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The extinct Latinates that could’ve been | ||
Tags: Dead Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes  Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 9 of 16 10 December 2011 at 7:56pm | IP Logged | ||
I agree. They have got a funny hobby, but it seems that their work is based on solid knowledge. I can't really judge the relationship with Welsh, but there is a clear Polish tinge to their Slavic experiment. Maybe it is worth mentioning that scholars have looked in Romanian for a Dacian substrate, but found very few certain identifications so the Romans must have done a thorough and fast job of killing off the Dacian language - just as they did in France. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| fomalhaut Groupie United States Joined 4904 days ago 80 posts - 101 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 10 of 16 11 December 2011 at 10:59am | IP Logged | ||
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That's really another facet of the fascination, i mean, how did they just completely eradicate the language? They'd have to completely exterminate the local population, which was simply not possible. A forced monolingualism would've been impossible, and impractical and not inline with Rome's pragmatism.
What's most likely is an initial situation of Diglossia which slowly leaked Latin more and more in dailylife, but the evidence doesn't show that as there would've been more remnants of the indigenous language right? The only place we can't observe that is Greece and beyond, where their relative independance in cultural matters and the respect for Hellenism let them probably officially resist Latin, especially since Greek was the language of the educated Romans and still used as the adminstrative Lingua Franca of the former Diadochai Edited by fomalhaut on 11 December 2011 at 11:02am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 11 of 16 11 December 2011 at 11:22am | IP Logged | ||
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I doubt that the change came slowly - then more words would have survived from respectively Dacian and Gaul. As far as I remember Caesar hacked a hand off something like on in ten in Gallia just to show who now ruled the country, and Dacia was similarly harshly decimated by Trajanus - maybe not to the extent of exterminating the local population, but nobody could be in doubt that the key to getting a decent life in both places was to align oneself with the Romans. And given that the Romans introduced writing there weren't any stubborn writers in the old languages to carry on the torch in secret so we hardly know where to look for a substratum in the modern languages in those places. In the case of French there may be an influence from the Franks, and in the case of Romanian Greek, Turkish and the Slavic languages in the region have clearly left their marks so that it is hard to see whether anything at all points all the way back to the Dacians.
Apart from that, the Swedish king Gustav Wasa used similarly harsh methods to exterminate the use of Danish after the collapse of the Kalmar union (including book burnings), and later Karl X Gustav used blunt force to 'convince' the population in Skåne (Scania) to learn Swedish. And well, they speak Swedish today - and ironically Skånsk is now the Swedish dialect that is hardest to understand for us remaining Danes. Which just goes to show that if you really want to change a country and its language it can be done if you are willing to commit the necessary atrocities. Edited by Iversen on 15 December 2011 at 12:28pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 12 of 16 11 December 2011 at 9:33pm | IP Logged | ||
The change must have happened relatively slowly, and for practical reasons. Latin was the language of trade, and the peoples of Europe were very linguistically diverse. You're talking about Gauls, but "Gaul" isn't synonymous with "France". Modern France is composed of lands historically occupied by Celtic tribes, Germanic tribes, Basques etc. There was a hell of a lot of sea trade going on at the time. And if we look at any Romance languages we see signs of the influence of various languages. Thinking of French as "Latin spoken by Gauls" is incorrect -- the movement of initial ST, SP consonant clusters to to ÉT, ESP etc most probably comes from Basque or a Basque-like language. And yet the word "stupide" has no initial E, so the language must have been pieced together over a long time, either through the consolidation of dialects or through re-introduction of words from scholarly Latin or other Romance languages. (CF Latin ferrum->Spanish hierro, but the new word ferrocarril retains the F lost in earlier Spanish.) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 13 of 16 11 December 2011 at 11:22pm | IP Logged | ||
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French may have a Basque substratum - though a Basque influence on the language spoken in Northern France would be difficult to explain (something like Basque may have been spoken there before the Celts, but then we are almost back in the stone age)). And French has definitely been influenced over a long time from its neighbours and invaders.
The point is however that the Celtic language disappeared almost without a trace, and it was never seen again - unlike for instance the Anglosaxon language which changed, but turned up again after a few centuries (albeit heavily changed). Another example: Baltic languages like Latvian and Lituanian 'hibernated' while the Germans ruled. But the Gaulish language didn't reappear. Breton is NOT the old Gaulish language of Vercingetorix, but a Brythonic Celtic language imported from the British Isles. So my conclusion is that Latin was introduced as a general use language, not just an administrative or mercantile tool. One or two generations may have been bilingual, but the status of Celtic was apparently so low that nobody even thought of writing texts in it or transmit it to future generations. Edited by Iversen on 11 December 2011 at 11:27pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| fomalhaut Groupie United States Joined 4904 days ago 80 posts - 101 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 14 of 16 12 December 2011 at 10:15am | IP Logged | ||
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this is what's the mystery to me; Celts were no barbarians as Caesar's propaganda portrays. they were literate, they had a written language (used both Latin and Greek alphabets) and such, so it's just amazing how it could just completely disappear without even a trace in the language.
Even the Galatian Celts were literature to a degree; There are inscriptions by Galatians in Egypt written in their modified Greek alphabet written language (literally: Roigh and Tyrgh were here) i know that to a degree, it has been reconstructed. I'm going to ask some 'experts' on this, because it seems i'm not the only one who wonders on this mystery. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Delodephius Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Yugoslavia Joined 5404 days ago 342 posts - 501 votes Speaks: Slovak*, Serbo-Croatian*, EnglishC1, Czech Studies: Russian, Japanese | Message 15 of 16 15 December 2011 at 7:10am | IP Logged | ||
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Didn't the Gauls speak a language that was mutually intelligible with Latin? As far as I
know, Caesar had to write his orders in Greek so that in case the messengers were caught the Gauls could not read the letters. There are few interesting articles on this subject here: http://languagecontinuity.blogspot.com/2008/09/romance-langu ages-before-romans.html http://languagecontinuity.blogspot.com/2008/06/what-romans-s poke.html Edited by Delodephius on 15 December 2011 at 7:15am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 16 of 16 15 December 2011 at 11:56am | IP Logged | ||
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The Gauls were not stupid, so they may have translators who could read and/or understand Latin even before the Roman conquest of Gallia.
As for the relationship between Latin and Gaulish it has actually been suggested that there is a connection. If you see how the Indoeuropean languages are subdivided you may see the term "Italo-Celtic" (just as you can see "Balto-Slavic") - but as far as I can see from sources on the internet the idea has generally lost favour favour among the relevant linguists. "Italo-" refers to a language group that comprised not only Latin, but also Oscian, Umbrian and Faliscan, all of which disappeared when the Romans came, but at last leaving enough traces to make it possible to study them. But this connection would not have been relevant for a Gaulish farmer receiving orders in Latin. Edited by Iversen on 15 December 2011 at 12:50pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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