-century Arabic script is drawn in gold leaf; and classical Maya and Nahuatl are handwritten in fragile, centuries-old books.
To better understand the meaning and context of such objects, it’s essential to know what they say and to bring that knowledge to life for future generations.
Latin
A Sloth, 1561–1562, Joris Hoefnagel and Georg Bocskay. Watercolors, gold and silver paint, and ink, 6 9/16 × 4 7/8 in. Getty Museum, Ms. 20 (86.MV.527), fol. 106
Latin Academy students visit Getty's manuscripts department to see and read examples of Latin used in the Middle Ages.
Last summer, 16 high school students spent a week immersed in Latin at the Getty Villa Museum’s free Latin Academy (Academia Aestiva). They took a linguistic and cultural plunge into “being Roman” by speaking Latin, mostly the restored classical variety that flourished in Rome around 2,100 years ago, but also the “ecclesiastical” version of later periods. As one student recounted: “Papae! I could physically feel my brain working in new ways.” (Roughly, papae is Latin for “wow.”)
Latin, the language of ancient Rome, is officially categorized as “dead,” as it is no longer the native tongue of a community. However, it seems to be stubbornly undead, surviving in an altered form as the foundation of Romance languages (Spanish, Italian, French, Romanian, etc.) and persisting in legal, medical, and scientific fields—as well as Pope Francis’s Twitter account. At the Villa’s Latin Academy, students spent mornings concentrating on Latin culture by speaking the language using old and new vocabulary. Then they visited the galleries, where their lessons were amplified by reading and translating original Latin inscriptions and describing ancient art. “Getting up close and personal with antiquities is just about the coolest thing in the world,” one student said.
Villa curators led sessions on Roman art, architecture, culture, and daily life. To emphasize Latin’s long and evolving life, students took a field trip to the Manuscripts Department at the Getty Center, where they could study the language’s medieval contexts and quirks of its handwritten form. But “being Roman” came out of more casual activities too. Students got to reenact Roman leisure activities, like creating head wreaths out of olive branches and mimicking the relaxed lounging posture of elite Roman dining etiquette.
Dr. Shelby Brown, who runs the program, adds: “Latin is a wonderful, complex, relevant language and is often the most difficult, chart-memorizing language students encounter. These students have enjoyed it anyway, and here for one week, they can feel how immersion and speaking can be fun.”
Nahuatl
Butterfly-and Jaguar-Fish in Book 11 of the Florentine Codex (“On Earthly Things”). Ms. Mediceo Palatino 220, 1577, fols. 62v and 63. Courtesy of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, and by permission of MiBACT
At the Getty Research Institute (GRI), scholars have been studying the Florentine Codex, a 16th-century manuscript written in Classical Nahuatl and Spanish. Nahuatl is one of Mexico’s many surviving Indigenous languages, spoken in contemporary variants by more than a million individuals in central Mexico and thousands of people in Los Angeles. It was the language of the Aztec Empire, which ruled large parts of central Mexico between 1428 and 1521, and was spoken widely throughout Mesoamerica.
The 2,500-page Codex, which is a remarkable illustrated encyclopedia of Mexica (the Indigenous word for “Aztec”) knowledge and history of early modern Mexico, is now available as an enhanced multimedia digital edition. It includes English and Spanish translations and audio recordings of the Nahuatl texts.
Book 12 of the Codex is particularly fascinating, as it offers a rare history of the conquest of Mexico from the perspective of the Mexicas. As part of a workshop co-organized by UCLA and the GRI in 2020, local K–12 teachers developed lesson plans about the Codex so that students could learn the history of European invasion and war from the Mexicas in their own words.
Kevin Terraciano, professor of history at UCLA and a partner on the project, notes: “The eloquent Nahuatl language of the Florentine Codex is not so different from variants of the language spoken today in Mexico, and many of the topics addressed in the text are as relevant now as they were almost 500 years ago. The talented artists and writers who worked on the project must have known that they created something special for future generations of Nahuas and non-Nahuas to behold and cherish. In retrospect, it’s a miracle that it survived.”
Today, Nahuatl is classified as an endangered language, but support is coming from many directions. Teaching is a central tool; in Los Angeles, for example, Nahuatl language classes are offered to K–12 students at the Anahuacalmecac public charter school and taught at the college level at UCLA.
Some of Getty’s translation partners on the Codex project, like Sabina Cruz de la Cruz and Eduardo de la Cruz Cruz (profiled here), have committed their careers to revitalizing Nahuatl, teaching it in online courses, contributing to English-Nahuatl dictionaries, and adding entries to the Art & Architecture Thesaurus at Getty Vocabularies, a free online resource.
“Research and scholarship about Nahuatl make a meaningful impact when history and contemporary Nahuatl language communities are connected. It is important not only to study the language and to highlight it as a living language but also to encourage more Nahua people to speak it and practice their customs despite attempts to suppress their culture,” says de la Cruz Cruz.
