Robert Gordon Latham

Robert Gordon Latham (24 March 1812 – 9 March 1888) was an English ethnologist and philologist.

Early life The eldest son of Thomas Latham, vicar of Billingborough, Lincolnshire, he was born there on 24 March 1812. He entered Eton College in 1819, and in 1829 went on to King's College, Cambridge, where he graduated B.A. in 1832, and was soon afterwards elected a Fellow.

Philologist Latham studied philology for a year on the continent, near Hamburg, then in Copenhagen with Rasmus Christian Rask, and finally in Christiania (now Oslo).

In 1839 he was elected professor of English language and literature in University College, London.

Medical career Latham decided to enter the medical profession, and in 1842 became a licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians; he subsequently obtained the degree of M.D. at the University of London.

Latham was a follower of James Cowles Prichard, and like Prichard took ethnology to be, in the main, the part of historical philology that traced the origin of races through the genealogical relationships of languages. He frequently lectured in this area. As a baseline he used the three-race theory of Georges Cuvier. Along with Prichard, however, Latham criticised Cuvier's use of the "Caucasian race" concept; and he preferred to avoid the term "race", referring instead to "varieties of man", as a reaction to the rise of polygenist theory around 1850. However, he followed in 1854 by writing The Native Races of the Russian Empire.

Latham moved on, though, from Prichard's assumption (now sometimes called "languages and nations"), that the historical relationships of languages matched perfectly the relationships of the groups speaking them. In 1862 he made a prominent protest against the central Asian theory of the origin of the Aryan race. He supported views which were later advocated by Theodor Benfey, Parker, Isaac Taylor, and others. The controversy over Latham's views on Indo-European languages following his Comparative Philology (1862) did permanent damage to his scholarly reputation.

Later life

Gordon Hake wrote in his memoirs of Latham's habit of pleading poverty and asking for money. In 1863 Latham obtained a civil list pension. In later life he was afflicted with aphasia, and died at Putney on 9 March 1888. Logic in its Application to Language, 1856 Descriptive Ethnology, 1858 Volume I Volume II Ethnology of India, 1859

Opuscula: Essays Chiefly Philological and Ethnographical, 1860 A Smaller English Grammar for the Use of Schools, 1861 (with David Thomas Ansted) The Channel Islands, 1862; 2nd edition (1865). Elements of Comparative Philology, 1862