Althea Sovani (Italy)

I come from Milan and I am currently reading for an MPhil in Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics. Alongside Greek and Italian, my studies will focus on the Indo-Iranian and Anatolian branches of the Indo-European language family. I have indeed just started learning Old Persian and Hittite and am looking forward to starting Avestan soon. In Milan, I studied at a state school, Liceo Classico Berchet, where I first learned Greek and Latin and won national competitions in translation. For my BA, I studied Classics with Sanskrit at Somerville College. My undergraduate thesis focused on the approaches to linguistic suppletion and defective paradigms in the ancient Greek grammarian Theodosius and in the Sanskrit grammarian Pāṇini. Grammar has always been my passion and looking at ancient grammatical traditions offers fascinating insights into the ancients’ culture and perspective on language and thought, from the relationship between grammatical studies and ritual in India to the obsession of 2nd-century AD Greece with the ideal of ‘Attic’ Greek. Alongside ancient grammarians, I want to devote my studies more directly to comparative reconstruction in Indo-European.

I also love composing in Greek and Latin verse and prose. In the second year of my BA, I won the Chancellors’ Latin Prose Prize for translation into Latin prose and, in 2022, alongside the Craven Prize, the Comparative Philology Prize and the Boden Prize for my Final exams, I won the Gaisford Greek Verse Prize for translation into Greek verses.

Besides my studies, I am also the President of the Oxford Ancient Languages Society. Our aim is to promote the study of ancient languages, primarily Greek and Latin, through the active method; that is by speaking and engaging directly with the languages. I have always had a passion for English literature, especially the Romantic period (mainly first wave of Romantic poets) and Victorian novels. My favourite authors are Pesudo-Longinus, Marcus Aurelius, Coleridge and Kierkegaard. I am fascinated by the Sanskrit philosopher-grammarian Bhartṛhari and I am developing a passion for linguistic iconicity. I cannot bear the use of the term thing, except in philosophical discourse.